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Indus civilization
Alternative Title: Harappān civilization, Indus valley civilization
Indus civilization, also called Indus valley civilization or Harappan civilization, the earliest known urban culture of the Indian subcontinent. The nuclear dates of the civilization appear to be about 2500–1700 bce, though the southern sites may have lasted later into the 2nd millennium bce.
Principal sites of the Indus civilization.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The civilization was first identified in 1921 at Harappa in the Punjab region and then in 1922 at Mohenjo-daro (Mohenjodaro), near the Indus River in the Sindh (Sind) region. Both sites are in present-day Pakistan, in Punjab and Sindh provinces, respectively. The ruins of Mohenjo-daro were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1980.
Subsequently, vestiges of the civilization were found as far apart as Sutkagen Dor in southwestern Balochistan province, Pakistan, near the shore of the Arabian Sea, about 300 miles (480 km) west of Karachi; and at Ropar (or Rupar), in eastern Punjab state, northwestern India, at the foot of the Shimla Hills some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) northeast of Sutkagen Dor. Later exploration established its existence southward down the west coast of India as far as the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay), 500 miles (800 km) southeast of Karachi, and as far east as the Yamuna (Jumna) River basin, 30 miles (50 km) north of Delhi. It is thus decidedly the most extensive of the world’s three earliest civilizations; the other two are those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, both of which began somewhat before it.
Harappa ruinsRuins of the ancient city of Harappa in Punjab, Pakistan.© Smn121
The Indus civilization is known to have consisted of two large cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, and more than 100 towns and villages, often of relatively small size. The two cities were each perhaps originally about 1 mile (1.6 km) square in overall dimensions, and their outstanding magnitude suggests political centralization, either in two large states or in a single great empire with alternative capitals, a practice having analogies in Indian history. It is also possible that Harappa succeeded Mohenjo-daro, which is known to have been devastated more than once by exceptional floods. The southern region of the civilization, on the Kathiawar Peninsula and beyond, appears to be of later origin than the major Indus sites. The civilization was literate, and its script, with some 250 to 500 characters, has been partly and tentatively deciphered; the language has been indefinitely identified as Dravidian.
Mohenjo-daroPortion of the ruins at the Mohenjo-daro archaeological site, southeastern Pakistan.© Yousaf Fayyaz/Fotolia
The Indus civilization apparently evolved from the villages of neighbours or predecessors, using the Mesopotamian model of irrigated agriculture with sufficient skill to reap the advantages of the spacious and fertile Indus River valley while controlling the formidable annual flood that simultaneously fertilizes and destroys. Having obtained a secure foothold on the plain and mastered its more immediate problems, the new civilization, doubtless with a well-nourished and increasing population, would find expansion along the flanks of the great waterways an inevitable sequel. The civilization subsisted primarily by farming, supplemented by an appreciable but often elusive commerce. Wheat and six-row barley were grown; field peas, mustard, sesame, and a few date stones have also been found, as well as some of the earliest known traces of cotton. Domesticated animals included dogs and cats, humped and shorthorn cattle, domestic fowl, and possibly pigs, camels, and buffalo. The Asian elephant probably was also domesticated, and its ivory tusks were freely used. Minerals, unavailable from the alluvial plain, were sometimes brought in from far afield. Gold was imported from southern India or Afghanistan, silver and copper from Afghanistan or northwestern India (present-day Rajasthan state), lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, turquoise from Iran (Persia), and a jadelike fuchsite from southern India.
Perhaps the best-known artifacts of the Indus civilization are a number of small seals, generally made of steatite (a form of talc), which are distinctive in kind and unique in quality, depicting a wide variety of animals, both real—such as elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, and antelopes—and fantastic, often composite creatures. Sometimes human forms are included. A few examples of Indus stone sculpture have also been found, usually small and representing humans or gods. There are great numbers of small terra-cotta figures of animals and humans.
Indus civilization: sealsAssortment of seals with animal motifs in use during the time of the Indus civilization, 2nd–3rd millennium bce.Copyright J.M. Kenoyer/Harappa.com; Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan
How and when the civilization came to an end remains uncertain. In fact, no uniform ending need be postulated for a culture so widely distributed. But the end of Mohenjo-daro is known and was dramatic and sudden. Mohenjo-daro was attacked toward the middle of the 2nd millennium bce by raiders who swept over the city and then passed on, leaving the dead lying where they fell. Who the attackers were is matter for conjecture. The episode would appear to be consistent in time and place with the earlier invaders from the north (formerly called Aryans) into the Indus region as reflected in the older books of the Rigveda, in which the newcomers are represented as attacking the “walled cities” or “citadels” of the aboriginal peoples and the invaders’ war-god Indra as rending forts “as age consumes a garment.” However, one thing is clear: the city was already in an advanced stage of economic and social decline before it received the coup de grâce. Deep floods had more than once submerged large tracts of it. Houses had become increasingly shoddy in construction and showed signs of overcrowding. The final blow seems to have been sudden, but the city was already dying. As the evidence stands, the civilization was succeeded in the Indus valley by poverty-stricken cultures, deriving a little from a sub-Indus heritage but also drawing elements from the direction of Iran and the Caucasus—from the general direction, in fact, of the northern invasions. For many centuries urban civilization was dead in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.
Indus civilization: cooking potsHarappan cooking pots in use during the Indus civilization, c. 2300–2200 bce.Copyright J.M. Kenoyer/Harappa.com; Courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan
In the south, however, in Kathiawar and beyond, the situation appears to have been very different. There it would seem that there was a real cultural continuity between the late Indus phase and the Copper Age cultures that characterized central and western India between 1700 and the 1st millennium bce. Those cultures form a material bridge between the end of the Indus civilization proper and the developed Iron Age civilization that arose in India about 1000 bce.
Site overview of Mohenjo-daro, eastern Pakistan.Frederick M. Asher
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Zeidan, Assistant Editor.
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Phoenicia
historical region, Asia
Phoenicia, ancient region corresponding to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Israel. Its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, were notable merchants, traders, and colonizers of the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium bce. The chief cities of Phoenicia (excluding colonies) were Sidon, Tyre, and Berot (modern Beirut).
It is not certain what the Phoenicians called themselves in their own language; it appears to have been Kenaʿani (Akkadian: Kinahna), “Canaanites.” In Hebrew the word kenaʿani has the secondary meaning of “merchant,” a term that well characterizes the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians probably arrived in the area about 3000 bce. Nothing is known of their original homeland, though some traditions place it in the region of the Persian Gulf.
At Byblos, commercial and religious connections with Egypt are attested from the Egyptian 4th dynasty (c. 2613–c. 2494); extensive trade was certainly carried on by the 16th century, and the Egyptians soon established suzerainty over much of Phoenicia. The 14th century, however, was one of much political unrest, and Egypt eventually lost its hold over the area. Beginning in the 9th century, the independence of Phoenicia was increasingly threatened by the advance of Assyria, the kings of which several times exacted tribute and took control of parts or all of Phoenicia. In 538 Phoenicia passed under the rule of the Persians. The country was later taken by Alexander the Great and in 64 bce was incorporated into the Roman province of Syria; Aradus, Sidon, and Tyre, however, retained self-government. The oldest form of government in the Phoenician cities seems to have been kingship—limited by the power of the wealthy merchant families. Federation of the cities on a large scale never seems to have occurred.
The Phoenicians were well known to their contemporaries as sea traders and colonizers, and by the 2nd millennium they had already extended their influence along the coast of the Levant by a series of settlements, including Joppa (Jaffa, modern Yafo), Dor, Acre, and Ugarit. Colonization of areas in North Africa (e.g., Carthage), Anatolia, and Cyprus also occurred at an early date. Carthage became the chief maritime and commercial power in the western Mediterranean. Several smaller Phoenician settlements were planted as stepping stones along the route to Spain and its mineral wealth. Phoenician exports included cedar and pine wood, fine linen from Tyre, Byblos, and Berytos, cloths dyed with the famous Tyrian purple (made from the snail Murex), embroideries from Sidon, wine, metalwork and glass, glazed faience, salt, and dried fish. In addition, the Phoenicians conducted an important transit trade.
In the artistic products of Phoenicia, Egyptian motifs and ideas were mingled with those of Mesopotamia, the Aegean, and Syria. Though little survives of Phoenician sculpture in the round, relief sculpture is much more abundant. The earliest major work of Phoenician sculpture to survive was found at Byblos; it was the limestone sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos at the end of the 11th century.
Sarcophagus of AhiramCarved limestone sarcophagus of Ahiram, a king of Byblos, bearing a Phoenician inscription, 10th century bce; in the National Museum of Lebanon, Beirut.Courtesy of the National Museum of Lebanon, Beirut
Ivory and wood carving became Phoenician specialties, and Phoenician goldsmiths’ and metalsmiths’ work was also well known. Glassblowing was probably invented in the coastal area of Phoenicia in the 1st century or earlier.
Although the Phoenicians used cuneiform (Mesopotamian writing), they also produced a script of their own. The Phoenician alphabetic script of 22 letters was used at Byblos as early as the 15th century. This method of writing, later adopted by the Greeks, is the ancestor of the modern Roman alphabet. It was the Phoenicians’ most remarkable and distinctive contribution to arts and civilization.
Phoenician religion was inspired by the powers and processes of nature. Many of the gods they worshiped, however, were localized and are now known only under their local names. A pantheon was presided over by the father of the gods, El, but the goddess Astarte (Ashtart) was the principal figure in the Phoenician pantheon. See also Lebanon, history of: Phoenicia. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn, Managing Editor.
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Article Title: Phoenicia
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Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 20 August 2019
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Aegean civilizations
Table of Contents
Introduction
Dating of the Aegean Bronze Age
History of exploration
Early Aegean civilizations
The decline of the early Aegean civilizations
Aegean civilizations, the Stone and Bronze Age civilizations that arose and flourished in the area of the Aegean Sea in the periods, respectively, about 7000–3000 bc and about 3000–1000 bc.
Principal sites associated with Aegean civilizations.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The area consists of Crete, the Cyclades and some other islands, and the Greek mainland, including the Peloponnese, central Greece, and Thessaly. The first high civilization on European soil, with stately palaces, fine craftsmanship, and writing, developed on the island of Crete. Later, the peoples of the mainland adapted the Cretan civilization to form their own, much as the Romans adapted the civilization of later Greece. The Bronze Age civilization of Crete has been called Minoan, after the legendary King Minos of Knossos, which was the chief city of the island throughout early times. The Bronze Age of the Cyclades is known as Cycladic, that of the mainland as Helladic, from Hellas, the Greek name for Greece. Early, middle, and late stages have been defined in each of these, with further subdivisions according to recognizable changes in the style of pottery and other products that are associated with each separate culture. The civilization that arose on the mainland under Cretan influence in the 16th century bc is called Mycenaean after Mycenae, which appears to have been one of its most important centres. The term Mycenaean is also sometimes used for the civilizations of the Aegean area as a whole from about 1400 bc onward.
Dating of the Aegean Bronze Age
The dates that are suggested here are approximate and conventional. In a general way, they are based on correlations with Egypt, where, from the beginning of the Early Dynastic period (c. 2925 bc onward), a historical chronology can be established with a leeway of a few centuries and can be fixed within reasonably narrow limits after about 2000 bc. Bronze Age pottery from the Aegean has been found in Egypt in contexts that are datable, and many Egyptian objects have been recovered on the island of Crete.
Two important landmarks are fragments of Cretan pottery from the town at Kahun in the Fayyūm, built for workers engaged in the construction of a pyramid for the pharaoh Sesostris II (ruled 1897–78), and a large quantity of Mycenaean pottery from the mainland found at Tell el-Amarna, site of Akhenaton’s capital, and imported during his reign (c. 1350–34). Radiocarbon dates appear consistent with those based on correlations with Egypt. Objects found in 1982 in the Kaş-Ulu Burun shipwreck off the southern coast of Turkey, including the first known gold scarab of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, reveal a tight web of interconnections in the later 14th century among Mycenaean Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Africa.
History of exploration
The poems of Homer, which reflect an epic tradition that absorbed many changes occurring in warfare and society between the 15th and the 8th century bc, describe warriors employing bronze weapons and objects such as helmets plated with tusks of wild boar that went out of use before the end of the Aegean Bronze Age. Massive Bronze Age defense walls survived at Mycenae and elsewhere on the mainland; they were called Cyclopean because, according to Greek tradition, the Cyclopes had built them. Apart from these Cyclopean walls, virtually nothing was known about the Aegean Bronze Age before the middle of the 19th century, when in 1876 a German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered unplundered royal shaft graves at Mycenae. He thought that the men buried in them were the Greek heroes of Homer’s siege of Troy. There are in fact many likenesses between Homer’s descriptions and the armour, weapons, and war imagery found in these graves. The graves, spanning about 1600 to 1450 bc, contained princely gifts from an age when Greece, Crete, and Troy engaged in trade. Schliemann’s discoveries led to intensive exploration of Bronze Age and earlier sites on the Greek mainland. On the island of Thera in 1866–67, before Schliemann, Ferdinand Fouqué, a French geologist, had already explored settlements of the Shaft Grave Period sealed in under a thick shroud of volcanic pumice and ash. He found houses, frescoes, pottery imported from as far as Cyprus, and well-preserved agricultural produce. Because Bronze Age Crete and Greece were not explored at the time, this important find lay fallow for a century.
Later in the 19th century, Christos Tsountas, a Greek archaeologist, dug cemeteries of earlier phases of the Bronze Age on other Cycladic islands and continued the work begun by Schliemann at Mycenae. At the end of the century, a British expedition excavated the important Bronze Age town of Phylakopi on Melos. When Crete eventually became independent of Turkish rule in 1898, attention was turned to Bronze Age sites there. In 1900 Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Evans, an English archaeologist, began to uncover the palace at Knossos, the largest Bronze Age centre of the island, discovering clay tablets with the first positive evidence for Bronze Age writing in the Aegean. Greek, American, French, and Italian excavators added further knowledge of the Cretan Bronze Age during the years that followed, and American and German expeditions opened new sites on the mainland. Inscribed clay tablets in the script called Linear B, such as those found at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the century, were recovered in Messenia in 1939 by the American archaeologist Carl W. Blegen; others have since come to light at Mycenae and elsewhere on the mainland. The belief that the language of these tablets was a very archaic form of Greek was established in 1952 by the English architect and cryptographer Michael Ventris, working with the linguist John Chadwick, though acceptance of this is not yet universal. In 1962 a large palace, destroyed by fire about 1450 bc at Zákros in eastern Crete, was discovered. In 1967 the Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos followed up Fouqué’s explorations with excavations at modern Akrotíri on the south coast of Thera. He uncovered a whole town buried under the volcanic eruption and so preserved in wonderful detail.
Early Aegean civilizations
Early cultures
Paleolithic (Old Stone Age)
Chipped stone tools made by Paleolithic hunters have been found in many parts of mainland Greece, but none are yet recorded from Crete or the other islands. As elsewhere in Europe, the latest Lower Paleolithic industries evolved into Upper Paleolithic ones with diminutive stonework. The excavations of Thomas W. Jacobsen at the Franchthi Cave on the Bay of Argos showed that boats already sailed to the island of Melos north of Crete for obsidian, a volcanic glass invaluable for early tools, by about 13,000–11,000 bc and that the cultivation of hybrid grains, the domestication of animals, and organized community tuna hunts had already begun.
Neolithic (New Stone Age)
If radiocarbon dates are to be trusted, agriculture was being practiced in some parts of the Aegean area as early as the 7th millennium. The first agriculturalists in the Aegean, like those of Anatolia and Palestine, may have been ignorant of the art of making fired clay vases—traces of agricultural settlements without pottery have been identified at several places in Thessaly and at Knossos in Crete. The island of Crete appears to have been uninhabited before this time, and the first agriculturalists must have reached it by sea from western Anatolia or from somewhere more distant. Other immigrants from the east may have brought agricultural techniques and ways of life to the mainland, where they mingled with the Upper Paleolithic hunting peoples. For human habitation the Aegean is one of the most favoured regions of the Mediterranean basin. Immigrants from the coastal areas of Anatolia, Syria, or Palestine would have found the climate and ecology similar to what they had known in their homelands. The olive and vine, sources of oil and wine, the staples of the Mediterranean diet, grow in most parts of the Aegean area and may have been native there. Water, which is a problem in the present century, was probably more abundant in early times when forests were more extensive than they are today.
Agricultural communities were eventually established in every part of Greece. They made pottery by hand and ground stones to shape edged tools, axes, adzes, and chisels. Wheat, barley, oats, millet, lentils, and peas were among the crops grown, supplementing wild grapes, pears, nuts, and honey. The inhabitants continued to hunt and fish, though they also raised cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Arrowheads of chipped stone were used on the mainland and in the Cyclades, but none is recorded from Crete, where bone points may have served to tip arrows. Another long-range weapon was the sling, and clay sling pellets were made in Thessaly where suitable beach pebbles were not available. In Crete, clubs were armed with stone heads as in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East in early times. Houses with rectangular rooms are attested at Knossos in Crete, at Saliagos in the Cyclades, and at Nea Nikomedia in Macedonia. Some Aegean communities, however, may have lived in circular huts of the kind found in predynastic Egypt and in early Syria and Cyprus. By the Middle Neolithic, there existed independent walled acropolis towns with specialized industries like potteries; Sesklo is an important site several acres in extent, with nearly 30 houses, a sophisticated gate, and striking red-and-white pottery. In the Late Neolithic, walled communities with special big houses that had megarons (central halls), as at Dhimini, suggest social hierarchies and dominant chiefs.
Several Thessalian settlements were surrounded by defense walls or ditches. Copper tools—simple, flat axes and knives—were in use before the end of the Neolithic both in Crete and on the mainland.
The Bronze Age
The Early Bronze Age (c. 3000–2200)
The transition from Neolithic to Bronze Age in the Aegean was marked by changes in pottery and other aspects of material culture. These changes may reflect the arrival in Crete and the Cyclades of new people from lands farther east bringing knowledge of metalworking with them. In Crete and the islands, the changes that inaugurated the Bronze Age were more or less contemporary with the beginning of dynastic times in Egypt. The Bronze Age in the Peloponnese appears to have begun later under the influence of settlers from the islands. The Bronze Age in central Greece and Thessaly may have begun later still. Evolved types of metal tools appear to have been current considerably before the end of the Neolithic there.
Flourishing metal-using cultures were established by the middle of the 3rd millennium in Crete, the Cycladic islands, and the southern part of the mainland. Each of these three cultures had its own distinctive characteristics; however, they had much in common, and their peoples may have spoken the same or similar non-Greek languages. Many place-names throughout the Aegean—notably ones ending in -nt- and -ss-, such as Corinth and Knossos—seem to reflect a time when a group of related languages with probable Anatolian affinities was spoken there before the introduction of Greek. A large number of words came to be adopted into Greek from this earlier language group.
These Early Bronze Age peoples of the Aegean seem to have employed similar types of metal tools, including axes, adzes, and short daggers, but double axes may have been special to Crete. Tweezers were used for plucking facial hairs, and rectangular stone palettes for grinding face paints with small pestles made of attractive veined stones or Spondylus shell.
Lerna and other settlements on the mainland were eventually surrounded by massive walls with projecting towers, and neighbouring islands like Aigina or Syros in the Cyclades also had towered walls with trap gates. Houses with several rooms were being constructed in most parts of the Aegean by this time, and buildings at Knossos and at Vasilikí in Crete have been identified as the residences of local rulers. The so-called House of Tiles at Lerna, destroyed by fire toward the end of the period, appears to have been an important focus for the community. A massive rectangle two stories high, with a roofed balcony upstairs, the structure takes its name from the baked clay tiles found in its ruins. These small, flat tiles are thought to have come from a sloping roof and may be the earliest roof tiles known. Similar tiles were recovered from a huge circular structure of the same period at neighbouring Tiryns, of which only a section has been excavated, as it lies deep below the level of the later Mycenaean palace there. It was evidently a public building of some kind.
Cretans in the Early Bronze Age buried their dead in communal tombs. These belonged to clans or extended families and might have remained in use for many generations. Traces of hundreds of burials have been noted in some of them. Caves and rock-shelters, as well as buildings of various kinds, were used as tombs. Circular tombs were characteristic of the Mesara region of southern Crete. They were built above ground, with low massive stone walls perhaps covered with logs and thatch or slabs. Some of the largest tombs, however, with a diameter of 40 feet (12 metres) or more inside, may have been vaulted in mud brick. Annexes with cult rooms were built in front of the entrances of some tombs, and others had chambers for offerings around the sides. When a tomb became full, a new floor was laid above the earlier burials, or parts of the tomb’s annex were brought into use as burial chambers. Sometimes the remains of earlier burials were removed to separate buildings or enclosures nearby. Communal tombs at Mochlos on the north coast had rectangular compartments or rooms and flat roofs, such as those in contemporary houses. At Knossos, where the local rock was soft, artificial caves were dug to serve as tombs. Everywhere in Crete the dead were normally trussed into a tightly contracted position, knees to chin. Sometimes the bodies were then squeezed into large storage jars or small clay chests or coffins. There was evidently much ceremonial in connection with burial, and, apart from objects of personal use such as seals, jewelry, and weapons left with the dead, vases with offerings were regularly placed inside or outside the tombs.
In contrast to the Cretans, the people of the Cyclades during the earlier part of the Bronze Age buried their dead in small graves that held a single body or sometimes a pair. The graves were often grouped in family cemeteries, which might be surrounded by a wall. The bodies were placed in them lying on one side in a loosely flexed position. Some Cycladic graves were small stone-built chambers with an entrance, although the standard type consisted of a box (cist) made with large slabs set on edge and roofed with slabs. There were platforms near the cemeteries in some cases, perhaps for musical performances, dances, or rites.
Less is known about contemporary burials on the mainland. The graves there normally contained several bodies, which suggests that they belonged to families but not to large units, such as the clans that existed in Crete. Various types of mainland graves of this period are known, including chambers cut in the rock and stone-built tombs, such as those in the Cyclades. Circular cairns (heaps of stones), each covering several burials, on the island of Leucas in western Greece appear to go back to this time.
Pottery was still made by hand throughout the Aegean area. A useful type of vase first attested there at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age was a handled jug with a spout for pouring. Some of the earliest jugs from Crete have round bottoms and yellowish surfaces, as if they were copies of vessels made from gourds. Distinctive spouted bowls of oval shape nicknamed sauceboats were quite typical of the Early Bronze Age on the mainland and usually have a fine reddish or dark overall wash. Pottery with a similar wash and with the surface often deliberately mottled is found in Crete and is known as Vasilikí ware, after a site with a little “palace” where large amounts of it were recovered. The art of making stone vases flourished in the Cyclades from the beginning of the Bronze Age. The techniques used were simple and included boring with a hollow reed, which twirled an abrasive, either emery from Naxos or sand. The people of the Cyclades used their fine white marble not only for vases but also for remarkable figurines, mostly female but including men, some playing double pipes or seated on chairs with harps. While the majority of these figures are only a few inches high, some females are larger and a few are nearly life-size. Some have traces of painted decoration. These marble figures were often placed in graves, and groups of them have been found in sanctuaries, though whether they represented gods and goddesses is uncertain. They were exported to the mainland and Crete and may have been imitated there. Vessels of gold and silver were current in the Aegean by then, and a few have survived, including gold sauceboats of mainland type and gold and silver bowls from the islands. Gold and silver jewelry of this period, mostly from Crete, includes bracelets, necklaces, earrings, headbands, and hair ornaments of various kinds. Some of the finest of this early jewelry was found in communal tombs at Mochlos on the northern coast of Crete. The inspiration for it no doubt came from the east, and much of that from Mochlos, notably hairpins with flower heads, is reminiscent of jewelry from the royal tombs at Ur in Mesopotamia.
Seals came into use in the Aegean about the middle of the 4th millennium. Before the invention of locks and keys, seals were employed to stamp wet clay, which was used to secure doors or affix lids to storage jars or other containers. The design impressed by the seal might add the threat of magic to that of detection if the sealing was broken. Many seals resembling those current in Egypt and Syria have been recovered from early tombs in Crete. Some of these early Cretan seals were made of elephant tusk or hippopotamus tooth. Others were made of bone or soft, easily cut stones, such as serpentine and steatite. They were of various shapes, some of animals or birds or their heads, others cylindrical, adapted from Syrian versions of early Mesopotamian cylinder seals. They were engraved with a variety of designs, including abstract patterns and pictures of animals, notably dangerous lions and scorpions or poisonous spiders (rogalidhas) of a species native to Crete. Seals appear to have been in use in the Cyclades and on the mainland during this period, but very few have been recovered there. A stone cylinder seal from Amorgos resembles early Syrian ones. Most Aegean seals of this period, however, even in Crete, may have been made of perishable wood. Clay seal impressions, preserved by fires that destroyed buildings at Lerna, including the palatial House of Tiles, look as if they had been stamped by wooden seals with intricate interlocking designs.
Pictures of boats with many oars or paddles were drawn among spirals (waves?) on clay vases of this period in the Cyclades and on the mainland. The boats have a high prow often surmounted by a fish ensign, the stern being low with the keel apparently projecting beyond it. Similar vessels, though with a single mast for a square sail in addition to oars, are represented on early Cretan seals. Ships of this kind would have been capable of voyages to Syria and Egypt, whence skills and fashions were reaching Crete along with imports such as Egyptian stone vases and Syrian daggers.
End of the Early Bronze Age on the mainland (c. 2200–2000)
The comparative unity of incipient civilization in the Aegean area was eventually shattered by new movements of people into the Cyclades and the southern part of the mainland. Toward the end of the 3rd millennium, many of the settlements on the mainland, such as that at Lerna, were destroyed by fire, and the houses built afterward were of a different type and more primitive. These new houses were long and narrow, only one story high, and apparently gable-roofed. The entrance was at one end, and there was often a small compartment, which might be semicircular (apsidal), at the other. The new houses were evidently built by foreign invaders settling in the places they had destroyed. Some of the previous inhabitants, however, may have survived as hewers of wood and drawers of water. A new formal dark, burnished pottery appeared, as well as a simple ware with a linear pattern on a light ground; sauceboats, however, disappeared. This pottery has many features in common with that of the succeeding Middle Bronze Age; thus there may be ethnic affinities. The site of the House of Tiles appears to have been reserved as sacred or unlucky ground, with a ring of large stones above its burnt ruins.
The Middle Bronze Age on the mainland (c. 2000–1550)
The mainland was disrupted again about 2000 bc with new levels appearing at sites such as Lerna in the Argolid and Eutresis in Boeotia; there seem to be new burial habits on both coasts. Some scholars see an intrusion from the north of “Indo-Europeans,” but this is a difficult, perplexing topic. Some handmade pottery may have Balkan affinities, and there is string-impressed ware at a few places that resembles in some ways the pottery of the Black Sea region. In any case, the newcomers apparently were pastoralists. Although not wealthy, they may have been one source for the appearance of the horse in Greece, an established fact before the Shaft Grave Period. Many scholars view this wave, which covered most of Greece, as representing “the coming of the Greeks”; others regard the Greek language as a rich amalgam formed within the confines of Greece and not imposed from outside. A new pottery appeared on the mainland: a class of gray burnished ware, wheel-made, with sharp angular shapes copied from those of metal vases. The polished gray surfaces of this “Minyan” ware (as it was named by Schliemann after the legendary inhabitants of Orchomenus in central Greece, where he first came upon it) look as if meant to imitate silver; later, some pieces were coloured red or yellow. After some time, “Matt-painted” pottery also appeared, again with simple linear patterns on a light ground. The traditional “long house,” often apsidal, was the preferred architectural form; by the end of the period, some villages were walled.
The level of cultural attainment seems low, and not much metal circulated at first. The newcomers quickly developed connections with the islands and Crete; they imported Cretan vases, and some local vases show mainland ships. Minyan and Matt-painted pottery has been found in the nearer islands and even as far as Crete and the Anatolian coast. Burials grew from single interments to larger “family” chambers at Eleusis in Attica and on both coasts; in Messenia, in parts of the Argolid, and at Marathon there appeared a novel kind of multiple burial, with individual cists (burial chambers) or pithoi (large earthenware jars), the whole cluster being covered by a single mound. These tumulus burials, which had already appeared earlier at Leucas in the Ionian Sea, may reflect Balkan practice. In Messenia a Late Bronze Age beehive, or tholos, tomb was cut into the older mound as though that particular burial place were special. By the end of the 17th century, the newcomers had taken their full place on a newly emerging international scene and were always to be in a special relation with the Cycladic islands, Crete, and, probably, Troy. Bronze knives and gold ornaments were found with some burials, and, by the time of the Mycenae Shaft Graves in the 16th century, a luxuriant style of native goldwork had been created.
The Cyclades
On the island of Cythera (Kíthira), between western Crete and the southern tip of the Peloponnese, a colony of Cretans appears to have replaced a settlement of people from the mainland toward the end of the 3rd millennium. In the 17th or 16th century, Cretan colonies were established at Triánda in Rhodes and at Miletus on the western coast of Anatolia. Later Greek legends seem to refer to colonies from Crete, if not from Knossos, in some of the Aegean islands. Much Cretan pottery found its way to the Cyclades and was also imitated there; but, although the Cycladic people adapted some fashions and ideas from Crete, they retained their own distinctive traditions. Cycladic vases are decorated with flowers, especially lilies and saffron crocus, with swallows, wild goats, and dolphins, and with warriors and strange griffins, in a lively, splashy, and colourful style. Frescoes at Ayía Iríni (Aghia Eirene) on Ceos (Kéa) show blue birds, a town, hunting, a girl picking flowers, myrtle branches, and a copper ingot, and those at Phylakopi on Melos depict women in clothes embroidered with birds, fine textiles, flying fish, and lily blossoms. At Akrotíri on Thera, a town buried under a volcanic eruption about 1500 bc, there are in almost every house fairly well-preserved frescoes displaying wonderful, flat, brightly coloured scenes of boxers, fishermen, antelopes, birds, and blue monkeys. The two most dramatic ones are the “naval” or “miniature” frescoes from the West House, showing themes of war and peace in a seaside-and-country setting with whole towns watching elaborate ships, and the elegantly drawn set in Xeste 3, of girls and women picking saffron crocus, wearing their finest gold and rock crystal jewelry and elegant costumes; they are accompanied by blue monkeys. The Theran paintings are the best surviving Aegean documents for clothing, architecture, ships, armament, and daily life.
The Shaft Grave Period on the mainland (c. 1600–1450)
There are links between the Thera paintings and such items as earrings, necklaces, and metal vessels found in the royal Shaft Graves at Mycenae. Thera itself, however, had few valuables like metal; apparently the inhabitants had taken prized objects away. The Shaft Graves, in contrast, were packed with gold, silver, and bronze—almost nomadic in the obvious preference for portable gold and weapons. Two groups of Shaft Graves were discovered at Mycenae in different parts of a large cemetery area. The burials in them seem to have ranged over a period of 150 years, from shortly before about 1600 to the middle of the 15th century. Each group was eventually surrounded by a circular enclosure wall. The circle designated B, with the earliest burials, lay outside the limits of the later Bronze Age defenses, but the other circle, A, enclosing the richest burials in six large graves, was deliberately incorporated within them. The wealthy burials belonged to leading, if not royal, families of the place that would eventually supplant Knossos as the chief centre of the Aegean. Schliemann excavated the graves of Circle A in 1876, but it was not until 1951 that Circle B was noted. These graves are capacious shafts cut in the rock, often with pebble floors and slab roofs. They were used for multiple burials over a course of at least several years, and the remains, including beef bones and oyster shells, give evidence of well-developed funeral rites. Both men and women were buried in the graves, many of which contained several bodies. After the bodies were placed in the graves, the stone-walled burial chambers were roofed with timbers, and the shafts above were filled again. Sometimes the remains of earlier burials seem to have been pushed aside to make room for later ones, but, if so, the shafts must have been laboriously reopened to admit new burials. Large stone slabs with carvings in flat relief had been set above some of the graves. The carvings include spiral designs and pictures of the dead riding in their chariots to war or to the hunt. They have vivid battle imagery—three stallions rearing, spears ground under chariot wheels, and a man falling headfirst from a chariot. In one case, the scene of a warrior driving a chariot over a fallen enemy encased in a shield seems to be reinforced by a scene just below it, a lion chasing a deer. This visual simile may be analogous to lion similes in Homeric epic. According to another interpretation, the dead were taking part in their own funeral games with chariot races as described in Homer. These tombstones provide the earliest evidence for chariots on the mainland.
A fantastic array of gold and silver cups, jewelry, and dress ornaments had been placed with the dead, especially with those in the graves of Circle A. Golden diadems and elaborate hairpins decked the heads of women. Beads in necklaces were of amethyst, probably from Egypt, and amber, from the Baltic. The men were buried with supplies of bronze weapons, including great slashing knives and spearheads and two kinds of rapier-like swords, a mainland version and a Cretan version. Several swords are ornamented with gold-plated hilts and pommels of polished stone, ivory, or gold; some have gold predators at the hilt gripping the blades in their mouths. The blades may be ornamented with running horses, flying griffins, shields in the shape of a figure eight, or even lilies running down from hilt to tip. The tremendous influence from Crete on these graves is visible in the metal cups, faience “sacral knots” (i.e., representations of a Cretan ritual object in the shape of a scarf with a looped knot and fringed ends), dolphin-appliquéd ostrich eggs, conch shells associated with ritual summoning, gold triple shrine facades, images of bulls with double axes between their horns, and imported pottery painted with plants. Beside them is an equal wealth of local art such as formal gold cups, gold worked in breathless surface patterns of lions, bulls, and plants, and dozens of lions twisted as ornament. There probably is a local iconography in the gold seals of duels, lion combat, chariot hunting, and a wounded lion trying to pull an arrow from his shoulder. Traveling artists may account for some of the similarities to Cycladic and Cretan art, but local armourers may also have wrought local metal into drinking cups. Covering the faces of some of the men were gold portrait masks showing them with beards and mustaches. In this they are like an amethyst “portrait” gem in Circle B of a bearded mature man. (Later studies of faces also seem to reserve the beard and mustache for important or powerful elders, although fashions change; servants and soldiers are normally beardless). Women’s costume cannot be known from the remains, but it may have had the same range of tunic, apron, and veil as in the Theran paintings, and the jewelry is impressive.
Some bronze dagger blades were inlaid with remarkable pictures or designs in other metals, chiefly gold and silver and electrum (a mixture of gold and silver) in various shades. Black niello was used as a background for these pictures or to heighten the incised detail. The most famous of the Shaft Grave daggers shows men armed with bows, spears, and great body shields, hunting a pride of lions; another has catlike animals chasing wild fowl among papyrus flowers beside a silver stream. This technique of “painting in metals” appears to have originated in Syria, although the workmanship and style of the pictures on the Mycenae daggers look novel. Whereas other daggers and some metal cups with inlaid designs of this kind have been found on the mainland, none has yet been recovered in Crete. But many of the treasures from the Shaft Graves are imports from Crete.
The Shaft Graves had so many metal vases, including huge bronze cauldrons (one marked with Linear signs), that clay vases were not much needed. Yet, the contemporary chamber tombs at Mycenae and many other sites have wonderful pottery that is both imported from Crete and made with local taste with spirals, ferns, and double axes. In this development one can observe the formation of a new Mycenaean Greek culture, as it assimilated styles from Crete and yet insisted on more traditional local habits. It is this tentative fusion of two cultural “languages of art,” already in touch for two or three centuries, that gave a special impetus to the new Mycenaean world, rendering it flexible, receptive, and adventurous. The pottery, superior in technique, colour, and design, was attractive to other cultures and widely used as commercial containers for oils. Because it has been found in almost all coastal districts from Syria to Sardinia, it is a real aid to dating.
Along with the rich chamber tombs at Mycenae, certain families, perhaps princely, began building tholos, or beehive, tombs as early as the Shaft Grave Period, perhaps first in Messenia in the 16th century and then in many places in Greece by the middle of the 15th century. The tholos tomb has three parts: a narrow entranceway, or dromos, often lined with fieldstones and later with cut stones; a deep doorway, or stomion, covered over with one to three lintel blocks; and a circular chamber with a high vaulted or corbeled roof, the thalamos. When the facades are finely dressed with cut stones or recessed vertical panels, one may think of a Cretan connection; indeed, one of the tholos tombs at Peristeria has two Cretan “masons’ marks,” a branch and a double ax, cut into the facade to the left of the doorway. The influence of Crete on the southwest Peloponnese is marked. Perhaps a traditional memory of this connection is preserved in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, which tells of the god kidnapping the crew of a ship trading from Knossos to Pylos to serve his new sanctuary at Delphi. Excavations at Delphi yielded a snout of a marble lion rhyton (libation vessel), matched best by a complete example at Knossos. The tholos tomb is always covered by a mound of earth, often kept in place by a peripheral stone ring, or krepis. Some tholoi were built on the surface of the land, but most were built in a deep pit excavated into the slope of a hillside. The stones that were overlapped in rings to form the vault in the corbeled system were laid with a narrower face inside, which locked each ring in place. The lintel blocks, often huge in size and weight, were dragged across the hill and dropped onto the corbel rings at the proper height; either a single huge block or two or three slabs next to each other provided the needed depth. Various systems were used to ease the weight on the lintel, such as narrow stone bars or an open relieving triangle sealed by a thin-cut screening stone. The whole vault was sealed with a keystone.
Most tholos tombs have collapsed, often when the lintel cracked and gave way, and their contents have largely been looted. Occasionally the robbers overlooked a pit sunk in the floor, like the rich burial at Vapheio near Sparta; sometimes a whole tomb survived unplundered, like the one at Dendra near Mycenae or that at Rutsi-Myrsinochorion in Messenia. Of the nine tholos tombs at Mycenae, two, the Treasury of Atreus and the Tomb of Clytemnestra, have splendidly dressed facades with engaged half columns in two tiers and coloured exotic stones; they may have been built early in the 14th century, although arguments are made for a 13th-century construction. The elaborate design of the facade may have been imitated from the impressive north facade of the inner court at the Cretan palace of Phaistos. The imagery might imply a continuing presence of the dead kings inside the tomb. Such tombs sometimes mark the gate or main road to a town, as classical tombs did, as though they were “ancestral watchers” or guardians. Tholos tombs were built from the 15th to the 13th century and imply a hierarchical command of labour, of the kind the palace exerted later, according to the Linear B documents. Possibly the capstone was not put in place until the dynast died. These structures could not be built quickly but were prepared with foresight.
While stone-built tholos tombs became the standard resting places for kings and princes in all parts of the mainland to which the Mycenaean civilization penetrated, the mass of the population changed from a custom of burial in single graves, whether in mounds or cemeteries or inside settlements, to the use of family vaults. In some regions, such as Messenia and the frontier area of Thessaly, families built small tholos tombs for themselves. The most common type of Mycenaean family tomb, however, was a rock-cut chamber with a dromos leading down to the entrance. The entrance was blocked with stones and the passage filled with earth after each burial. The rock-cut tomb may have been developed in Messenia during the 16th century under Cretan influence, like the tholos tomb. In the Knossos region of Crete, rock-cut tombs had been in use for communal burials for many centuries before this. Whatever its origin, the idea of family burial in rock-cut tombs soon spread to Mycenae and other parts of the mainland. Some rock-cut tombs in Messenia and elsewhere were carved in the shape of the beehive vaults of tholos tombs. A few large rock-cut tombs, including some of this shape, were used for royal or princely burials.
Period of the Early Palaces in Crete (c. 2000–1700)
Crete does not seem to have been affected by the movements of people into the Cyclades and the mainland at the end of the 3rd millennium, but important changes were taking place there. Great palaces of a distinctive type built around large rectangular open courts seem to have been constructed within a comparatively short time at the leading centres of Knossos, Phaistos, and Mallia. The art of writing is first attested for certain in Crete at the beginning of this Palatial Period. These developments in Crete appear to have been the result of local evolution.
Crete advanced rapidly along the path of civilization during the period of the Early Palaces, while the mainland relapsed into comparative agricultural stagnation. The art of seal engraving made great strides in Crete. Hard stones, such as jasper and rock crystal, began to be employed for some of the finer seals. A new and much-favoured shape, which may have been adopted from Anatolia, was the signet with a stalk. Anatolian seals found their way to Crete, and impressions of them have been identified in a great deposit of clay sealings from the early palace at Phaistos. Cretan seal designs now included elegant abstract patterns of spirals and concentric circles neatly made with the drill as well as lifelike pictures of animals, birds, and insects, together with mythical beasts such as sphinxes and griffins adapted from Egyptian or Oriental models. Attractive hard stones, such as gabbro, were used by the Cretan vase makers, although they still used the softer chlorites and serpentines. Some of the fine stone vases from communal tombs in the Mesara region and at Mochlos may date from this period, rather than earlier, in the light of discoveries since 1950 in the early palace at Phaistos.
The fast potter’s wheel began to come into use in Crete about the same time as in the Cyclades and on the mainland. Meanwhile, a revolution in the style of Cretan pottery was taking place. During the Early Bronze Age most of the finer vases everywhere in the Aegean area had been decorated with designs in dark, rather shiny paint—shades of red, brown, and black—on a light surface. Toward the end of that period in Crete, however, there was a change to a “light-on-dark” style of decoration; the vases were given an overall wash of the shiny paint previously used for decoration, and designs were applied to this dark surface in white. This new light-on-dark fashion was also adopted, to some extent, in the Cyclades and on the mainland, but in Crete it was developed much further, and, from the beginning of the Palatial Period, decoration in white was regularly supplemented with red to create a striking polychrome effect. This kind of pottery, which flourished in Crete throughout the time of the first palaces and later (c. 2200 to 1600), is known as Kamáres ware from a sacred cave of that name on Mount Ida, where vases with fine polychrome decoration were recovered at the end of the 19th century. Most of the smaller vases in Crete, notably the drinking cups, now copy metal ones in their shapes and often in their molded or impressed decoration, and the exquisite “eggshell” ware, made in the workshops of the great palaces, with walls as thin as those of metal vases and shiny black surfaces adorned with abstract flowerlike designs in a combination of white, red, and orange, is among the finest pottery ever produced in Greek lands. The imitations in clay suggest that vessels of precious metal—gold and silver—were in general use in the palaces of Crete by this time. A silver, two-handled goblet of this period was recovered from a tomb at Gourniá in eastern Crete. Silver occurs in the Cyclades, and it was being mined during the Bronze Age near Laurium in Attica on the mainland.
There were many contacts between Crete and the rest of the Levant during this period. Scarabs and stone vessels from Egypt reached Crete and were imitated there. Cretan Kamáres ware was exported to Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt, where it has been found in tombs and on town sites. Letters recovered from the ruins of the city of Mari on the Euphrates, destroyed by Hammurabi about 1760, refer to objects of Cretan workmanship. It seems that Cretan metalworkers were already preeminent in the civilized world of the time. The daggers they made were of types ultimately derived from Syria, but they were exported to Cyprus in exchange, perhaps, for copper, although supplies existed in Crete. Westward, they may have reached Italy, where native copper daggers are of Cretan shapes and flint imitations of them seem to have been made. It was during this period that tin-bronze began to come into more general use in the Aegean, replacing copper or bronze made by adding arsenic, a process which was effective but dangerous for the craftsman who undertook it. Tin may have reached the Aegean first from Iran through Syria, although Etruria on the western coast of Italy was another possible source.
Burial in Crete was still normally in communal tombs, and many of the Early Bronze Age ones continued in use, but cemeteries of burials in storage jars are also in evidence at this time. No royal tombs of this period have been identified, however, and kings and queens may have been laid to rest, like their subjects, in the tombs of their clans or possibly even buried ceremonially at sea. A large rectangular building with many rooms or compartments in the cemetery area just outside the city at Mallia might have been the tomb of the royal clan there. The local inhabitants plundered it during the 19th century, and its modern name—Chrysolakkos (“Gold Hole”)—suggests what they found. A gold cup and jewelry, including elaborate earrings and pendants, acquired by the British Museum in 1892 and allegedly from a Mycenaean tomb on the island of Aegina near Athens have been thought to be plunder from Chrysolakkos, although recent excavations on Aegina have indicated a wealthy and warlike community that could equally have produced these jewels. They are marked by an unusual style: one earring has a two-headed snake surrounding a pair of leashed hounds over squatting monkeys, with owls and discs hanging on soldered chains. The collection may have been made during the 17th century, after the destruction of the older palaces. French excavations there in the 1920s led to the recovery of similar jewelry, notably a gold dress-pin with flower head and a pendant in the form of a pair of bees (or wasps) facing each other over a disc, which may be meant for a honey cake. This pendant shows that the Cretan jewelers were masters of the art of hard soldering and could use it to fix wire (filigree) or minute globules of gold (granulation) to a background.
Life in the Cyclades seems to have continued much as it had in the Early Bronze Age. Yet, apart from signs scratched or painted on pottery from Phylakopi in Melos, there is little evidence of acquaintance with writing or the use of seals. Some time after the beginning of the period of the Early Palaces in Crete, Phylakopi was defended by a massive wall. Cretan Kamáres ware was exported to the islands of Melos, Ceos, and Aegina and to Lerna and a few other coastal sites on the mainland, and mainland Minyan ware found its way to the islands and to Crete. The trade may partly reflect the trade in Melian obsidian, which may still have been in demand for cheap knives and razors, although metal ones were already in use in the Aegean area from the Early Bronze Age onward. Chamber tombs cut in the rock at Phylakopi appear to go back to this period, but burial in slab-lined cists continued elsewhere in the islands. At some point the fortified settlement at Khalandrianí on Syrus was destroyed by fire and abandoned, but Aegina, Ceos, and other fortified island towns flourished.
Period of the Late Palaces in Crete (c. 1700–1450)
Various disasters occurred in Crete about the turn of the 18th and 17th centuries bc. The palaces at Knossos and Mallia were damaged, while that at Phaistos and a building that may have been the residence of a local ruler in a large settlement at Monastiráki west of Mount Ida were destroyed by fire. The palace at Phaistos had been so violently burned that an enormous layer of almost impenetrable vitrified mud brick formed an underpinning for the new palace built on top of it; it is a vivid testimony to massive destruction. What caused these destructions is uncertain. Accident, internal warfare, or foreign invasion are among possible agents. The damage at Knossos might have been caused by one of the many earthquakes that afflict the area. It has been suggested that Crete was first conquered by Greeks during this period or by people from Anatolia speaking another Indo-European language called Luwian and related to Hittite. There is, however, no strong evidence for an invasion of Crete at this time.
The two or three centuries following these disasters were indeed the most flourishing of the Aegean Bronze Age, during which Cretan civilization reached its zenith. The palaces at Knossos, Phaistos, and Mallia were restored with greater splendour than before.
From the dimensions of the new and entirely rebuilt palace at Phaistos, it has been possible to calculate the unit of length used by the Cretan architects: a foot only a fraction shorter than the standard English foot. In plan, the later palaces were basically the same as the earlier ones, with agglomerations of rooms clustering around long, rectangular central courts oriented roughly from north to south either for ritual or for catching the best of the winter sun. Many parts of these palaces were two or three stories high. A section on the eastern side of that at Knossos, built into a cutting in a steep slope below the level of the central court and housing the royal living quarters, may have had five stories. Large areas of the palaces, especially at Knossos, were possibly reserved for cult. It is difficult to explain otherwise the beautiful ceremonial steps at Phaistos leading up to a blank wall; although there is no entrance, a personage could make a sudden appearance from the side and speak or show something to an assembly in the open space in front. The palaces often had a conjunction of grand facades and storage quarters, perhaps for the first fruits of the harvest to be blessed in passing.
Wide, paved squares flanked the palaces, and around them spread extensive towns, which by this time if not earlier seem to have been unwalled. Unfortunately, a complete town around a palace has never yet been excavated, and the comparative wealth or population is not known. Cobbled streets with raised central paths of smooth squared blocks for the convenience of pedestrians ran through the towns. Surface water was carried away by covered drains, and skillfully jointed clay water pipes were found in the palace at Knossos.
The only settlement of this period that has been entirely excavated is a small town at Gourniá in eastern Crete. This was built on the slopes of a ridge overlooking the sea, on top of which stood a little “palace” with a small open court in the centre and a public square beside it on the sheltered landward side. Down the ridge from the palace toward the sea was a small shrine facing the end of a path that led to it from the main street. Even in a small town such as that at Gourniá, many of the houses were evidently two stories high, and houses with three stories are depicted on faience inlays from the palace at Knossos assignable to the 17th century bc.
Palaikastro in eastern Crete is another important town with blocks of houses marked by coloured stone foundations, narrow streets with drains, and pottery of exceptional quality. Another town of great potential interest is Arkhanes near Knossos, where palace facades, early tholos tombs and later shaft-grave burials, and shrines have been discovered scattered through the countryside. Pyrgos, a controlling villa, and Kommos, a commercial town with fine architecture, roads, and ship sheds, also are indicative of power and wealth; the road and watchtower system is beginning to be better known.
In palaces as well as houses, the lower parts of walls were still normally built of rough fieldstones held together with mud, the upper stories being continued in mud brick. Carefully squared and fitted blocks of limestone, however, were employed for some important facades. Now, as earlier, walls were often tied together with a framework of timbers set vertically and horizontally and joined by crossbeams running through them. There was also an extensive use of timber for columns and pillars and for the rafters supporting upper floors and roofs, which, it seems, were usually flat. Pictures of wooden columns show them with a characteristic downward taper, which may reflect an original custom of placing tree trunks upside down. The lower parts of the walls inside the palaces and great houses were often clothed with large slabs of attractively veined gypsum, a soft crystalline stone that outcrops in the region of Knossos and Phaistos. Gypsum was also much employed for pavements, but a hard lime plaster was more commonly used for coating walls and floors. Plastered walls were decorated with brightly coloured pictures, which may be an innovation of this period, since they are not yet attested for certain earlier in Crete. These pictures are described as frescoes because they were normally painted while the plaster was still damp. Lines impressed with string in the wet plaster helped to guide the artists. White, red-brown, or blue were usually chosen as a background, while yellow and black were among the other basic colours used. Many of these pictures, especially those from the palace at Knossos, were concerned with religion; they show elaborately dressed goddesses, together with sacred dances and ceremonies, such as bull leaping, which appears to have had a religious or magical basis. Yet scenes such as a frieze of partridges and hoopoes adorning a room in what seems to have been an inn for strangers opposite the palace at Knossos look entirely secular. Monkeys, imported from Egypt, are depicted more than once, along with native wild goats and extraordinarily lifelike flowers—rose, ivy, saffron crocus, lily, and papyrus—but often imaginary hybrids. Some frescoes may represent permanent magic gardens. The pictures ranged in scale from those with life-size figures, which might occupy most of the wall surface, to panels and friezes, including a class of miniatures with figures of men and women two to three inches (five to seven centimetres) high. Parts of some wall pictures at Knossos were in relief, and plaster reliefs of this kind are occasionally found elsewhere in Crete. Floors and ceilings might also carry painted decoration.
Their wall paintings were probably the finest achievements of the Cretan artists, but only battered or fire-discoloured fragments of these have survived. The minor arts are better represented in the archaeological record. Now, if not earlier, hard rock crystal began to be used for making vases and seals, together with the volcanic glass, obsidian. A variety flecked with spots of white pumice, from Yialí (Glass Island), near Cos, was favoured for vases. Other fine stones imported for vase manufacture were Egyptian alabaster (calcite) and green and red marbles (antico rosso and lapis lacedaemonius) from the southern Peloponnese. Antique stone vases from Egypt might be adapted to local tastes by the addition of spouts and handles. Vessels with narrow necks were carved in two pieces that were afterward joined together, an example being a crystal libation vase from Zákros with the handle formed of crystal beads threaded on copper wire. A number of cult vases are carved with pictures in relief, including an octopus, a mountain shrine with birds perched on horns of consecration, altars in an enclosed courtyard, and wild goats and, on other vases, youths engaged in ritual competition, a ritual dance of some kind, and games, such as bull leaping, wrestling, and boxing, which apparently had magical or religious connotations. Soft stones, such as chlorite or serpentine, were used for making these vases, the surfaces of which were often coated with gold leaf, to judge from the scraps that have survived. This economical system of gilding was sometimes applied to seal stones, although solid gold and silver seals also occur. A class of gold signet rings has oval bezels engraved with ritual scenes that may be from the story of a goddess and her consort and include scenes of worship at an altar or a tree, with a shield or sacral knots as attributes, or dancing. Seals of other shapes, in a wide range of attractive stones, display a variety of designs, including animals, such as lions, bulls, and wild boars. Sometimes a bull is being attacked by a lion, or a wild goat is escaping or standing at bay before a hound. Birds, fish, and butterflies also figure on these seals, and most of the designs appear to be entirely secular in character. A class of gems crudely engraved with pictures of jars and leafy branches may have been rain charms, however.
There is little evidence for Bronze Age sculpture in Crete, apart from a few small stone heads that may have come from statues with wooden bodies or a pair of clay feet perhaps supporting a dressed armature. Some bronze curls from the palace at Knossos appear to have adorned the head of a more than life-size wooden statue of a goddess. Figurines cast in solid bronze, though sometimes marred by casting defects, are often of great beauty. They mostly represent worshipers, both men and women, and were placed as votives in sanctuaries. Statuettes of bull leapers and perhaps of gods and goddesses were made of imported ivory in several pieces cunningly joined together by pins and dowels. Faience manufacture was presumably learned from Egypt. Exquisite faience plaques of animals, along with statuettes of goddesses or priestesses and small vases of the same material, appear to be products of the palace workshops at Knossos for shrine or ritual display.
The Late Palace Period seems to have been rich in metals. Although few gold and silver vessels have survived in Crete, many fine vessels in the Mycenae Shaft Graves may have been made by Cretan skilled workers. Even cooking vessels were now being made of copper or bronze, including huge cauldrons in which a sheep or goat could be boiled whole. Among a variety of serviceable bronze tools were axes, adzes, and double-bladed axes such as those of earlier times. The sockets of these were improved toward the end of the period from a circular to an oval shape, which prevented twisting of the haft. New tools current by then included long bronze chisels and immense saws capable of slicing the gypsum required for paving and wall veneer, as well as for cutting timber. Helmets of copper or bronze are depicted on faience inlays from Knossos and on stone relief vases, but plate armour is attested only from the end of the 15th century. For defense, the Cretans of this time, like their Mycenaean and Cycladic contemporaries, appear to have relied on huge rectangular or eight-shaped shields of bull’s hide. (Homer’s description of the shield of Ajax as being “like a tower” preserves a memory of body shields of this kind.) Weapons included spears and daggers, as well as rapiers with long slender blades and short tangs for affixing wooden hilts. Massive pommels of attractive stones, such as rock crystal, or of gold-plated wood or ivory helped to balance the blades. Toward the end of the period, swords are found with strong, flanged hilts and short blades adapted for cutting as well as thrusting strokes. A remarkable set of weapons, often inlaid, enriched with gold, ivory, and designs, was created at Knossos at one or more brilliant sword workshops (which vanished after about 1400).
Signs scratched or painted on clay vases, not only in Crete but on the mainland and in the islands, from about the middle of the 3rd millennium onward may reflect acquaintance with writing among the peoples of the Aegean area. The first positive evidence for the use of writing in the Aegean, however, is found in Crete at the beginning of the Palatial Period—about 2000 or somewhat later. This earliest Cretan writing is known as pictographic or hieroglyphic because its signs are pictures of animals or things; the system appears to be of Cretan origin, even if it was inspired by Egypt or Syria. During the period of the Early Palaces and while the Cretan hieroglyphic script was still in use, a simplified linear script was being scratched on clay tablets at Phaistos. A more evolved script with linear signs of this kind is attested in various parts of Crete and was known in the Cyclades during the Late Palace Period. It is known as Linear A to distinguish it from the variety of script (Linear B) current both in Crete and on the mainland from the end of the 15th century (see below The Linear B texts). Most of what has survived of Aegean Bronze Age writing is on clay tablets of the kind used in Syria and Mesopotamia in early times. Ink was, however, used to write Linear A inscriptions around the insides of two clay cups from Knossos, and the bulk of what was written in the Aegean during the Bronze Age may have been in ink on some kind of paper made from papyrus, as in Egypt, or from palm leaves, as later Greek tradition hints. The two standard forms of tablets are the long narrow “palm leaf” for short transactions and the tall rectangular “page,” which often is a summary or inclusive list. The Knossos tablets supply records of transactions involving personnel, cattle, sheep, goats, oils and spices, wool and textiles, weapons(including arrows, swords, and issues of chariots with armour), stored treasures, and religious offerings. They seem to reflect a period when the former palaces of the several districts were no longer standing, or powerful, but when the surrounding lands still produced agricultural goods that were taxed or tithed at Knossos.
The decline of the early Aegean civilizations
The eruption of Thera (c. 1500) and the conquest of Crete (c. 1450)
Cretan civilization reached its highest peak between about 1600 and the later 15th century. An important change of fashion that began about 1600 in Crete was the abandonment of the “light-on-dark” style of vase decoration of Kamáres tradition in favour of a return to “dark-on-light.” The new-style Cretan pottery, with attractive designs of spirals, grasses, ferns, and flowers in shiny black or brown paint, was soon to inspire the development of Mycenaean pottery on the mainland. This flourishing period in Crete, however, ended in a series of disasters. About 1500 the volcano on the island of Thera, long, it seems, quiescent, erupted to bury the settlements there under many feet of pumice and ash. The story of Atlantis, if Plato did not invent it, may reflect some Egyptian record of this eruption, one of the most stupendous of historical times. Knossos was shattered by a succession of earthquakes that preceded or accompanied the eruption, while great waves resulting from it appear to have damaged settlements along the northern coast of Crete. Ash identified as coming from the eruption has been found in coastal sites as far away as Israel and Sardis in Anatolia. The wind may have been blowing from the south or west. Later Greek traditions, such as the story of Deucalion’s flood, may enshrine a memory of similar waves that swept the coasts of the mainland at this time. Some Cretan settlements might have been wrecked by the blast from the eruption, although Thera lies about 70 miles (110 kilometres) away from Crete. Whatever the damage caused, it appears to have been soon repaired and not to have disrupted the course of local culture. Damages to pastures and livestock were apparently minimal. Similarly, in the Cyclades there are few signs of any gap in occupation as a result of the eruption. The settlements on Thera, however, lay buried deep in pumice. The largest of these, at Akrotíri, opened by excavations since 1967, offers a unique picture of a Bronze Age town. The walls of its houses stand in places two stories high, with paintings miraculously preserved on them, and the floors with storage jars and other objects are as they were left when the inhabitants escaped from the eruption or from the earthquake that is thought to have preceded it. The wonderful preservation of delicate frescoes and of foodstuffs, from snails to olives to grain, makes Thera a tantalizing closed deposit of Aegean life. Many houses have flagstone floors upstairs, with columns supporting the roof, and rooms with multiple windows. Below there are storage bays filled with jars, looms, medicine chests, and grain and oil stores. There is delightful local pottery with swallows, dolphins, wild goats, and caper and saffron plants. The wall paintings have a garden quality and may often have religious associations or celebrate festivals and seasons, city or country life, and sea voyaging. Only a small part of the town has been excavated. The work has been slowed by the engineering problems of keeping the two- or three-story houses from collapsing and crushing the painted walls and delicate contents sealed from damage for centuries.
After the eruption, Crete appears to have enjoyed comparative prosperity for a time, while the influence of Cretan civilization continued to spread on the mainland. Alongside vases with plant and flower designs, the Cretan potters began to decorate others in an attractive marine style, with octopuses and other sea creatures. The marine style may have originated at Knossos, but vases with this type of decoration, many of them of a ritual character, were exported all over Crete, as well as to the Cyclades and the mainland. About the middle of the 15th century, however, a generation or so after the eruption of Thera, most of the important sites in central and southern Crete were destroyed by fire. Destruction was not confined to palaces and towns but extended to country houses, farms, and rural shrines. Many settlements were never inhabited again, such as that at Mochlos, where excavators found the remains of numbers of people who had perished in the destruction. The site of the destroyed town at Gourniá was eventually occupied by a scatter of houses, but the palace there was not rebuilt. The large palaces at Mallia and Zákros were also destroyed by fire and afterward abandoned.
A new social order
The fact that palaces and country houses, centres of landed estates, were not rebuilt suggests a total overthrow of the existing social order. A number of magnificent stone ritual vases and bronze tools have been recovered from the ruins of the palace at Zákros in excavations since 1962, but virtually no gold or silver objects were found. Indeed, it looks as if the palaces and houses everywhere in Crete had been ransacked before they were destroyed. Of the four great palaces, only that at Knossos may have escaped serious damage at this time, but parts of the city there were wasted by fire. In the early days of Cretan exploration, it was taken for granted that such destruction was the result of war. Since the 1930s, however, it has been suggested that it was in some way caused by the eruption of Thera. The eruption, however, began and ended a generation or more before this horizon of destruction, while evidence of conquerors in Crete immediately after it has been found. The destruction appears to have been their work.
The conquerors evidently came from the mainland and made their capital at Knossos, but they seem to have established another centre of power at Phaistos, and legend hints at a third centre at Kydonia (modern Khaniá) in western Crete. Vases of shapes already popular on the mainland, such as drinking cups with tall stems, became fashionable at Knossos after the conquest and eventually spread to other parts of the island. A rather stiff, formal “Palace Style” of vase decoration, using motifs derived from the earlier plant and marine styles, may reflect an adaptation of Cretan fashions to mainland tastes. The old clan tombs went out of use in the Knossos region and were replaced by rock-cut tombs. Some of these contain the burials of warriors and their families, accompanied by rich assortments of weapons and jewelry, resembling the military equipment of the Mycenae Shaft Graves and the mainland tholos tombs. There was a cemetery of similar rock-cut tombs, with richly furnished burials (the Tombe dei Nobili), at Phaistos. Tholos tombs sunk in the ground and covered by mounds appear to have been introduced to Crete from the mainland now. One, on the Kefála ridge north of the palace at Knossos, may have been built soon after the conquest. It has masons’ marks like the one at Peristéria in Messenia.
The Linear B texts
Insight into the social order on Crete after the conquest can be gleaned from the Linear B tablets found at Knossos, where Linear B had replaced Linear A by the 14th century Bc. The decipherment in 1952 of the Linear B tablets as Greek by Michael Ventris, working with John Chadwick, has been widely accepted. Still, there are some skeptics who reject it; and, while most of these believe that the language of the tablets will prove to be Greek when (in their view) it is correctly deciphered, a minority think it will not. At the same time, among philologists who do accept the Ventris decipherment, there are a few who regard the language of the tablets as a form of Greek with little or no relation to the Greek of later times, which, in this minority view, was introduced into the Mycenaean world by new peoples of Greek speech at the end of the Bronze Age. The tablets have many personal names and place-names but very little connected descriptive Greek, making them hard to read; nonetheless, they are of enormous potential value. Knossos seems to have been the only Cretan centre with a genuine archive recording income, palace issues of expensive equipment like chariots and bronze corselets, and outlays on gifts to the gods (some of whom were Greek, some traditional Cretan), mainly in the form of donations of oil and cloth. The Knossos records are valuable in allowing reconstruction of farming practices, the wool industry, and military defense, as well as in providing lists of personnel and places scattered around the countryside of Crete that owed or brought sheep and produce to the palace. The bureaucratic apparatus seems to have been well organized and extensive, whereas the rest of Crete in the 14th and 13th centuries, though rebuilt after the earlier disasters and the abandonment of the 15th century and prosperous, does not give evidence of the same degree of control and record keeping. How far the countryside was subservient to Knossos is not known.
The fusion of cultures on Crete
The last decades of the 15th century and the first part of the 14th century saw a wonderful fusion of Cretan and mainland skills; the fabric and firing of pottery improved, and there were formidable and often elegant and richly ornamented bronze weapons in the warrior graves at Knossos and Phaistos. Sword hilts were sometimes sheathed in gold, and their pommels made of fine stones and ivory. Warriors were armed with large thrusting spears as well as throwing spears, or javelins; boar spears were used for hunting. Shields were painted on walls as well as hung there, and there were new bronze arrowheads and conical helmets with a plume knob and cheekpieces. The old mainland helmet plated with tusk plaques of the wild boar reached Crete, too. Bronze armour was issued by the palace, with chariots and pairs of horses; the transverse strokes on the cuirass ideogram on the tablets suggest a link with the transverse bronze bands of the armour suit from Dendra near Mycenae from about 1400 bc. There seems to have been a disciplined set of chariot squads, perhaps often composed of men from abroad, patrolling the island. It may be that a memory of this energetic military epoch is preserved in the Iliad, in the passages describing the exploits of the Cretan princes Idomeneus and Meriones. Gold rings from this period have a rich religious iconography of shrines and worshipers, and there are fine sealstones. About 1400 the fused customs or beliefs of the Cretan and Mycenaean worlds appear on the painted limestone sarcophagus from Ayía Triadha, a small palace near Phaistos; depicted on one side are libations on the left and, probably, offerings to a dead man on the right. The other side shows a bull being sacrificed while a man is playing the double pipe. Pairs of women in chariots drawn by wild goats or griffins are represented on the ends. Historically the sarcophagus occupies a dividing line: Knossos was burned again after 1400.
There seems to be a marked difference in economic power or aesthetic achievement between the earlier (1600–1400) and the later (1400–1200) periods of Minoan, Cycladic, and Mycenaean cultures. Frescoes are duller—more repetitive, coarser in outline, and muddier in colour. The grand swords are no longer made, and rings and seals are simpler. Metal becomes rarer, and blue glass tends to replace lapis lazuli from the east. It is uncertain whether this decline in art reflects a change of governmental forms, a restriction on trade with Egypt and the east, a decrease of creative energy leading to an unimaginative reproduction of traditional patterns in familiar materials, or the loss of palace-controlled Cretan workshops that had supplied the earlier fine standards for the developing Greek world.
The mainland
While there are many signs of mainland influence in Crete in the period after about 1450, the conquest may have helped to spread Cretan fashions and techniques on the mainland through the medium of captive artisans sold as slaves. The earliest wall paintings on the mainland appear to date from this time and are thoroughly Cretan in style. The Mycenaean civilization of the mainland nevertheless remained very different from that of Crete. Mycenaean pottery is distinguishable from Cretan, and religious customs, such as worship in caves or hilltop sanctuaries, which continued in Crete, do not appear to have taken root on the mainland. The sphere of architecture, however, is continually impressive, as it had been in the older phase of tholos tombs.
The standard mainland palace of this period, although built with Cretan techniques, differed from the traditional Cretan palace centred around a large, rectangular court. The focal point of a mainland palace, such as that at Pylos (Pílos) in Messenia, was a great hall with the roof supported on four pillars and a vast circular central hearth. The hall was entered through an anteroom with a columned porch beyond it. This complex appears to be an adaptation of the type of longhouse found on the mainland since the end of the 5th millennium. The mainland palaces were painted in a manner derived from Cretan models, with large processional scenes and smaller scenes of men hunting boars or stags, of chariots, duels, and numerous battles; there are heraldic hounds, griffins, lions, sphinxes, and patterns with horses, argonaut shells, spirals, and rosettes. The whole is colourful but more imaginative in idea than expert in execution. After about 1400, a series of small acropolis palaces was built, usually with a simple megaron hall, as at Tiryns, in Late Helladic III A. These palaces developed into almost grandiose complexes by the later 13th century, with lower courses of well-dressed limestone and painted floors, surrounded by workshops and storerooms. The descriptions of palaces in Homer are evidently based on memories of palaces such as these, and what Homer calls the megaron corresponds to the great hall. A small palace with mainland features was built at Phylakopi on Melos in the Cyclades, and a more regular form on massive foundations at Ayía Triadha near Phaistos in Crete. A shrine there whose floor was painted with fish and octopods looks forward to the painted floors of mainland palaces, with dolphins and octopods at Tiryns and octopods and fish at Pylos.
The palaces on the mainland had a system of keeping records that was similar to the Cretan one. The archive at Pylos, excavated by Blegen in 1939 and again after World War II, is the only extensive one found so far, but Thebes also produced tablets in some numbers, and there were smaller groups at Mycenae and Tiryns. These tablets reflect the same range of interest as those at Knossos: they consist of lists of palace personnel and of persons in outlying towns in professions such as bronzesmith, shepherd, cowherd, or tree cutter. There are lists of landowners, women and children, and priests and “slaves of the god,” as well as records of agricultural income, of the preparation of perfumed oil, and of sacrifices of animals to the gods and offerings of oil and cloth at different parts of the Pylian province. Systems of landownership and tenancy were fairly complicated, and the palace kept a close eye on all dues and exchanges of goods. The archive at Thebes has records of trade with neighbours, in Euboea, or at places like Sicyon in the Peloponnese and of contacts with western Crete; the commercial interests of the Pylos district seem to have been more internal.
By the late 20th century, only three palace systems—at Tiryns, Mycenae, and Pylos—were well excavated and understood. The Theban palace may yet emerge; workshops, storerooms, and an arsenal have been found in probes under the modern town. Athens and Sparta may have had palaces, now lost; Dendra-Midea in the Argolid had impressive walls; Orchomenos in Boeotia had at least a small megaron with frescoes. Private houses are known both at the palace centres and in nonpalatial places, and some private houses, like those at Mycenae, maintained their own records in Linear B. There is a certain likeness all across Greece in architectural techniques, pottery, frescoes, ivory, and jewelry, but local autonomy and distinct variations in design and workshop styles also are evident. Gifts no doubt were exchanged among the principal centres, and there was at least a partial network of roadways connecting one centre to another; much trading must also have been coastal.
The Greek mainland in the 14th and 13th centuries was densely populated with towns and villages, and cemeteries confirm the numbers. The state was organized under a king, wanax, with a military leader, rawaketa, and troops with chariot officers attached for patrolling the borders; there also were naval detachments. The people had certain powers and a council. The towns were organized hierarchically under local officials, like the later “kings,” basileis.
Eastward explorations
From the 15th century, the mainland Greeks explored eastward and replaced the Cretan settlers in such outpost towns as Triánda on Rhodes or Miletus on the coast of Anatolia. There are Hittite records that apparently mention the maneuvers and political meddling of Greeks in coastal states; they refer to them under the name of Ahhíyawa, probably the equivalent to Homer’s Achaeans at Troy. These records, from the 15th through the 13th century, are confirmed archaeologically by finds from the cemetery at Panaz Tepe near Phocaea in the north to Müskebi near Halicarnassus in the south. Panaz Tepe has warrior equipment, and apparently the soldiers took native wives, for the Greeks were buried while the Anatolians were cremated in the same small tholos tombs. Mycenaean pottery and imitations of it appeared at Troy itself from the 15th century onward. The renowned “Trojan War” may sum up a series of relationships and conflicts spanning the entire Bronze Age, since some of the archaic equipment described in the poems is actually found in 15th- and 14th-century Anatolia. There also was extensive trade with the Levantine coast and Cyprus, at least until all trade networks began to be disrupted after the Battle of Kadesh in the 13th century. The exports are far more visible than the reciprocal imports.
The end of the Bronze Age in the Aegean
From the middle of the 13th century, expensive fortification walls were constructed for the mainland palaces (except Pylos), which give testimony of tremendous skill in fitting large blocks of stone together without bonding, in designing sophisticated gates, and in protecting underground water supplies. At Tiryns the walls are marked by elegant setbacks, and at Mycenae the famous Lion Gate is ornamented with the sculpture of two lions, one on either side of a column. The gateway and walls on the Acropolis of Athens were also impressive, with postern gates and guard posts and roofed, sheltered water supplies, either from local springs or brought in by pipes. These walls may signal frictions between city-states such as marked classical Greece or represent a common fear of attack from enemies unknown to 20th-century investigators. It may be that the cost, in labour and hire, of these fortifications had serious effects on the economy. Yet the 13th-century palaces increased in size and complexity, their walls and floors being repainted. The tomb gifts did not decline in value, suggesting that local wealth was maintained, and, if the two columned tholos tombs at Mycenae, the Treasury of Atreus and the Tomb of Clytemnestra, were really built this late, as some scholars maintain, then dynastic resources were still potent. The palace workshops, controlling the production of blue glass paste jewelry, agate beads, or chariots and harness, also flourished until shortly before the end of the 13th century; these workshops had divine patrons, according to the texts. In the “private sector” outside the palace at Mycenae there was a shrine, apparently devoted to a popular cult that involved a fertility goddess, a sword goddess, and snakes.
Shifts in populations
Toward the end of the 13th century, the mainland palaces were burned, possibly within a short time of each other; the exception was Thebes in the north, which may have received a destructive blow slightly earlier. Mycenae and Tiryns continued to be inhabited and indeed had very rich and energetic periods of pottery production and trade in the 12th century; Pylos was deserted, however, and Athens was inhabited but not wealthy. New centres, both of refuge and of independence, became conspicuous, such as Lefkandi on the inner shore of Euboea, south of Chalcis. The Cyclades, Crete, and, in the west, the Ionian islands such as Cephallenia experienced an increase in population. New expeditions eastward to Cyprus consisted of small groups who fortified military settlements around the coast. Anatolia may also have received new immigrants, as it had periodically since the 15th century, as far as Tarsus in Cilicia.
No completely satisfactory explanation for the collapse of the palace systems and the movements of populations has been found. Perhaps one must look toward a combination of factors such as climatic change and drought, harvest failure, starvation, epidemic, civic unrest, and resentment of palace taxes. Contributing factors may also have been the breaking off of trade with the east after the clash of the Hittites and Egyptians at the Battle of Kadesh earlier in the 13th century, the presence of roving piratical bands of both local peoples and immigrants around the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean (known in the Egyptian records as the Peoples of the Sea) who were hired as temporary allies by several states, and general frictions caused by universally failing economies and alliances. At any rate, the stable states of the wealthy later Bronze Age, which had been bound by commercial exchanges and political alliances, gradually or swiftly collapsed into near chaos. By the end of the following Dark Age (lasting perhaps from 1100 to 1000 in some places, or 900 in others), new peoples had arrived and settled, as, for example, the Dorians in southern Greece and Crete and the southern Cyclades as far as Rhodes or the Phrygians in central Anatolia. Notable too is the fact that new late Hittite states had been formed in northern Syria at this time.
New foreign elements
Even before the end of the Bronze Age, there were occasional signs of new foreign elements in Greece, Crete, the islands, and Cyprus, such as exchanges of pottery and metalwork with Italy, Sardinia, the Balkans, and northern Greece and with regions like Epirus and other northern districts theretofore beyond the margins of the standard Mycenaean world. Dorian tribesmen as well as others may have moved into the weakened states and into the grazing lands to the south. They may have pushed the old inhabitants into flight or into isolated and linguistically separate hilltop areas like Arcadia. Occasionally single burials appear next to the family chamber tombs of traditional Mycenaean practice, along with an increase in cremation burial. Some alien gray pottery, pairs of long dress pins for securing women’s untailored blanket garments, and the late introduction of iron and steel are further signs of new elements and evolving changes. Whether some of the “west Greek” elements in the new population were actually novel or had been present in Mycenaean society all along is obscured by the linguistic unity of the palace tablets; it may be that the Greek dialects that seem to have moved into place during the Dark Age, especially the Dorian dialects of the south, had been spoken but not written at an earlier stage by segments of the population.
The people of the Aegean Bronze Age
The Aegean populations after the Neolithic Period do not conform to a clear ethnic type. The men from small tribal organizations of early times seem to have chosen brides from outside the kin group, at distances from Anatolia to the Balkans and points south. Almost from the start one finds evidence of a variety of people—slender and stout, with round and long skulls, and of tall and medium height. Probably many of the ancient inhabitants of Greece and the islands looked as people in Greece do today—active, muscular, and of moderate height. From the evidence of the wall paintings, though these are often idealized, they seem largely to have had dark hair, dark or gray eyes, fine profiles, and slender figures. Detailed skeletal studies of burials in Grave Circle B at Mycenae have shown tall, rugged skeletons with large hands and feet, some arthritis and gallstones, and recurrent “family traits.” The high average age at death—about 36 years—may reflect fighting careers, for which the men may have been socially selected, fed, and trained. Their generally superior physical condition in comparison to that of “commoners” was perhaps the result of a better diet from childhood onward.
Dress
Clay figurines of about 2000 from Crete show men wearing a narrow codpiece with a belt or loincloth and bare above the waist. This was to remain the basic fashion for Cretan men throughout the Bronze Age. Cretan women wore short-sleeved jackets that left the breasts bare and ankle-length flounced skirts, although shorter skirts to just below the knees are also attested. Marble figurines of men from the Cyclades assigned to the Early Bronze Age have belts and narrow codpieces like those of the Cretans. There is little evidence for dress on the mainland until the time of the Mycenae Shaft Graves in the 16th century. A considerable variety of dress is represented from that time onward throughout the Aegean area, but it is difficult to recognize fashions peculiar to the mainland. Tasseled shorts worn by men shown on the Mycenae lion-hunt dagger are also attested in Crete at the time. A group of Aegean envoys painted on the walls of the tomb of Rekhmire, vizier of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III (ruled 1504–1450), are wearing large codpieces of a type fashionable in Crete in the Shaft Grave Period; thus they may have been Cretan envoys. A second group of envoys painted on the walls of the same tomb at a somewhat later date, however, are wearing kilts without codpieces, as worn by men in paintings at Knossos after the mainland conquest of Crete, about 1450. This might reflect mainland envoys going to Egypt after the conquest and wearing a different type of dress from the Cretans, but kilts of this kind appear to be represented in Crete both before and after the conquest.
In addition, curious scaly cloaks and long single-piece robes are among a variety of ritual garments in Crete. Linen was known in Crete by the beginning of the Bronze Age, and fragments of it were recovered from the Mycenae Shaft Graves; however, in Crete, at any rate, clothes were mostly, it seems, made of wool, and wall paintings show them woven with colourful and intricate designs, including pictures of animals and birds and even musical instruments. One of the dyes used was purple crushed from murex shells. Cretan men wore knee boots and sandals with upturned toes. Men with leggings or greaves are represented in wall paintings on the mainland. Caps of various kinds appear on the heads of men, and high, pointed hats and tiaras on those of women and of gods and goddesses or their priests. Clay figurines of the Early Palace Period show Cretan women with elaborate hair arrangements. Women put jewelry in their hair, including strings of beads. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and armlets were displayed by men as well as women. Sealstones were carried on strings around the neck or on the wrist. Cretan men normally left their hair long but were clean-shaven. Beards and mustaches are attested on the mainland in the Shaft Grave Period and later.
The frescoes at Thera show a wonderful variety of costumes, including the Minoan bodice-jacket, the flounced skirt or apron worn thigh-length or ankle-length, a one-piece tunic with rich borders, diaphanous veils, and a marvelous profusion of gold earrings, necklaces, collars, bracelets, and anklets, and rock crystal and carnelian beads. The men wear a kilt or a tunic or a loincloth; “peasants” may wear sheepskin cloaks; soldiers have long capes, tower shields, and boar’s-tusk helmets.
Society
The early villages show few signs of economic disparity between families, although at times the presence of big houses in the later Neolithic Period indicates domination by chiefs. The island communities of the 3rd millennium are not yet well known, though signs of maritime trade are conspicuous and the grave gifts of marble idols point to organized religious rites and some wealth. The existence of fortified communities and two-story special houses on the mainland may indicate that communities contributed to their welfare and that they were ruled by a dynast. In Crete two types of early towns are known, a communal one, as at Myrtos, and one dominated by a big house or houses, as at Vasilikí. By the time of the Early Palaces, after 2000, it is clear that some governing power in several provinces was able to call upon extensive labour for the construction of buildings, granaries, and roads. The likenesses among the palaces, moreover, suggests that social systems across Crete were similar, perhaps dictated in form by certain religious behaviours. The palaces combined facilities for agricultural storage and for community displays and festivals, perhaps regulated by trained families and priestesses or priests. The palaces suggest a reciprocal relationship between the inhabitants and the surrounding villages. In mainland Greece, dynasties controlled fortified acropolis centres with outlying towns dependent on princes. This system is recorded extensively in Greek myths with Bronze Age origins, which tell of kings, princesses, and heroes from a few reigning families. During the last phase of Mycenaean culture and presumably during the Dark Age, the power of the old families was dispersed to lower local rulers, basileis, and the systems of councils of elders and village headman were maintained.
Trade
Foreign manufactures reaching the Aegean and especially Crete during the Bronze Age included Cypriot pottery, Mesopotamian and other Oriental cylinder seals, and Egyptian stone vases, ivories, and scarabs, while Cretan and eventually Mycenaean pottery is found in Egypt and elsewhere in the Levant.
By the 14th and 13th centuries, Mycenaean pottery is found densely in the Levant; it is often accompanied by Cypriot pottery as though carried in Cypriot or Syrian ships. Mycenaean pottery not mixed with Cypriot pottery is found in Anatolia from Troy to Tarsus. Because there is almost nothing on the mainland in return, one may suppose that trade was carried on in archaeological invisibles, such as food, textiles, copper ores, and perhaps slaves or war captives (some are attested in the Linear B texts). Mycenaeans may also have exported technology, such as weapon making, or mercenaries. Crete and the mainland had to import tin for bronze, probably from Anatolia, and both used copper ores from Cyprus and other sources. Minoan contact seems to have reached Sicily and Sardinia, and metal ingots may have been brought back from the west. Silver-lead was produced in the Cyclades and Attica. The Kaş Ulu Burun shipwreck shows an extensive trade in glass ingots, often cobalt blue, as well. Ostrich eggs and stone for making vases were among imports to Crete from Egypt, and ivory came from there or from Syria. Amber from the Baltic reached the mainland in some quantity during the Shaft Grave Period and later but is rarely found in Crete. Exports from the Aegean may have included woolen goods, olive oil, and timber, as well as silver. In Crete, at any rate, foreign trade may have been largely under palace control, but a class of private merchants engaged in overseas commerce no doubt existed in the Aegean.
Transport
Ships with a mast and square sail in addition to oars or paddles were used in the Aegean from the Early Bronze Age. On land, goods were no doubt transported by pack animals or on poles slung between bearers; this principle was also adopted for passenger chairs, of which there are clay models. A model of a four-wheeled cart from Crete is datable to about 2000 or earlier. The wheels of such carts were evidently solid, and the carts were no doubt drawn by oxen. Horses may have been ridden in Crete by then, as they seem to be depicted on early Cretan seals. These horses could have come from the east, but a different breed was introduced into the mainland from the north at the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age, about 2000. The light spoke-wheeled chariot drawn by horses appears to have developed in Syria or northern Mesopotamia early in the 2nd millennium, but it spread rapidly throughout the Middle East because of its usefulness in war. Chariots are depicted on tombstones of the Mycenae Shaft Graves and on Cretan seals before the time of the mainland conquest, about 1450. Apart from warfare, they were used in the Aegean for hunting and probably for travel. During the latter part of the Bronze Age, terraces were built to support roads wide enough for wheeled vehicles both in Crete and on the mainland. Such roads were carried across streams on bridges, examples of which have survived in the region of Mycenae.
Warfare
Short daggers of types derived from Syria were in use in the Aegean during the Bronze Age. Long rapiers, evolved from those in Crete, are found on the mainland by the time of the Mycenae Shaft Graves in the 16th century bc.
The traditional armour of the Shaft Grave Period—a shield shaped in the figure eight or a tower shield, a helmet often reinforced with boars’ tusks, a thrusting spear, and a sword on a baldric in a tasseled scabbard—appears also in the Thera naval fresco and in the epics behind Homer’s Iliad. Charioteers apparently wore a bronze tunic of thonged plates, sketched on the Knossos tablets and found in a chamber tomb at Dendra in the Argolid. Linen greaves appear in frescoes, and bronze greaves in graves. There were bronze wrist guards for archers. Many soldiers may have preferred quilted, padded protection in the summer because of the heat.
Warrior armed with a figure-of-eight shield and boar's-tusk helmet, ivory relief, c. 1400–1200 bce, from Delos; in the Archaeological Museum, Delos, Greece.Cliche, Ecole Francaise d'Archeologie, Athenes
Short swords adapted for cutting as well as thrusting began to appear in the following century and may have been developed in connection with chariot warfare. Bronze armour and small, round shields more serviceable in chariots replaced the old Cretan body shields at approximately the same time. Bows and slings were probably used everywhere in the Aegean area, but, whereas arrowheads of flint and obsidian are found on the mainland, they are virtually unknown in Crete, where arrows may have been tipped with bone or wood until the appearance of bronze arrowheads in the 15th century. Settlements on the mainland and in the Cyclades were defended by walls from the Early Bronze Age onward, and the town at Mallia in Crete appears to have been protected by a wall during the period of the Early Palaces; but, by the time of the Late Palaces, Cretan towns may have been unwalled. Faience inlays of the 17th century from Knossos, however, seem to show an attack on a walled town such as that depicted on a silver-relief vase from the Mycenae Shaft Graves. The attraction of the theme of the city by the sea, with vignettes of war and peace, landscape and water, is also apparent in the Thera naval fresco and the Master Sealing of Chania in western Crete, which shows a youth lording it over the rooftops of a town. Methods of warfare had become highly developed by the end of the Bronze Age, with improved weapons, complex and well-designed fortifications, extensive use of chariots, and warships with rams.
Religion
Little is known about religion in the Cyclades and on the mainland before the period when they came under strong Cretan influence. An open-air sanctuary filled with marble figurines on the island of Kéros (Káros) is assignable to the Early Bronze Age. In Crete during the Early Palace Period, there were many open-air sanctuaries on the tops of hills and mountains. Some of these had small shrines in them, and shrines with one or more rooms and benches for offerings and cult statues are found in the countryside and in the towns in Crete. Parts of the palaces and of large houses there were also set apart for cult. Shrines not unlike Cretan ones existed in settlements in the Cyclades and on the mainland in the Late Bronze Age; however, hilltop sanctuaries are not well attested there, and most of those in Crete appear to have gone out of use after the mainland conquest, about 1450. Caves also were used as sanctuaries in Crete, and cults in some of these persisted until the end of the Bronze Age and later.
The chief deity everywhere in the Aegean during the Bronze Age was evidently a goddess. Perhaps there were several goddesses with different names and attributes. The extant texts refer to a Potnia (“Lady” or “Mistress”), to whom they give several epithets like “horse” or “grain.” Most mainland palaces have paintings of processions in which people bring gifts to a goddess. On Thera, frescoes show girls picking saffron crocus and offering it in baskets to a seated goddess. Clay statues of goddesses, often with upraised arms and attributes such as horns of consecration, doves, snakes, or poppies have been found in Crete; these range in date from the 14th to the early 12th century, providing evidence of a strong tradition. A shrine with large clay goddesses, which once were stuccoed and painted, existed at Ayía Iríni on the island of Ceos, and a smaller, later one at Phylakopi on Melos, with both male and female figurines. The shrine at Mycenae seems to have been devoted to powers of grain and the sword. A later shrine at Tiryns had small clay goddesses with upraised arms. Many cult statues may have been made of wood, and mythic traditions of simple wooden logs or planks (xoana) dropping from heaven or being found in thickets have become attached to several later sanctuaries.
The texts show a more elaborate set of divinities than do the surviving idols, with many later Greek divinities already in place, including Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Artemis, Ares, Hermes, and Dionysus. The Cretan birth goddess Eleuthia and war goddess Eyno were transmitted to the mainland Greeks, and natural forces, like the winds, were occasionally worshiped. There can be no doubt about the continuity of religions and cult from the Late Bronze Age into later Greek times, as well as of the language itself. Some divinities, like the female Zeus and the female Poseidon figures known at Pylos, do not reappear in later times, however. The culture was reshaping itself as it passed from generation to generation.
The normal gifts to divinities were scented oils, textiles, and, in Greece at least, animal sacrifice of cattle, sheep, and pigs. The burial of a horse or a dog may either signify a sacrifice or simply express the attachment between the animal and its master. Two ideas about the realm of death existed, a rarer one of an overseas Elysian paradise where the dead were restored to a new life of bodily blessed ease and a more common one, transmitted in the epic tradition, of a dark underground realm (Hades) inhabited by weak shades with poor memories. These two ideas, representing the Cretan and the Mycenaean tradition, were not fused but survived in separate sets of songs and tales. M. Sinclair F. Hood Emily D. Townsend Vermeule
Citation Information
Article Title: Aegean civilizations
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 18 March 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aegean-civilization
Access Date: August 07, 2019
Additional Reading
General overviews include Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age (1964, reissued 1974), the standard work; Hans-Günther Buchholz and Vassos Karageorghis, Prehistoric Greece and Cyprus: An Archaeological Handbook (1973; originally published in German, 1971); Spyridon Marinatos and Max Hirmer, Kreta, Thera, und das mykenische Hellas, 3rd ed. (1976), also available in an English translation of an earlier edition, Crete and Mycenae (1960); William Taylour, The Mycenaeans, rev. ed. (1983); N.K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean, 1250–1150 B.C., rev. ed. (1985); and Peter Warren, The Aegean Civilizations (1975, reissued 1989). Ancient Crete is discussed in Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos, 4 vol. (1921–35, reissued 1964), still basic; Arthur Evans, Mark Cameron, and Sinclair Hood, Knossos Fresco Atlas (1967); Sinclair Hood, The Minoans (1971); and J. Walter Graham, The Palaces of Crete, rev. ed. (1987). John Boardman, The Cretan Collection in Oxford (1961), describes Cretan antiquities in the Ashmolean Museum. The Cycladic civilizations are examined by Jürgen Thimme (ed.), Art and Culture of the Cyclades (also published as Art and Culture of the Cyclades in the Third Millennium B.C., 1977; originally published in German, 1976), an extensive exhibition catalog; Christos G. Doumas, Thera, Pompeii of the Ancient Aegean (1983); and R.L.N. Barber, The Cyclades in the Bronze Age (1987). Ancient civilization on the Greek mainland is the focus of George E. Mylonas, Mycenae and the Mycenaean Age (1966), for the Late Bronze Age and Mycenaean Shaft Grave Circle B; Emily Vermeule, The Art of the Shaft Graves of Mycenae (1975); and J.T. Hooker, Mycenaean Greece (1976). Religion and religious sites are discussed in Martin P. Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion, 2nd rev. ed. (1950, reprinted 1971), still the standard work; and Bogdan Rutkowski, The Cult Places of the Aegean (1986). Information on ancient pottery and seals may be found in Arne Furumark, The Mycenaean Pottery: Analysis and Classification (1941, reissued 1972); Friedrich Matz et al., Corpus der Minoischen und Mykenischen Siegel (1964– ); and John Boardman, Greek Gems and Finger Rings (1970). Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, Documents in Mycenaean Greek, 2nd ed. (1973), is essential for information on the writing and decipherment of Linear B, including transcriptions, translations, and commentary on selected tablets. For the Aegean Bronze Age as a background to Homer, see the series Archaeologia Homerica: die Denkmäler und das frühgriechische Epos, ed. by Friedrich Matz and Hans-Günter Buchholz (1967– ). Sinclair Hood, The Arts in Prehistoric Greece (1978, reissued 1988), is the best standard work on this subject. William S. Smith, Interconnections in the Ancient Near-East: A Study of the Relationships Between the Arts of Egypt, the Aegean, and Western Asia (1965). M. Sinclair F. Hood Emily D. Townsend Vermeule
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Ancient Italic people
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Etruscans
Other Italic peoples
Ancient Italic people, any of the peoples diverse in origin, language, traditions, stage of development, and territorial extension who inhabited pre-Roman Italy, a region heavily influenced by neighbouring Greece, with its well-defined national characteristics, expansive vigour, and aesthetic and intellectual maturity. Italy attained a unified ethnolinguistic, political, and cultural physiognomy only after the Roman conquest, yet its most ancient peoples remain anchored in the names of the regions of Roman Italy—Latium, Campania, Apulia, Bruttium, Lucania, Samnium, Picenum, Umbria, Etruria, Venetia, and Liguria.
The Etruscans
The Etruscans formed the most powerful nation in pre-Roman Italy. They created the first great civilization on the peninsula, whose influence on the Romans as well as on present-day culture is increasingly recognized. Evidence suggests that it was the Etruscans who taught the Romans the alphabet and numerals, along with many elements of architecture, art, religion, and dress. The toga was an Etruscan invention, and the Etruscan-style Doric column (rather than the Greek version) became a mainstay of architecture of both the Renaissance and the later Classical revival. Etruscan influence on the ancient theatre survives in their word for “masked man,” phersu, which became persona in Latin and person in English.
satyrEtruscan roof tile (antefix) with the head of a satyr, terra-cotta, 4th century bce; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photograph by AlkaliSoaps. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, purchase by subscription, 1896 (96.18.159)
General considerations
Nomenclature
The Greeks called the Etruscans Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi, while the Latins referred to them as Tusci or Etrusci, whence the English name for them. In Latin their country was Tuscia or Etruria. According to the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus (flourished c. 20 bce), the Etruscans called themselves Rasenna, and this statement finds confirmation in the form rasna in Etruscan inscriptions.
ancient Italic peoplesDistribution of peoples of ancient Italy c. 500 bce.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Geography and natural resources
Ancient Etruria lay in central Italy, bounded on the west by the Tyrrhenian Sea (recognized early by the Greeks as belonging to the Tyrrhenoi), on the north by the Arno River, and on the east and south by the Tiber River. This area corresponds to a large part of modern Tuscany as well as to sections of Latium and Umbria. The chief natural resources of the region, undoubtedly playing a crucial role in Etruscan commerce and urban development, were the rich deposits of metal ores found in both northern and southern Etruria. In the south, in the maritime territory stretching between the first great Etruscan cities, Tarquinii and Caere (modern Cerveteri), the low-lying Tolfa Mountains provided copper, iron, and tin. These minerals also were found inland at Mount Amiata, the highest mountain in Etruria, in the vicinity of the city of Clusium (modern Chiusi). But the most productive area turned out to be in northern Etruria, in the range known as the Catena Metallifera (“Metal-Bearing Chain”), from which copper and especially iron were mined in enormous amounts. The city of Populonia, located on the coast, played a leading role in this industry, as did the adjacent island of Elba, evidently renowned from an early date for the wealth of its deposits.
The forests of Etruria constituted another major natural resource, providing abundant firewood for metallurgical operations as well as timber for the building of ships. The Etruscans were famous, or perhaps infamous, for their maritime activity; they dominated the seas on the western coast of Italy, and their reputation as pirates instilled fear around the Mediterranean. Their prosperity through the centuries, however, seems also to have been founded on a stout agricultural tradition; as late as 205 bce, when Scipio Africanus was outfitting an expedition against Hannibal, the Etruscan cities were able to supply impressive amounts of grain as well as weapons and materials for shipbuilding.
Historical periods
The presence of the Etruscan people in Etruria is attested by their own inscriptions, dated about 700 bce; it is widely believed, however, that the Etruscans were present in Italy before this time and that the prehistoric Iron Age culture called “Villanovan” (9th–8th century bce) is actually an early phase of Etruscan civilization.
Inasmuch as no Etruscan literary works have survived, the chronology of Etruscan history and civilization has been constructed on the basis of evidence, both archaeological and literary, from the better-known civilizations of Greece and Rome as well as from those of Egypt and the Middle East. Contact with Greece began around the time that the first Greek colony in Italy was founded (c. 775–750 bce), when Greeks from the island of Euboea settled at Pithekoussai in the Bay of Naples. Thereafter, numerous Greek and Middle Eastern objects were imported into Etruria, and these items, together with Etruscan artifacts and works of art displaying Greek or Oriental influence, have been used to generate relatively precise dates along with more general ones. In fact, the basic nomenclature for the historical periods in Etruria is borrowed from corresponding periods in Greece; the assigned dates are usually (though perhaps erroneously) conceived of as being slightly later than their Greek counterparts to allow for cultural “time lag.” Thus the Etruscan Orientalizing period belongs to the 7th century bce, the Archaic period to the 6th and first half of the 5th century bce, the Classical period to the second half of the 5th and the 4th century bce, and the Hellenistic period to the 3rd to 1st centuries bce. Etruscan culture became absorbed into Roman civilization during the 1st century bce and thereafter disappeared as a recognizable entity.
Etruscan friezeEtruscan frieze; in the National Archaeological Museum, Siena, Italy.© Timur Kulgarin/Shutterstock.com
Language and writing
Etruscan, the third great language of culture in Italy after Greek and Latin, does not, as noted above, survive in any literary works. An Etruscan religious literature did exist, and evidence suggests that there may have been a body of historical literature and drama as well. (Known, for example, is the name of a playwright, Volnius, of obscure date, who wrote “Tuscan tragedies.”) Etruscan had ceased to be spoken in the time of imperial Rome, though it continued to be studied by priests and scholars. The emperor Claudius (died 54 ce) wrote a history of the Etruscans in 20 books, now lost, which was based on sources still preserved in his day. The language continued to be used in a religious context until late antiquity; the final record of such use relates to the invasion of Rome by Alaric, chief of the Visigoths, in 410 ce, when Etruscan priests were summoned to conjure lightning against the barbarians.
There are more than 10,000 known Etruscan inscriptions, with new ones being discovered each year. These are mainly short funerary or dedicatory inscriptions, found on ash urns and in tombs or on objects dedicated in sanctuaries. Others are found on engraved bronze Etruscan mirrors, where they label mythological figures or give the name of the owner, and on coins, dice, and pottery. Finally, there are graffiti scratched on pottery; though their function is little understood, they seem to include owners’ names as well as numbers, abbreviations, and nonalphabetic signs.
Of the longer inscriptions, the most important is the “Zagreb mummy wrapping,” found in Egypt in the 19th century and carried back to Yugoslavia by a traveler (National Museum, Zagreb). It had originally been a book of linen cloth, which at some date was cut up into strips to be wrapped around a mummy. With about 1,300 words, written in black ink on the linen, it is the longest existing Etruscan text; it contains a calendar and instructions for sacrifice, sufficient to give some idea of Etruscan religious literature. From Italy come an important religious text, inscribed on a tile at the site of ancient Capua, and an inscription on a boundary stone at Perugia, noteworthy for its juridical content. The few Etruscan-Latin bilingual inscriptions, all funerary, have little importance with respect to improving knowledge of Etruscan. But inscribed gold plaques found at the site of the ancient sanctuary of Pyrgi, the port city of Caere, provide two texts, one in Etruscan and the other in Phoenician, of significant length (about 40 words) and of analogous content. They are the equivalent of a bilingual inscription and thus offer substantial data for the elucidation of Etruscan by way of a known language—Phoenician. The find is also an important historical document, which records the dedication to the Phoenician goddess Astarte of a “sacred place” in the Etruscan sanctuary of Pyrgi by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere, early in the 5th century bce.
The 20th-century notion that there is a “mystery” regarding the Etruscan language was fundamentally erroneous; there exists no problem of decipherment, as was often wrongly asserted. The Etruscan texts are largely legible. The alphabet derives from a Greek alphabet originally learned from the Phoenicians. It was disseminated in Italy by the colonists from the island of Euboea during the 8th century bce and adapted to Etruscan phonetics; the Latin alphabet was ultimately derived from it. (In its turn the Etruscan alphabet was diffused at the end of the Archaic period [c. 500 bce] into northern Italy, becoming the model for the alphabets of the Veneti and of various Alpine populations; this happened concurrently with the formation of the Umbrian and the Oscan alphabets in the peninsula.)
The real problem with the Etruscan texts lies in the difficulty of understanding the meaning of the words and grammatical forms. A fundamental obstacle stems from the fact that no other known language has close enough kinship to Etruscan to allow a reliable, comprehensive, and conclusive comparison. The apparent isolation of the Etruscan language had already been noted by the ancients; it is confirmed by repeated and vain attempts of modern science to assign it to one of the various linguistic groups or types of the Mediterranean and Eurasian world. However, there are in fact connections with Indo-European languages, particularly with the Italic languages, and also with more or less known non-Indo-European languages of western Asia and the Caucasus, the Aegean, Italy, and the Alpine zone as well as with the relics of the Mediterranean linguistic substrata revealed by place-names. This means that Etruscan is not truly isolated; its roots are intertwined with those of other recognizable linguistic formations within a geographic area extending from western Asia to east-central Europe and the central Mediterranean, and its latest formative developments may have taken place in more direct contact with the pre-Indo-European and Indo-European linguistic environment of Italy. But this also means that Etruscan, as scholars know it, cannot simply be classified as belonging to the Caucasian, the Anatolian, or Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, from which it seems to differ in structure.
The traditional methods hitherto employed in interpreting Etruscan are (1) the etymological, which is based upon the comparison of word roots and grammatical elements with those of other languages and which assumes the existence of a linguistic relationship that permits an explication of Etruscan from the outside (this method has produced negative results, given the error in the assumption), (2) the combinatory, a procedure of analysis and interpretation of the Etruscan texts rigorously limited to internal comparative study of the texts themselves and of the grammatical forms of the Etruscan words (this has led to much progress in the knowledge of Etruscan, but its defects lie in the hypothetical character of many of the conclusions due to the absence of external proofs or confirmations), and (3) the bilingual, based on the comparison of Etruscan ritual, votive, and funerary formulas with presumably analogous formulas from epigraphic or literary texts in languages belonging to a closely connected geographic and historical environment, such as Greek, Latin, or Umbrian. Nonetheless, with the increase of reliable data, in part from more recent epigraphic discoveries (such as the gold plaques at Pyrgi mentioned above), the need to find the one right method appears to be of decreasing importance; all available procedures tend to be utilized.
Archaeological evidence
The lack of Etruscan literature and the widely acknowledged bias and contradictory accounts of Greek and Roman writers create a situation in which the careful study of the visible remains of the Etruscans is fundamental for understanding them. The archaeological contexts and the remains themselves (including pottery, metalwork, sculpture, painting, architecture, animal and human bones, and the humblest objects of daily life) fall into three basic categories: funerary, urban, and sacred. (There is sometimes an overlapping of these categories.)
By far the largest percentage of material is funerary; thus there is a great deal of information about Etruscan ideas on the afterlife and on their attitudes toward the deceased members of their families. But there can be no doubt that the relatively scarce information about Etruscan settlements is also of great importance. The evidence of the well-preserved Etruscan city at Marzabotto (c. 500 bce) near Bologna (probably an Etruscan colony) reveals that the Etruscans were among the first in the Mediterranean to lay out a city with a grid plan; it was oriented according to the compass, emphasizing a principal north-south street and including one or more major east-west streets. The ritual involved in thus laying out a town, complete with walls, temples, and other sacred areas, was known to the Romans as the ritus etruscus. The system was commonly used by the Romans in laying out military camps and new cities and has survived in the centre of many European cities today. Such rigidly organized town plans seem to have been rare in Etruria; more often one finds an irregular pattern resulting from the coalescence of villages in Villanovan times and the adaptation to the hills normally chosen as town sites.
In a sacred context, the Etruscan temple also often revealed a careful organization, once again with a system that was passed on to the Romans. In contrast to Greek temples, those of the Etruscans frequently showed a clear differentiation of front and back, with a columniated deep front porch and a cella that was flush with the podium on which it stood. The materials were frequently perishable (timber and mud brick, on a stone foundation) except for the abundant terra-cotta sculptures that adorned the roof. Especially well-preserved are the acroteria, or roof sculptures, from the Portonaccio temple at Veii (late 6th century bce) representing Apulu (the Etruscan Apollo) and other mythological figures.
Of a different order are the spectacular finds from the site of Poggio Civitate (Murlo) near Siena, where excavations (begun in 1966) have revealed a huge building of the Archaic period with rammed earth walls, measuring about 197 feet on each side and featuring a large court in the middle. It was adorned with life-size terra-cotta figures, male and female, human and animal; some of the figures wear a huge “cowboy” hat in the regional style. Authorities still disagree over the nature of the site and are uncertain whether the building was a palace, a sanctuary, or perhaps a place of civic assembly. Ordinary Etruscan houses, known from a number of sites, include oval-shaped huts from San Giovenale and elsewhere and structures with a rectilinear plan from Veii and Acquarossa (Archaic) and Vetulonia (Hellenistic).
As for the necropolises of Etruria, these, too, occasionally show signs of a grid plan, as at the Crocefisso del Tufo at Orvieto (second half of the 6th century bce) and at Caere. More often they have an irregular, agglutinative quality that reflects the site’s long history of use. Because the Etruscans took great pains to make their relatives comfortable in a “house of the dead,” the tombs suggest many details of actual Etruscan houses. Thus the tombs of Caere (especially those of the 6th century and later), carved underground out of the soft volcanic tufa so widespread in Etruria, have not only windows, doors, columns, and ceiling beams but also pieces of furniture (beds, chairs, and footstools) sculptured from the living rock. At Tarquinii, another tradition for tomb decoration led to painting the walls of the chamber with frescoes of Etruscan funerary celebrations, including banqueting, games, dancing, music, and various performances in a fresh outdoor landscape. The scenes probably served to commemorate actual funerals, but they also may have alluded to the kind of afterlife that was expected for the deceased. The Elysium-like concept of the afterlife prevailed in the Archaic period, but in the ensuing centuries one finds a growing emphasis on the darker realm of the underworld. Frescoes show its ruler, Hades (Etruscan Aita), wearing a wolf-skin cap and sitting enthroned beside his wife; demons and monsters populate this sphere. They may be seen in the remarkable Tomb of the Blue Demons (c. 400 bce), discovered at Tarquinii in 1987, or in the Francois Tomb from Vulci, where the blue-skinned devil Charu (only remotely resembling the Greek ferryman Charon) waits with his hammer to strike the deceased and take him away to the underworld. He sometimes has a gentler partner, the angelic winged figure of Vanth, who helps to ease the transition from life to death.
A perennial theme in the discussion of Etruscan material culture is its relationship to Greek models. The comparison is natural, indeed essential, in light of the massive amount of Greek artifacts, especially vases, that have been excavated in Etruria and the abundant examples of Etruscan imitations, of the pottery especially. It is also certain that Greek craftsmen sometimes settled in Etruria, as in the report by Pliny the Elder (1st century ce) about a Corinthian noble named Demaratus, who moved to Tarquinii, bringing along three of his own artists. But it is no longer appropriate to dwell naively on the “inferiority” of Etruscan art nor to insist that the Etruscans were mere imitators of the Greek art they undoubtedly prized. Instead, increasing emphasis is being placed on defining the highly original elements in Etruscan culture that exist side by side with the qualities that show their great admiration of things Greek.
In addition to their distinctive modes of designing a town or of building a temple or tomb, one may note their unique native pottery, bucchero (beginning c. 680 bce), with its decorative incision in a shiny black fabric; it is radically different from standard Greek vase decoration, which regularly featured paint and a contrast of red or cream and black. In metallurgy, their bronze mirrors, sometimes described as an Etruscan “national industry,” featured a convex reflecting side and a concave side adorned with engravings of themes from Greek and Etruscan mythology and daily life. Etruscan fashion also had many unique elements such as a hem-length braid down the back (7th century bce), pointed-toe shoes (c. 575–475 bce), and the mantle with the curved hem known to the Romans as the toga (6th century bce and later). Finally, the Etruscans seem to have taken an early interest in reproducing the features of their honoured relatives or officials (as in the funerary canopic urns from Clusium) and thus gave a major impetus to the development of truly realistic portraiture in Italy (especially in the Hellenistic period).
Religion and mythology
The essential ingredient in Etruscan religion was a belief that human life was but one small meaningful element in a universe controlled by gods who manifested their nature and their will in every facet of the natural world as well as in objects created by humans. This belief permeates the Etruscan representational arts, where one finds rich depictions of land, sea, and air, with man integrated into the ambient. Roman writers give repeated evidence that the Etruscans regarded every bird and every berry as a potential source of knowledge of the gods and that they had developed an elaborate lore and attendant rituals for using this knowledge. Their own myths explained the lore as having been communicated by the gods through a prophet, Tages, a miraculous child with the features of a wise old man who sprang from a plowed furrow in the fields of Tarquinii and sang out the elements of what the Romans called the Etrusca disciplina.
The literary, epigraphic, and monumental sources provide a glimpse of a cosmology whose image of the sky with its subdivisions is reflected in consecrated areas and even in the viscera of animals. The concept of a sacred space or area reserved for a particular deity or purpose was fundamental, as was the corollary theory that such designated areas could correspond to each other. Heaven reflected Earth, and macrocosm echoed microcosm. The celestial dome was divided into 16 compartments inhabited by the various divinities: major gods to the east, astral and terrestrial divine beings to the south, infernal and inauspicious beings to the west, and the most powerful and mysterious gods of destiny to the north. The deities manifested themselves by means of natural phenomena, principally by lightning. They also revealed themselves in the microcosm of the liver of animals (typical is a bronze model of a sheep’s liver found near Piacenza, bearing the incised names of divinities in its 16 outside divisions and in its internal divisions).
These conceptions are linked closely to the art of divination for which the Etruscans were especially famous in the ancient world. Public and private actions of any importance were undertaken only after having interrogated the gods; negative or threatening responses necessitated complex preventive or protective ceremonies. The most important form of divination was haruspicy, or hepatoscopy—the study of the details of the viscera, especially the livers, of sacrificial animals. Second in importance was the observation of lightning and of such other celestial phenomena as the flight of birds (also important in the religion of the Umbri and of the Romans). Finally, there was the interpretation of prodigies—extraordinary and marvelous events observed in the sky or on the earth. These practices, extensively adopted by the Romans, are explicitly attributed by the ancient authors to the religion of the Etruscans.
The Etruscans recognized numerous deities (the Piacenza liver lists more than 40), and many are unknown today. Their nature was often vague, and references to them are fraught with ambiguity about number, attributes, and even gender. Some of the leading gods were eventually equated with major deities of the Greeks and Romans, as may be seen especially from the labeled representations on Etruscan mirrors. Tin or Tinia was equivalent to Zeus/Jupiter, Uni to Hera/Juno, Sethlans to Hephaestus/Vulcan, Turms to Hermes/Mercury, Turan to Aphrodite/Venus, and Menrva to Athena/ Minerva. But their character and mythology often differed sharply from that of their Greek counterparts. Menrva, for example, an immensely popular deity, was regarded as a sponsor of marriage and childbirth, in contrast to the virgin Athena, who was much more concerned with the affairs of males. Many of the gods had healing powers, and many of them had the authority to hurl a thunderbolt. There were also deities of a fairly orthodox Greco-Roman character, such as Hercle (Heracles) and Apulu (Apollo), who were evidently introduced directly from Greece yet came to have their designated spaces and cults.
Origins
Because the Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language while being surrounded in historical times by Indo-European peoples such as the Latins and Umbro-Sabelli, scholars of the 19th century examined and debated, often bitterly, the origins of this anomalous population. Their dispute continued into the 21st century but has now lost much of its intensity. A leading scholar in Etruscan studies, Massimo Pallottino, wisely observed that such discussions have become sterile as the result of an incorrect formulation of the problem. Too much emphasis has been placed on the provenance of the Etruscans, with the expectation that there could be one simple answer. The problem is in reality exceedingly complex, and attention should be directed instead to the formation of the population, as it might be, for example, in a study of the origins of “the Italians” or “the French.” Pallottino’s position may be understood more clearly through a brief review of the debate.
The argument began, in fact, in antiquity with the statement by Herodotus that the Etruscans migrated from Lydia in Anatolia shortly after the time of the Trojan War; their leader was Tyrsenos, who later gave his name to the whole race. Supporters of this “Eastern” theory pointed above all to the archaeological evidence of profound Oriental influence on Etruscan culture, such as in monumental funerary architecture and exotic luxury goods of gold, ivory, and other materials. But chronologically the Oriental inundation occurred nearly 500 years too late for the Herodotean migration. Further, it developed gradually rather than making the sudden appearance that would have characterized the arrival of a people en masse; moreover, it is quite easily explained by reference to the trade conduits established by the Euboean Greeks in the 8th century bce. A key document in the Eastern theory is the inscription on a stone grave stela found on the island of Lemnos near the coast of Anatolia that shows remarkable lexical and structural similarities with the Etruscan language. But this curious isolated document dates only to the 6th century bce and thus cannot be interpreted as evidence of an Etruscan way station in the Herodotean migration from Anatolia to Italy. On the contrary, it has now been proposed that Lemnos may in fact have been colonized or used as a trading point by the Etruscans looking toward Anatolia in the 6th century bce rather than as a place they visited moving away from the area.
A second theory on Etruscan origins was proposed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who rejected the tradition of Herodotus, pointing out that the Lydian language and customs and those of the Etruscans were greatly dissimilar; he argued that the Etruscans were autochthonous (of local origin). Acceptance of this “autochthonous” theory requires that Villanovan culture be regarded as an early phase of Etruscan civilization (a hypothesis now widely endorsed) and, in addition, that there be links with an ethnic substratum of the Bronze Age in Italy (2nd millennium bce). There are indeed stray affinities with the Bronze Age culture of the “Terramara,” with its cremating, sedentary habits, but also with the “Apenninic” culture, which was seminomadic and practiced inhumation. There is, however, mounting evidence of a critical transition period at the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age, in which there are so many important developments that the connections between these two cultures and the Villanovan seem minor. Although the terminology is vexed for this transition period, varying from “sub-Apennine” to “Recent Bronze,” “Final Bronze,” and, most frequently, “Proto-Villanovan,” the social and economic changes are clear. There was an increase in population and in overall wealth, a tendency to have larger, permanent settlements, an expansion of metallurgical knowledge, and a strengthening of agricultural technology. Diagnostic archaeological criteria include the use of cremation (with a biconical ash urn) and the presence of characteristic artifacts such as the fibula (“safety pin”), razor, objects of amber, the ax, and various other bronze weapons. The fact that the Proto-Villanovan archaeological horizon developed gradually rather than suddenly as the result of invasion or large migration might seem to support the theory of autochthony for the Etruscans. But once again the picture is clouded, because the Proto-Villanovan occurs in scattered areas all around Italy, including zones that definitely did not emerge as Etruscan in historical times.
To these two theories from antiquity was added a third in the 19th century to the effect that the Etruscans migrated overland into Italy from the north. This theory, without any ancient literary support, was based on similarities in customs and artifacts between the Villanovan and the Iron Age cremating cultures north of the Alps and on a dubious comparison of the name of the Rasenna with that of the Raeti, a people inhabiting the east-central Alps in the 5th century bce. The theory is basically without supporters today, though the influence or presence of certain central European weapon and helmet types and vessel forms in Etruria is not denied. These elements, however, are now put into perspective as representing simply one significant strand in the complex fabric of Etruscan culture as it developed from Villanovan to Orientalizing.
These northern connections in a sense form a parallel to theGreek influences in subsequent periods, whether Euboean (8th century bce), Corinthian (7th century), Ionian (6th century), or Attic (5th century). Likewise, Oriental influences may be readily acknowledged, coming from such diverse areas as Lydia, Urartu, Syria, Assyria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. But none of these connections per se give any firm proof about Etruscan “origins,” and current scholarship is much more concerned with understanding the interrelationship of these influences and the context in which the civilization in Etruria developed.
Expansion and dominion
Archaeological evidence helps to develop a picture of the beginnings of Etruscan cities during the Villanovan period. Nearly every major Etruscan city of historical times has yielded Villanovan remains, but it is in the south, particularly near the coast, that the earliest signs of city formation appear. It is hypothesized that clusters of huts forming a network of villages on a single hill or on several adjacent hills coalesced into pre-urban settlements at this time. (The plural form of the names of some of these—Vulci, Tarquinii, and Veii—is consistent with this hypothesis.) Ash urns in the shape of oval huts with thatched roofs excavated in the area suggest what the houses of the living may have looked like, while the parity of grave goods for men and women implies a basically egalitarian society, at least in earlier stages. Cremation with ashes in a biconical vessel is commonly found as a holdover from the Proto-Villanovan; inhumation also appeared and during the Orientalizing period eventually became the prevailing rite, except in northern Etruria, where cremation persisted to the 1st century bce.
After contact was made with Greeks and Phoenicians, new ideas, materials, and technology began to appear in Etruria. In the Orientalizing period the use of writing, the potter’s wheel, and monumental funerary architecture accompanied the accumulation of luxury goods of gold and ivory and exotic trade items such as ostrich eggs, tridacna shells, and faience. The Regolini-Galassi Tomb at Caere (c. 650–625 bce), discovered in 1836 in an unplundered state, dramatically revealed the full splendour of the Orientalizing period. The tomb’s main chamber belonged to a fabulously wealthy lady who, inhumed with her banquet service and a wide array of jewelry made by granulation and repoussé, might well be called a queen; the word Larthia on her belongings may record her name. Even if Caere did not have kings and queens at this time (as did Rome, or as Caere certainly did in the 5th century), it is clear that society had become sharply differentiated, not only in regard to wealth but also in division of labour. Many scholars hypothesize the existence of a powerful aristocratic class, and craftsmen, merchants, and seamen would have formed a middle class; it was probably at this time that the Etruscans began to maintain the elegant slaves for which they were famous. (Various Greek and Roman authors report on how Etruscan slaves dressed well and how they often owned their own homes. They easily became liberated and rapidly rose in status once they were freed.)
The dramatic growth of Etruscan civilization and influence in the 7th century is reflected in the so-called “princely” tombs, closely akin to the Regolini-Galassi Tomb, found in Etruria itself at Tarquinii, Vetulonia, and Populonia and along the Arno River (e.g., at Quinto Fiorentino) and in the south at Praeneste in Latium and at Capua and Pontecagnano in Campania. Literary sources report that Rome itself came under the rule of Etruscan kings in the late 7th century. Livy describes the arrival from Tarquinii of Tarquinius Priscus, the later king, and his ambitious, learned wife Tanaquil, a worthy counterpart to Queen Larthia of Caere. There is also archaeological evidence of Etruscan expansion northward into the Po valley in the 6th century.
True urbanization followed these developments. Mighty city-states featuring fortified walls and other public works flourished both in Etruria and in its spheres of influence. The Rome of the Etruscan kings, described in detail by Livy and known through excavation, had fortifications, a paved forum, a master drainage system (the Cloaca Maxima), a public stadium (the Circus Maximus), and a monumental Etruscan-style temple dedicated to Jupiter Optimus Maximus.
It is at the end of the 6th century that one finds the earliest evidence for the grid system in towns and cemeteries mentioned earlier. The ample but surprisingly uniform houses and tombs imply growing regulation and cooperation and possibly signal a change in government. Etruscan cities, like Rome itself, may have begun to remove their kings at this time and to operate under an oligarchic system with elected officials from powerful noble families.
The Roman orator Cato’s statement that “almost all of Italy was once under Etruscan control” best applies to this period. Undoubtedly, Etruscan maritime power and commerce played a central role in this domination. Exported Etruscan objects of the period have been found in North Africa, Greece and the Aegean, Anatolia, Yugoslavia, France, and Spain; later they even reached the Black Sea. But land routes were well under control also, especially in the corridor leading through Rome and Latium down to Capua and the other Etruscanized cities of Campania. In northern Italy, Bologna (Felsina) was the principal city, and colonies such as the ones at nearby Marzabotto and at Adria and Spina on the Adriatic Sea represented significant posts along the northern trade network.
Almost from the beginning, the Etruscans must have been rivaled in their own seas by the Greeks, who, from the founding of Pithekoussai and Cumae, settled in numerous colonies in southern Italy, and by the Phoenicians, who had established Carthage about 800 bce. The Carthaginians claimed parts of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia as spheres of influence and dominated the seas west of these islands to Spain. The generally salutary trading relations among these three nations and the delicate balance of power were upset, however, in the Archaic period, as new waves of Greek colonists arrived. Phocaean Greeks established a colony on Corsica at Alalia (modern Aleria) which threatened both the Etruscans at Caere and the Carthaginians and led to a naval coalition between them. The ensuing battle in the seas off Corsica (c. 535 bce) had disastrous results for the Phocaeans, who emerged as victors but lost so many ships that they abandoned their colony and moved to southern Italy. The Carthaginians and Etruscans reasserted control over Corsica, and Etruscan might was to hold firm for another quarter of a century.
Organization
From the 6th century bce onward, territorial organization and political and economic initiative were concentrated in a limited number of large city-states in Etruria itself. These city-states, similar to the Greek poleis, consisted of an urban centre and a territory of fluctuating size. Numerous sources refer to a league of the “Twelve Peoples” of Etruria, formed for religious purposes but evidently having some political functions; it met annually at the chief sanctuary of the Etruscans, the Fanum Voltumnae, or shrine of Voltumna, near Volsinii. The precise location of the shrine is unknown, though it may have been in an area near modern Orvieto (believed by many to be the ancient Volsinii). As for the Twelve Peoples, no firm list of these has survived (indeed, they seem to have varied through the years), but they are likely to have come from the following major sites: Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, Rusellae, Vetulonia, Populonia—all near the coast—and Veii, Volsinii, Clusium, Perusia (Perugia), Cortona, Arretium (Arezzo), Faesulae (Fiesole), and Volaterrae (Volterra)—all inland. There also are reports of corresponding Etruscan leagues in Campania and in northern Italy, but it is far more difficult to generate a list of Etruscan colonies or Etruscanized cities that would be likely candidates for these.
The names of some magistracies both in the league and in individual cities—such as lauchme, zilath, maru, and purth—are known, though there is little certainty as to their precise duties. Lauchme (Latin lucumo) was the Etruscan word for “king.” The title of zilath…rasnal, translated into Latin as praetor Etruriae and meaning something like the “justice of Etruria,” was evidently applied to the individual who presided over the league.
The men holding such magistracies belonged to the aristocracy, which derived its status from the continuity of the family. Onomastic formulas show that persons of free birth normally had two names. First came an individual name, or praenomen (relatively few of these are known: for men, Larth, Avle, Arnth, and Vel were frequent; for women, Larthia, Thanchvil, Ramtha, and Thana); it was followed by a family name, or nomen, derived from a personal name or perhaps the name of a god or a place. This system was in use by the second half of the 7th century, replacing the use of a single name (as in “Romulus” and “Remus”) and reflecting the new complexity of relationships developing with urbanization. The Etruscans rarely used the cognomen (family nickname) employed by the Romans, but often inscriptions include the name of both the father (patronymic) and the mother (matronymic).
Etruscan women enjoyed an elevated status and a degree of liberation unknown to their counterparts in Rome and, especially, in Greece. They were allowed to own and openly display objects and clothing of a luxurious nature; they participated freely in public life, attending parties and theatrical performances; and—shocking to Greeks and Romans—they danced, drank, and rested in close physical contact with their husbands on the banqueting couches. Etruscan ladies were often literate, as one may deduce from the inscriptions on their mirrors, and even learned, if Livy’s portrayal of Tanaquil as skilled in augury may be trusted. Their prominence in the family was a consistent feature of Etruscan aristocratic society and seems to have played a role in its stability and durability.
Crisis and decline
The end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 5th was a turning point for Etruscan civilization. Several crises occurred at this time, from which the Etruscans never fully recovered and which in fact turned out to be only the first of numerous reverses they were to suffer in the ensuing centuries. The expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome (509 bce) deprived them of control over this strategic spot on the Tiber and also cut off their land route to Campania. Soon afterward, their naval supremacy also collapsed when the ships of the ambitious Hieron I of Syracuse inflicted a devastating loss on their fleet off Cumae in 474 bce. Completely out of touch with the Etruscan cities of Campania, they were unable to prevent a takeover of this area by restless Umbro-Sabellian tribes moving from the interior toward the coast.
All these reverses led to economic depression and a sharp interruption of trade for the cities on the coast and in the south and caused a redirection of commerce toward the Adriatic harbour of Spina. The situation in the south deteriorated even further as Veii experienced periodic conflict with Rome, its close neighbour, and became the first Etruscan state to fall to this growing power in central Italy (396 bce).
A measure of prosperity had come to the Po valley and the Adriatic towns, but even this Etruscan vitality in the north was short-lived. The progressive infiltration and pressure of the Celts, who had penetrated and settled in the plain of the Po, eventually suffocated and overpowered the flourishing Etruscan urban communities, almost completely destroying their civilization by the mid-4th century bce and thus returning a large part of northern Italy to a protohistoric stage of culture. Meanwhile, the Gallic Senones firmly occupied the Picenum district on the Adriatic Sea, and Celtic incursions reached on the one hand Tyrrhenian Etruria and Rome (captured and burned about 390 bce) and on the other as far as Puglia.
In the 4th century bce ancient Italy had become profoundly transformed. The eastern Italic people of Umbro-Sabellian stock diffused over most of the peninsula; the Syracusan empire and lastly the growing power of Rome had replaced the Etruscans (and the Greek colonies of southern Italy) as the dominant force. The Etruscan world had been reduced to a circumscribed, regional sphere, secluded in its traditional values; this situation determined its progressive passage into the political system of Rome.
Within this context, Etruria experienced an economic recovery and a rebounding of the aristocracy. Tomb groups once again contain riches, and the sequence of painted tombs at Tarquinii, interrupted during the 5th century, resumes. All the same, there is a new atmosphere in these tombs; now one finds images of a grim afterlife, represented as an underworld replete with demons and overhung by dark clouds.
Renewed resistance to the power on the Tiber proved futile. Roman history is filled with records of victories and triumphs over Etruscan cities, especially in the south. Tarquinii sued for peace in 351 bce, and Caere was granted a truce in 353; there were triumphs over Rusellae in 302 and over Volaterrae in 298, with the final defeat of Rusellae coming in 294. Volsinii also was attacked in this year, and its fields devastated. During this same bleak period, Etruscan society was wracked with class struggles that eventually led to the development of a substantial freedman class, especially in northern Etruria, where numerous small rural settlements sprang up in the hills. In some cities, the aristocracy looked to Rome for assistance against the restless slave class. The noble Cilnii family at Arretium called for help with a revolt of the lower classes in 302 bce, while at Volsinii the situation deteriorated so badly that the Romans marched in and razed the city (265 bce), resettling its inhabitants in Volsinii Novi (probably Bolsena).
By the mid-3rd century all Etruria appears to have been pacified and firmly subjected to Roman hegemony. In most cases, the Etruscan cities and their territories preserved a formal autonomy as independent states with their own magistrates, thus passing an uneventful period in the 2nd century bce, when the sources are largely silent about Etruria.
But the saddest chapter of all remained to be written in the 1st century bce. In 90 bce Rome granted citizenship to all Italic peoples, an act that in effect created total political unification of the Italic-Roman state and eliminated the last pretenses of autonomy in the Etruscan city-states. Northern Etruria, in addition, underwent a final devastation as it became the battleground for the opposing forces of the civil war of Marius and Sulla. Many Etruscan cities sided with Marius and were sacked and punished with all the vengeance the victorious Sulla could muster (80–79 bce). At Faesulae, Arretium, Volaterrae, and Clusium, the dictator confiscated and distributed territorial lands to soldiers from his 23 victorious legions. The new colonists brutally abused the old inhabitants and at the same time squandered their military rewards, sinking hopelessly into debt. Revolts and reprisals followed, but the agonizing process of Romanization was not actually completed until the reign of Augustus (31 bce–14 ce) brought new economic stability and reconciliation. By this time Latin had almost completely replaced the Etruscan language.
Other Italic peoples
Local populations in areas colonized by Greece
The presence of the Siculi in Sicily and in the Italian peninsula is attested by the historical sources (Thucydides and Polybius). But the extent of their diffusion and their connections with other peoples of the peninsula (such as the Ligurians, the Itali, the Oenotrii, the Ausones) is more difficult to establish. A few small non-Greek inscriptions found in eastern Sicily and referable to the Siculi (the most noteworthy was found at Centuripe), coin legends, and Siculan words reported by Classical writers demonstrate the Indo-European character of the Siculan language, which seems to show an affinity with Latin and also has connections with the Umbro-Sabellian dialects. The immigration of the Siculi from the Italian peninsula into Sicily goes back to a prehistoric but not extremely early epoch; this assumption is based on the fact that there are some echoes of it in tradition and that a continental archaeological influence suddenly appears at the end of the Bronze Age. The characteristic Siculan iron culture, evident in the necropolises of Pantalica near Syracuse and of Finocchito near Noto, flourished between the 9th and the 5th centuries bce and was progressively submerged in the superior civilization of the Greeks.
Evidence is quite scarce for the Siculi in the peninsula and for the other primitive indigenous populations of what is now Calabria and of Lucania (the Oenotrii, Ausones, Chones, Morgetes, and Itali) and Campania (the Ausones and Opici). Modern scholars have hypothesized that along the Tyrrhenian coastal arc there extended in earliest times a belt of paleo-Italic peoples (so-called western Italics or Proto-Latins) originally related to the Latins and distinct from the eastern Italic peoples inhabiting the Apennine and Adriatic regions. (The archaeological documentation consists of cemeteries with Iron Age graves, but there are also traces of cremation necropolises, especially in the province of Salerno and in Calabria.) Large fortified towns arose, particularly in the interior zones of Lucania. The ethnic individuality of these ancient peoples, however, was progressively obliterated between the 8th and the 4th century bce by the Greek penetration and by the expansion of the Etruscans and the eastern Italics (Samnites, Lucanians, Bruttii).
The Apulians
The inhabitants of the southeastern extremity of the Italian peninsula formed a definitely characterized group of populations that the ancients often called Iapyges (whence the geographic term Iapygia, in which “Apulia” may be recognized). The territory included the Salentini and the Messapii peoples in the Salentine Peninsula (ancient Calabia) and the Peucetii and the Dauni farther north. (Sometimes the designations Iapyges and Messapii are used with identical reference.) Ancient tradition insists upon an overseas origin for these tribes, held to be Cretan or Illyrian. The Iapygian, or more commonly, Messapian (Messapic) language is known from a considerable series of public funerary, votive, monetary, and other inscriptions written in the Greek alphabet and found in the Apulian area, especially in the Salentine Peninsula, from words reported by the ancient writers, and from toponomastic (local place-name) data. Messapian is without doubt an Indo-European language, distinct from Latin and from the Umbro-Sabellian dialects, with Balkan and central European analogies. This confirms the overseas provenance of the Iapyges from the Balkans, the more so because there existed in Illyria a tribe called the Iapodes and because a people known as the Iapuzkus lived farther north, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. Rather than a true immigration, however, there was a gradual prehistoric penetration of trans-Adriatic elements. The expansion of the Iapyges must have brought them to Lucania and even to what is now Calabria, as would be deduced from traditional and archaeological indications.
The Apulians’ civilization, which was considerably influenced by that of the nearby Greek colonies, developed from the 9th to the 3rd centuries bce. In the most ancient period there were pit graves, sometimes in large stone tumuli. In the Siponto area, near what is now Manfredonia, the graves were accompanied by anthropomorphic stelae with geometric bas-reliefs. Geometrically painted ceramics in linear motifs persisted to the threshold of the Hellenistic age. Later graves took the form of large trunks and of catacombs with paintings on the sides. Burial was the disposition exclusively used.
Beginning in Archaic times, large cities developed, linked to each other by bonds of confederation. These included Herdonea (now Ordona), Canusium (Canosa), Rubi (Ruvo), Gnathia, Brundisium (Brindisi), Uria (Oria), Lupiae (Lecce), Rudiae, and Manduria. They preserved their independence, tenaciously defended against the Greeks, until the age of the Roman conquest.
The Latins
The Latin nation had a relatively limited territory, south of the Tiber, which was reduced, in historic times, by the invasion of the Volsci to the region between the Alban hills and the Aurunci mountains (the so-called Latium Novum). The principal Latin centres included Alba Longa, Tusculum, Lavinium, Ardea, Tibur (now Tivoli), and Praeneste (Palestrina) and the early Volscianized cities of Velitrae (Velletri), Signia (Segni), Cora (Cori), Satricum, Antium (Anzio), and Anxur (Terracina). The importance of the Latins is essentially linked with the fortunes of Rome, the forward bulwark of Latinity in the direction of the Etruscan realm. Intermixtures with the legends of the origin of Rome make the ethnographic traditions of Latium very diverse and complex. The linguistic evidence, which begins with inscriptions of the 7th to 6th century bce, indicates an individuality of the Latin world distinct from the neighbouring Etruscan and eastern Italic peoples.
The Latins had a federal organization, centred at the sanctuary of Jupiter on Albanus Mons. Their religious heritage survived in the beliefs and cults of the Roman world. The most ancient Latin culture (9th–8th century bce) was characterized by cremation as the funeral rite, a practice it had in common with the cultures in the Etruscan and northern Italian territory, and by an iron culture showing affinities with the proto-Villanovan culture and with the cultures of Tyrrhenian southern Italy. Etruscan political control of Latium (probably 7th–6th century) coincided with an evident Etruscan cultural and artistic influence; while, from the south and from the sea, elements of Greek civilization penetrated, beginning with the alphabet.
North of Latium lived tribes ethnically akin to the Latins, with principal centres at Capena, Narce, and Falerii (whence the name Faliscans). Their political and cultural history merges with that of the Etruscans. The Faliscan dialect, known from inscriptions, was originally Latin but was contaminated and modified by eastern Italic and Etruscan elements.
The eastern Italics
A great part of the central and southern Italian peninsula was occupied in protohistoric and historic times by populations forming a vast ethnic and linguistic unit—the eastern Italics or Umbro-Sabellians. To the south, in the mountains of the Abruzzo, lived the Samnites, who later spread into Campania, Lucania, and what is now Calabria. In the centre were the Vestini, Paeligni, Marrucini, Marsi, Aequi, Volsci, and Sabini. Farther north lived the Umbri. The origin and relationship of all these peoples is unclear. Ancient ethnographic traditions bearing on central Italy link the Samnites to the Sabines and the Sabines to the Umbri, locating their primitive centre of dispersion in the Rieti basin and in the area of Amiternum. Their diffusion was attributed to the mass emigration of an entire generation in search of a new homeland (so-called sacred spring).
The linguistic data prove the unity of the group of eastern-Italic idioms, belonging to the Indo-European stock but differing from the Latin. Within this group may be distinguished a southern variant (Sabellic or Oscan) known from an abundant harvest of epigraphic documents from Samnium, Campania, and southern Italy. This variant is to be attributed to the Samnites and to a large part of the minor stocks of central Italy, including the Sabines, known from isolated inscriptions in central Italy. On the other hand, a northern (Umbrian) variant is represented by inscriptions of Umbria—principally bronze tablets from Gubbio, inscribed between the 4th and 1st century bce by a brotherhood of Umbrian priests—and by a bronze tablet from Velletri. The eastern Italic words reported by the Classical writers, as well as toponomastics, confirm these conclusions.
Notwithstanding the original unity of stock and of language, these populations had diverse histories and cultures. The Samnites from Molise (the Caraceni, the Pentri, and the Frentani) in the 5th and 4th centuries bce occupied Campania—where they vanquished Etruscans and Greeks and assumed from the local tribes the name Opici, or Osci—as well as Lucania (with the Hirpini or Lucani), reaching what is now Calabria—where they took the name Bruttii—and finally Sicily. Defeated by Rome in the Samnite wars (4th and early 3rd centuries bce), the Samnites tried for the last time, in the period of the Social War (90–83 bce), to counterpose to the Romans an Italic nationality of their own. A considerable difference existed between the culture of the mountain Samnites—organized in confederate tribes centred on fortified villages and in the 5th and 4th centuries still retaining aspects of the “iron culture”—and the high civilization of the Campani and Lucani established in the ancient cities of Capua, Nola, Nocera, and Paestum and dominated by Greek and Etruscan influence.
Some central tribes—the Marrucini, Vestini, Paeligni and Marsi—appear to be linked historically, politically, and culturally to the Samnites. The case is different with the Sabines, the Aequi, and the Volsci, whose period of expansion (6th and 5th centuries) is closely connected with earliest Rome and who had early contact with the Etrusco-Latin civilization.
The diffusion of the Umbri toward the north and beyond the Apennines lent credence to the ancient traditions relating to the great size of their territory. The traditions, however, are more probably based on the fact that the name Umbri is derived from that of a most ancient population, probably not Indo-European and certainly not Italic, living in the Apennine region before the diffusion of the eastern Italics. The history of the Umbrian cities—Iguvium (now Gubbio), Hispellum (Spello), Spoletium (Spoleto), Tuder (Todi), and others—is known only beginning with the period of the struggle of the Etruscans and Gauls against Rome. Umbrian civilization is revealed by the Gubbio Tablets, a document unique in its kind. The Umbrian artistic and material culture derived in large part from that of Etruria.
The populations of the Picenum
In historic times, expansion of the eastern Italic peoples placed them firmly along the Adriatic coastal tract corresponding to what is now the Marches region. Epigraphic and archaeological data give evidence also of the presence in the Picenum (an ancient region between the Apennines and the Adriatic) of the trans-Adriatic Liburni and the pre-Indo-European Asili. It is possible that elements were established here that had come by sea from Illyria (the Gubbio tablets mention the Iapuzkus, whose name recalls that of the Illyrian Iapodes and of the Apulian Iapyges). Inscriptions in the southern Piceno, however, seem to exhibit a close kinship with the Umbro-Sabellic dialects.
A material civilization flowered between the 8th and 5th centuries in the northern Abruzzo and in the Marches. This civilization is represented by the rich funerary equipment of burial tombs, whose type and decoration present affinities with the iron culture of Tyrrhenian and northern Italy and with that of the Balkans and which show Greek influence. Cremation tombs of Villanovan type have been found at Fermo. Also noteworthy is the presence of stone funerary sculpture. North of Ancona is a cultural variant, particularly in the necropolis of Novilara near Pesaro, where inscriptions are in a dialect other than that of the southern Picenum and difficult to classify.
It may be held that the middle-Adriatic iron cultures expressed an early Archaic mixture of eastern Italic and trans-Adriatic peoples, influenced by the Etruscans and the Greeks. Contributing to their decline were the Gauls and Syracusans, who established themselves in this area in the 4th century bce. In the 3rd century, the Picenum was already totally conquered by the Romans.
The Veneti
Ancient tradition held the Veneti to be an Illyrian people who, coming from the east, took possession of the region named for them (Venetia). To them are linked the Histri, the Carni, and various Alpine tribes. (The name of the Veneti, or its root, is widely diffused in the ethnic onomastics of central Europe and even of Asia.) The Venetic language is known from funerary and votive inscriptions, from words cited by the Classical writers, and from onomastic and toponomastic data. It is an Indo-European language of Archaic type bearing similarities to the Latin and the Germanic.
The principal centres of the Veneti, located at the western margin of the territory, were Padua and Este. Their culture developed from the 9th century to the period of Romanization, with relationships with the Golasecca, Villanovan, and Etruscan cultures and with the transalpine Hallstatt culture. Maximum development occurred in the 6th–4th centuries bce; particularly noteworthy is the production of figured bronze situlae (conical vessels). In the final period, Gallic (Celtic) influences are found. Phenomena parallel to those of Este appear in Istria. The Veneti were horse breeders and peaceful traders and navigators; protected by the waters of the lower Po and the lower Adige, they preserved their independence against Etruscan expansion and Celtic invasion and in the 3rd century bce entered into peaceful alliance with Rome.
The Ligurians
For the ancients, the name Ligures designated the peoples of northwestern Italy, including northern Tuscany, Liguria, Piedmont, and part of what is now Lombardy. Historical tradition also placed them in central Italy, while the Classical writers and toponomastic affinities give them a broader diffusion beyond the Alps. The Ligurians also included the peoples of Corsica. The more ancient Greeks gave all the peoples of the western world the common designation of Ligyes (i.e., Ligurians).
Linguistic data—furnished by toponomastics, lexical survivals, and Ligurian words cited by Classical writers—betray the presence of a pre-Indo-European Mediterranean stratum akin to that of western Europe. Inscriptions found in upper Lombardy and in the Ticino exhibit Indo-European characteristics and in particular Celtic influences. Thus the Liguri seem to belong to an environment formed in northern Italy after the Celtic invasion and called Celto-Ligures.
The Etruscan expansion in the plain of the Po and the invasion of the Gauls confined the Ligurians between the Alps and the Apennines, where they offered such resistance to Roman penetration that they gained a reputation with the ancients for primitive fierceness. Among the more considerable Ligurian monuments are rock engravings and anthropomorphic sculptures analogous to those of southern France, found in Lunigiana and Corsica. Some of these artistic manifestations are repeated in territories farther east. But it remains doubtful whether the similar cultural imprint indicates an original identity of stock. Ligurian and Celto-Ligurian tombs of the Lombard lakes region, often holding cremations, reveal a special iron culture called the culture of Golasecca, while Ligurian sepulchres of the Italian Riviera and of Provence, also holding cremations, exhibit Etruscan and Celtic influences.
Populations of central northern Italy and of the Alps
The ethnography of the Po and Alpine regions is complex and obscure because of the early spread of Etruscan culture and colonization. The ancients record two major ethnic groups (aside from the Etruscans and the Veneti): the Euganei, inhabiting the plain and the Alpine foothills, and the Raeti, in the valleys of the Trentino and the Alto Adige. Minor peoples in the region belonged to one or the other of these stocks or to Ligurian stocks; with regard to many of these peoples, the sources speak of an Illyrian or an Etruscan origin.
Late inscriptions discovered in the Adige River valley and on the plain have a dialect showing some affinities to Etruscan. Some scholars see in this a blending of local and Etruscan elements, while others speak of an indigenous pre-Indo-European language with Indo-European influences. Primitive toponomastics confirm the existence of a linguistic stratum that could be defined as Raetian or Raeto-Euganean but distinguish it sharply from the Venetic and probably also from the Ligurian. Other inscriptions from the Val Camonica and the Garda district attest to a more noticeable Indo-European dialect, due perhaps to Celtic and Latin influences. To the west are the so-called Lepontian inscriptions.
Thus in the central Alpine and sub-Alpine area, there were original populations, different from the Veneti and the Etruscans, whose kinship with the Ligurians remains uncertain. The distinction between Euganean and Raetic tribes can be based only upon an approximate geographic criterion. To this original ethnic stratum may have belonged the most ancient inhabitants of the region, who settled there before the immigration of the Illyrian Veneti and the Etruscan conquest; certain cremation sepulchres of the Verona and Mantua regions may be attributed to them. Perhaps the existence of a Venetian goddess Reitia, recorded by Strabo and mentioned in inscriptions from Este, is some proof of a Raeto-Euganean cultural persistence in the territory occupied by the Veneti. Nancy Thomson de Grummond
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Italic people
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 12 November 2015
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ancient-Italic-people
Access Date: August 20, 2019
Additional Reading
The basic guide is Popoli e civilità dell’Italia antica, 7 vol. (1974–78). Outdated but still useful are Joshua Whatmough, The Foundations of Roman Italy (1937, reprinted 1971); and David Randall-MacIver, Italy Before the Romans (1928, reprinted 1972). On the Etruscans there are three essential books in English that guide the reader through the bewildering maze of recent discoveries and research: Massimo Pallottino, The Etruscans, rev. and enlarged ed. edited by David Ridgway (1975; originally published in Italian, 6th ed., rev. and enlarged, 1975); David Ridgway and Francesca R. Ridgway (eds.), Italy Before the Romans: The Iron Age, Orientalizing, and Etruscan Periods (1979); and Larissa Bonfante (ed.), Etruscan Life and Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies (1986), which lists the many catalogs of exhibitions and other publications that came out as a result of “The Year of the Etruscans” in Italy in 1985. Among recent interpretations of Etruscan culture and history, the best in English are Mauro Cristofani, The Etruscans: A New Investigation (1979; originally published in Italian, 1978); and Michael Grant, The Etruscans (1980). Giuliano Bonfante and Larissa Bonfante, The Etruscan Language (1983), is a helpful introduction. Works on other individual Italic peoples, civilizations, and languages include the Ridgways’ book, cited earlier; Luigi Bernabò Brea, Sicily Before the Greeks, rev. ed. (1966); Renato Peroni, Archeologia della Puglia preistorica (1967); A. Alföldi, Early Rome and the Latins (1963); Gabriella Giacomelli, La lingua falisca (1963); Giacomo Devoto, Gli antichi Italici, 3rd ed. rev. (1967); E.T. Salmon, Samnium and the Samnites (1967); G.A. Mansuelli and R. Scarani, L’emilia prima dei Romani (1961); G.B. Pellegrini and A.L. Prosdocimi, La lingua venetica, 2 vol. (1967); and on Italic inscriptions, Oronzo Parlangeli, Studi messapici (1960); and Allessandro Morandi, Epigrafia italica (1982). Nancy Thomson de Grummond
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Phoenicia
historical region, Asia
Phoenicia, ancient region corresponding to modern Lebanon, with adjoining parts of modern Syria and Israel. Its inhabitants, the Phoenicians, were notable merchants, traders, and colonizers of the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium bce. The chief cities of Phoenicia (excluding colonies) were Sidon, Tyre, and Berot (modern Beirut).
It is not certain what the Phoenicians called themselves in their own language; it appears to have been Kenaʿani (Akkadian: Kinahna), “Canaanites.” In Hebrew the word kenaʿani has the secondary meaning of “merchant,” a term that well characterizes the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians probably arrived in the area about 3000 bce. Nothing is known of their original homeland, though some traditions place it in the region of the Persian Gulf.
At Byblos, commercial and religious connections with Egypt are attested from the Egyptian 4th dynasty (c. 2613–c. 2494); extensive trade was certainly carried on by the 16th century, and the Egyptians soon established suzerainty over much of Phoenicia. The 14th century, however, was one of much political unrest, and Egypt eventually lost its hold over the area. Beginning in the 9th century, the independence of Phoenicia was increasingly threatened by the advance of Assyria, the kings of which several times exacted tribute and took control of parts or all of Phoenicia. In 538 Phoenicia passed under the rule of the Persians. The country was later taken by Alexander the Great and in 64 bce was incorporated into the Roman province of Syria; Aradus, Sidon, and Tyre, however, retained self-government. The oldest form of government in the Phoenician cities seems to have been kingship—limited by the power of the wealthy merchant families. Federation of the cities on a large scale never seems to have occurred.
The Phoenicians were well known to their contemporaries as sea traders and colonizers, and by the 2nd millennium they had already extended their influence along the coast of the Levant by a series of settlements, including Joppa (Jaffa, modern Yafo), Dor, Acre, and Ugarit. Colonization of areas in North Africa (e.g., Carthage), Anatolia, and Cyprus also occurred at an early date. Carthage became the chief maritime and commercial power in the western Mediterranean. Several smaller Phoenician settlements were planted as stepping stones along the route to Spain and its mineral wealth. Phoenician exports included cedar and pine wood, fine linen from Tyre, Byblos, and Berytos, cloths dyed with the famous Tyrian purple (made from the snail Murex), embroideries from Sidon, wine, metalwork and glass, glazed faience, salt, and dried fish. In addition, the Phoenicians conducted an important transit trade.
In the artistic products of Phoenicia, Egyptian motifs and ideas were mingled with those of Mesopotamia, the Aegean, and Syria. Though little survives of Phoenician sculpture in the round, relief sculpture is much more abundant. The earliest major work of Phoenician sculpture to survive was found at Byblos; it was the limestone sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos at the end of the 11th century.
Sarcophagus of AhiramCarved limestone sarcophagus of Ahiram, a king of Byblos, bearing a Phoenician inscription, 10th century bce; in the National Museum of Lebanon, Beirut.Courtesy of the National Museum of Lebanon, Beirut
Ivory and wood carving became Phoenician specialties, and Phoenician goldsmiths’ and metalsmiths’ work was also well known. Glassblowing was probably invented in the coastal area of Phoenicia in the 1st century or earlier.
Although the Phoenicians used cuneiform (Mesopotamian writing), they also produced a script of their own. The Phoenician alphabetic script of 22 letters was used at Byblos as early as the 15th century. This method of writing, later adopted by the Greeks, is the ancestor of the modern Roman alphabet. It was the Phoenicians’ most remarkable and distinctive contribution to arts and civilization.
Phoenician religion was inspired by the powers and processes of nature. Many of the gods they worshiped, however, were localized and are now known only under their local names. A pantheon was presided over by the father of the gods, El, but the goddess Astarte (Ashtart) was the principal figure in the Phoenician pantheon. See also Lebanon, history of: Phoenicia. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn, Managing Editor.
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Article Title: Phoenicia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 20 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Phoenicia
Access Date: August 24, 2019
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Pre-Columbian civilizations
Table of Contents
Introduction
Mesoamerican civilization
Andean civilization
Pre-Columbian civilizations, the aboriginal American Indian cultures that evolved in Mesoamerica (part of Mexico and Central America) and the Andean region (western South America) prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. The pre-Columbian civilizations were extraordinary developments in human society and culture, ranking with the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. Like the ancient civilizations of the Old World, those in the New World were characterized by kingdoms and empires, great monuments and cities, and refinements in the arts, metallurgy, and writing; the ancient civilizations of the Americas also display in their histories similar cyclical patterns of growth and decline, unity and disunity.
In the New World the roots of civilization lay in a native agricultural way of life. These agricultural beginnings go back several millennia, to perhaps about 7000 bce and the first experimentations by the early Americans with plant cultivation. The domestication of successful food plants proved to be a long, slow process, and it was not until much later that a condition of permanent village farming life was achieved in the tropical latitudes of the two continents.
Sedentary village farming in Mesoamerica came into being by about 1500 bce. Corn (maize), beans, squashes, chili peppers, and cotton were the most important crops. These early villagers wove cloth, made pottery, and practiced other typical Neolithic skills. It appears that such villages were economically self-contained and politically autonomous, with an egalitarian social order. But rather quickly after this—between about 1200 and 900 bce—the building of large earthen pyramids and platforms and the carving of monumental stone sculptures signaled significant changes in this heretofore simple social and political order. These changes first appeared in the southern Gulf coast region of what is now Mexico; and the sculptures, rendered in a style now called Olmec, are presumed to depict chiefs or rulers. From these and other archaeological indications it has been inferred that a class-structured and politically centralized society developed. There appeared subsequently other large capital towns and cities in neighbouring regions that also displayed a similar Olmec art style. This Olmec horizon (i.e., a cultural diffusion that is contemporaneous at widely scattered sites) represents the first climax, or era of “unification,” in the history of Mesoamerican civilization.
After about 500 bce the Olmec “unification” gave way to an era (consisting of the Late Formative and Classic periods) of separate regional styles and kingdoms. These lasted until c. 700–900 ce. Among these are the well-known Maya, Zapotec, Totonac, and Teotihuacán civilizations. While sharing a common Olmec heritage, they also displayed many differences. For example, the Maya excelled in the intellectual pursuits of hieroglyphic writing, calendar making, and mathematics, while the Teotihuacán civilization placed its emphasis on political and commercial power. Teotihuacán, in the Valley of Mexico, was an urban centre of some 150,000 people, and the influence of its civilization eventually radiated over much of Mesoamerica. As such, Teotihuacán constituted a second grand civilizational climax or “unification” (400–600 ce). Teotihuacán power waned after about 600, and a “time of troubles” ensued, during which a number of states and nascent empires competed for supremacy. Among these competitors were the Toltecs of Tula, in central Mexico, who held sway from perhaps 900 to 1200 (the Early Postclassic Period). After their decline (in the Late Postclassic Period), another interregnum of warring states lasted until 1428, when the Aztec defeated the rival city of Azcapotzalco and emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico. This last native Mesoamerican empire was conquered by Hernán Cortés (or Cortéz) and the Spaniards in 1521.
In the Andean area, the threshold of a successful village agricultural economy can be placed at c. 2500 bce, or somewhat earlier than was the case in Mesoamerica. The oldest primary food crops there were the lima bean and the potato, which had long histories of domestication in the area, although corn appeared soon after the beginnings of settled village life. Indications of a more complex sociopolitical order—huge platform mounds and densely populated centres—occurred very soon after this (c. 1800 bce); however, these early Andean civilizations continued for almost a millennium before they participated in a shared stylistic “unification.” This has become known as the Chavín horizon, and Chavín sculptural art has been found throughout the northern part of the area.
The Chavín horizon disappeared after about 500 bce, and it was replaced by regional styles and cultures that lasted until about 600 ce. This period of regionalization (called the Early Intermediate Period) saw the florescence of a number of large kingdoms both on the Pacific coast and in the Andean highlands; among them were the Moche, Early Lima, Nazca, Recuay, and Early Tiwanaku. The period was brought to an end by the Tiwanaku–Huari horizon (Middle Horizon; 600–1000), which was generated from the highland cities of Tiwanaku (in modern northern Bolivia) and Huari (in central highland Peru). There is evidence—such as the construction of new centres and cities—that this Tiwanaku–Huari phenomenon, at least in many regions, was a tightly controlled political empire. The horizon and its influences, as registered in ceramics and textiles, died away rather gradually in the ensuing centuries, and it was replaced by the several regional styles and kingdoms of what has become known as the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1438).
The terminal date of the Late Intermediate Period marked the beginning of the Inca horizon and of the Inca conquests, which spread from the Inca capital, Cuzco, in the southern highlands of what is now Peru. By 1533, when Francisco Pizarro and his cohorts took over the empire, it extended from what is now the Ecuador–Colombia border to central Chile.
The synchroneity of horizon unifications and alternating regionalizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean region is striking and prompts the question of communication between these two areas of pre-Columbian high civilization. Although it is known that there were contacts—with the result that knowledge of food plants, ceramics, and metallurgy was shared between the two areas—it is also highly unlikely that political or religious ideologies were so spread. Rather, the peoples of each of these major cultural areas appear to have responded to their own internally generated stimuli and to have followed essentially separate courses of development. There are fundamental differences between the two cultural traditions. Thus, in Mesoamerica there was, from early on, a profound interest in hieroglyphic writing and calendar making. Religious ideology, judged from art and iconography, was more highly developed in Mesoamerica than in the Andean region. In Mesoamerica the market was a basic institution; it does not appear to have been so in the Andes, where the redistributive economy of the Inca empire—with such features as its government warehouses and a system of highways—must have had deep roots in the past. On the other hand, in the early development and deployment of metallurgy and in governmental institutions and empire-building, the ancient Peruvians were much more efficient than their Mesoamerican contemporaries. Gordon R. Willey
Mesoamerican civilization
The term Mesoamerica denotes the part of Mexico and Central America that was civilized in pre-Spanish times. In many respects, the American Indians who inhabited Mesoamerica were the most advanced native peoples in the Western Hemisphere. The northern border of Mesoamerica runs west from a point on the Gulf coast of Mexico above the modern port of Tampico, then dips south to exclude much of the central desert of highland Mexico, meeting the Pacific coast opposite the tip of Baja (Lower) California. On the southeast, the boundary extends from northwestern Honduras on the Caribbean across to the Pacific shore in El Salvador. Thus, about half of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador are included in Mesoamerica.
Mesoamerican civilizationPrincipal sites of Mesoamerican civilization.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Geographically and culturally, Mesoamerica consists of two strongly contrasted regions: highland and lowland. The Mexican highlands are formed mainly by the two Sierra Madre ranges that sweep down on the east and west. Lying athwart them is a volcanic cordillera stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The high valleys and landlocked basins of Mexico were important centres of pre-Spanish civilization. In the southeastern part of Mesoamerica lie the partly volcanic Chiapas–Guatemala highlands. The lowlands are primarily coastal. Particularly important was the littoral plain extending south along the Gulf of Mexico, expanding to include the Petén-Yucatán Peninsula, homeland of the Mayan peoples.
Agriculture in Mesoamerica was advanced and complex. A great many crops were planted, of which corn, beans, and squashes were the most important. In the highlands, hoe cultivation of more or less permanent fields was the rule, with such intensive forms of agriculture as irrigation and chinampas (the so-called floating gardens reclaimed from lakes or ponds) practiced in some regions. In contrast, lowland agriculture was frequently of the shifting variety; a patch of jungle was first selected, felled and burned toward the end of the dry season, and then planted with a digging stick in time for the first rains. After a few years of planting, the field was abandoned to the forest, as competition from weeds and declining soil fertility resulted in diminishing yields. There is good evidence, however, that the slash-and-burn system of cultivation was often supplemented by “raised-field” cultivation in the lowlands; these artificially constructed earthen hillocks built in shallow lakes or marshy areas were not unlike the chinampas of the Mexican highlands. In addition, terraces were constructed and employed for farming in some lowland regions. Nevertheless, the demographic potential for agriculture was probably always greater in the highlands than it was in the lowlands, and this was demonstrated in the more extensive urban developments in the former area.
The extreme diversity of the Mesoamerican environment produced what has been called symbiosis among its subregions. Interregional exchange of agricultural products, luxury items, and other commodities led to the development of large and well-regulated markets in which cacao beans were used for money. It may have also led to large-scale political unity and even to states and empires. High agricultural productivity resulted in a nonfarming class of artisans who were responsible for an advanced stone architecture, featuring the construction of stepped pyramids, and for highly evolved styles of sculpture, pottery, and painting.
The Mesoamerican system of thought, recorded in folding-screen books of deerskin or bark paper, was perhaps of even greater importance in setting them off from other New World peoples. This system was ultimately based upon a calendar in which a ritual cycle of 260 (13 × 20) days intermeshed with a “vague year” of 365 days (18 × 20 days, plus five “nameless” days), producing a 52-year Calendar Round. The religious life was geared to this cycle, which is unique to them. The Mesoamerican pantheon was associated with the calendar and featured an old, dual creator god; a god of royal descent and warfare; a sun god and moon goddess; a rain god; a culture hero called the Feathered Serpent; and many other deities. Also characteristic was a layered system of 13 heavens and nine underworlds, each with its presiding god. Much of the system was under the control of a priesthood that also maintained an advanced knowledge of astronomy.
Some seven Mesoamerican language families and three language isolates were found in Mesoamerica. Garífuna, a later import, is an Arawakan language. Most Mesoamerican languages are grouped in one of four families: Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, and Otomanguean. A dominant role was played by Uto-Aztecan, particularly by speakers of the Nahua groups of which Náhuatl, official tongue of the Aztec empire, was the most important. The Mayan family contains a number of mutually unintelligible languages, at least some of which were spoken by the inhabitants of the great Maya ceremonial centres. The modern Mexican state of Oaxaca is now the centre of the heterogeneous Otomanguean phylum; but the only linguistic groups of that family that played a great part in Mesoamerican civilization were the Mixtec and Zapotec, both of which had large, powerful kingdoms at the time of the Spanish conquest. Tarascan, mother tongue of an “empire” in western Mexico that successfully resisted Aztec encroachments, is now considered a language isolate; that is, it has no known relatives. Huave and Cuitlatec are also language isolates.
Pre-Classic and Classic periods
Early hunters (to 6500 bce)
The time of the first peopling of Mesoamerica remains a puzzle, as it does for that of the New World in general. Until recently it was widely accepted that groups of peoples entered the hemisphere from northeastern Siberia, perhaps by a land bridge that then existed, at some time in the Late Pleistocene, or Ice Age. But radiocarbon dating and other relatively recent tools have complicated the story. Perhaps they entered the West Coast from the sea at multiple points. There is abundant evidence that, at least by 11,000 bce, hunting peoples had occupied most of the New World south of the glacial ice cap covering northern North America. These peoples hunted such large grazing mammals as mammoth, mastodon, horse, and camel, armed with spears to which were attached finely made, bifacially chipped points of stone. Finds in Mesoamerica, however, confirm the existence of a “prebifacial-point horizon,” a stage known to have existed elsewhere in the Americas, and suggest that it is of very great age. In 1967 archaeologists working at the site of Tlapacoya, southeast of Mexico City, uncovered a well-made blade of obsidian associated with a radiocarbon date of about 21,000 bce. Near Puebla, Mexico, excavations in the Valsequillo region revealed cultural remains of human groups that were hunting mammoth and other extinct animals, along with unifacially worked points, scrapers, perforators, burins, and knives. A date of about 21,800 bce has been suggested for the Valsequillo finds.
More substantial information on Late Pleistocene occupations of Mesoamerica comes from excavations near Tepexpan, northeast of Mexico City. The excavated skeletons of two mammoths showed that these beasts had been killed with spears fitted with lancelike stone points and had been butchered on the spot. A possible date of about 8000 bce has been suggested for the two mammoth kills. In the same geologic layer as the slaughtered mammoths was found a human skeleton; this Tepexpan “man” has been shown to be female and rather a typical American Indian of modern form. While the association with the mammoths was first questioned, fluorine tests have proved them to be contemporary.
The environment of these earliest Mesoamericans was quite different from that existing today, for volcanoes were then extremely active, covering thousands of square miles with ashes. Temperatures were substantially lower, and local glaciers formed on the highest peaks. Conditions were ideal for the large herds of grazing mammals that roamed Mesoamerica, especially in the highland valleys, much of which consisted of cool, wet grasslands not unlike the plains of the northern United States. All of this changed around 7000 bce, when worldwide temperatures rose and the great ice sheets of northern latitudes began their final retreat. This brought to an end the successful hunting way of life that had been followed by Mesoamericans, although humans probably also played a role in bringing about the extinction of the large game animals.
Incipient agriculture (6500–1500 bce)
The most crucial event in the prehistory of Mesoamerica was the human capture of the food energy contained in plants. This process centred on three plants: Indian corn (maize), beans, and squashes. Since about 90 percent of all food calories in the diet of Mesoamericans eventually came from corn, archaeologists for a long time have sought the origins of this plant—which has no wild forms existing today—in order to throw light on the agricultural basis of Mesoamerican civilization.
The search for Mesoamerican agricultural origins has been carried forward most successfully through excavations in dry caves and rock shelters in the modern southern Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca. Sequences from these archaeological sites show a gradual transition from the Early Hunting to the Incipient Cultivation periods. At the Guila Naquitz cave, in Oaxaca, there are indications that the transition began as early as 8900 bce; finds from caves in the Tehuacán valley of Puebla, however, offer more substantial evidence of the beginnings of plant domestication at a somewhat later time. There, the preservation of plant remains is remarkably good, and from these it is evident that shortly after 6500 bce the inhabitants of the valley were selecting and planting seeds of chili peppers, cotton, and one kind of squash. Most importantly, between 5000 and 3500 bce they were beginning to plant mutant forms of corn that already were showing signs of the husks characteristic of domestic corn.
One of the problems complicating this question of the beginnings of early corn cultivation is related to a debate between paleobotanists on wild versus domesticated strains. One school of thought holds that the domesticated races of the plant developed from a wild ancestor. The other opinion is that there was never such a thing as wild corn, that instead corn (Zea mays) developed from a related grass, teosinte (Zea mexicana or Euchlaena mexicana). In any event, by 5000 bce corn was present and being used as a food, and between 2,000 and 3,000 years after that it had developed rapidly as a food plant. It has been estimated that there is more energy present in a single kernel of some modern races than there was in an ear of this ancient Tehuacán corn. Possibly some of this was popped, but a new element in food preparation is seen in the metates (querns) and manos (handstones) that were used to grind the corn into meal or dough.
Beans appeared after 3500 bce, along with a much improved race of corn. This enormous increase in the amount of plant food available was accompanied by a remarkable shift in settlement pattern. In place of the temporary hunting camps and rock shelters, which were occupied only seasonally by small bands, semipermanent villages of pit houses were constructed on the valley floor. Increasing sedentariness is also to be seen in the remarkable bowls and globular jars painstakingly pecked from stone, for pottery was as yet unknown in Mesoamerica.
In the centuries between 3500 and 1500 bce, plant domestication began in what had been hunting-gathering contexts, as on the Pacific coast of Chiapas and on the Veracruz Gulf coast and in some lacustrine settings in the Valley of Mexico. It seems probable that early domesticated plants from such places as the Tehuacán valley were carried to these new environmental niches. In many cases, this shift of habitat resulted in genetic improvements in the food plants.
Pottery, which is a good index to the degree of permanence of a settlement (because of its fragility it is difficult to transport), was made in the Tehuacán valley by 2300 bce. Fired clay vessels were made as early as 4000 bce in Ecuador and Colombia, and it is probable that the idea of their manufacture gradually diffused north to the increasingly sedentary peoples of Mesoamerica.
The picture, then, is one of growing human control over the environment through the domestication of plants; animals played a very minor role in this process, with only the dog being surely domesticated before 1500 bce. At any rate, by 1500 bce the stage was set for the adoption of a fully settled life, with many of the sedentary arts already present. The final step was taken only when native agriculture in certain especially favoured subregions became sufficiently effective to allow year-round settlement of villages.
Early Formative period (1500–900 bce)
Early village life
It is fairly clear that the Mexican highlands were far too dry during the much warmer interval that prevailed from 5000 to 1500 bce for agriculture to supply more than half of a given population’s energy needs. This was not the case along the alluvial lowlands of southern Mesoamerica, and it is no accident that the best evidence for the earliest permanent villages in Mesoamerica comes from the Pacific littoral of Chiapas (Mexico) and Guatemala, although comparable settlements also have been reported from both the Maya lowlands (Belize) and the Veracruz Gulf coast.
The Barra (c. 1800–1500 bce), Ocós (1500–1200 bce), and Cuadros (1100–900 bce) phases of the Pacific coasts of Chiapas and Guatemala are good examples of early village cultures. The Barra phase appears to have been transitional from earlier preagricultural phases and may not have been primarily dependent upon corn farming; but people of the Ocós and Cuadros phases raised a small-eared corn known as nal-tel, which was ground on metates and manos and cooked in globular jars. From the rich lagoons and estuaries in this area, the villagers obtained shellfish, crabs, fish, and turtles. Their villages were small, with perhaps 10 to 12 thatched-roof houses arranged haphazardly.
Ocós pottery is highly developed technically and artistically. Something of the mental life of the times may be seen in the tiny, handmade clay figurines produced by the Ocós villagers. These, as in Formative cultures generally throughout Mesoamerica, represent nude females and may have had something to do with a fertility cult. The idea of the temple-pyramid may well have taken root by that time, for one Ocós site has produced an earthen mound about 26 feet (8 metres) high that must have supported a perishable building. The implication of the site is that, with increasing prosperity, some differentiation of a ruling class had taken place, for among the later Mesoamericans the ultimate function of a pyramid was as a final resting place for a great leader.
Eventually, effective village farming with nucleated settlements occupied throughout the year appeared in the highlands. But perhaps from the very beginning of Formative life there were different cultural responses directed toward both kinds of environment. In the highlands, divided into a number of mutually contrasting environments no one of which could have provided sufficient resources for the subsistence of a single settlement, villages were presumably linked to each other symbiotically. In the lowlands, particularly in the littoral, one especially favourable environment, such as the lagoon–estuary system, may have been so rich in resources that villages within it would have been entirely self-sufficient. In effect, the former would have resulted in a cultural integration based upon trade, while the latter would have been integrated, if at all, by a unity of likeness. The two kinds of civilization that eventually arose in each region—the highlands definitely urban, the lowlands less so—reflect the same contrast.
Early religious life
Early religious phenomena can only be deduced from archaeological remains. Numerous clay figurines found in tombs afford little evidence of religious beliefs during the agricultural Pre-Classic periods of Zacatenco and Ticomán (roughly 1500 to the 1st century bce). It is possible, however, that terra-cotta statuettes of women were meant to represent an agricultural deity, a goddess of the crops. Two-headed figurines found at Tlatilco, a site of the late Pre-Classic, may portray a supernatural being. Clay idols of a fire god in the form of an old man with an incense burner on his back date from the same period.
The first stone monument on the Mexican plateau is the pyramid of Cuicuilco, near Mexico City. In fact, it is rather a truncated cone, with a stone core; the rest is made of sun-dried brick with a stone facing. It shows the main features of the Mexican pyramids as they were developed in later times. It was doubtless a religious monument, crowned by a temple built on the terminal platform and surrounded with tombs. The building of such a structure obviously required a protracted and organized effort under the command of the priests.
The final phase of the Pre-Classic cultures of the central highland forms a transition from the village to the city, from rural to urban life. This was a far-reaching social and intellectual revolution, bringing about new religious ideas together with new art forms and theocratic regimes. It is significant that Olmec statuettes have been found at Tlatilco with late Pre-Classic material.
The rise of Olmec civilization
It was once assumed that the Formative stage was characterized only by simple farming villages. Scholars now realize, however, that coexisting with these peasantlike cultures was a great civilization, the Olmec, that had arisen in the humid lowlands of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, in Mexico.
The Olmec were perhaps the greatest sculptors of ancient Mesoamerica. Whether carving tiny jade figures or gigantic basalt monuments, they worked with a great artistry that led a number of archaeologists to doubt their considerable antiquity, although radiocarbon dates from the type site of La Venta showed that Olmec civilization was indeed Formative, its beginning dating to at least 1,000 years before the advent of Maya civilization.
San Lorenzo is now established as the oldest known Olmec centre. In fact, excavation has shown it to have taken on the appearance of an Olmec site by 1150 bce and to have been destroyed, perhaps by invaders, around 900 bce. Thus, the Olmec achieved considerable cultural heights within the Early Formative, at a time when the rest of Mesoamerica was at best on a Neolithic level. The reasons for its precocious rise must have had something to do with its abundant rainfall and the rich alluvial soil deposited along the broad, natural levees that flank the waterways of the southern Gulf coast. Thus, the ecological potential for corn farmers in this counterpart of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent was exceptionally high. The levee lands, however, were not limitless, and increasingly dense populations must inevitably have led to competition for their control. Out of such conflicts would have crystallized a dominant landowning class, perhaps a group of well-armed lineages. It was this elite that created the Olmec civilization of San Lorenzo.
In appearance, the San Lorenzo site is a compact plateau rising about 160 feet (about 49 metres) above the surrounding plains. Cutting into it are deep ravines that were once thought to be natural but that are now known to be man-made, formed by the construction of long ridges that jut out from the plateau on the northwest, west, and south sides. Excavations have proved that at least the top 25 to 35 feet (about 8 to 11 metres) of the site was built by human labour. There are about 200 small mounds on the surface of the site, each of which once supported a dwelling house of pole and thatch, which indicates that it was both a ceremonial centre, with political and religious functions, and a minuscule town.
San Lorenzo is most noted for its extraordinary stone monuments. Many of these, perhaps most, were deliberately smashed or otherwise mutilated about 900 bce and buried in long lines within the ridges and elsewhere at the site. The monuments weighed as much as 44 tons and were carved from basalt from the Cerro Cintepec, a volcanic flow in the Tuxtla Mountains about 50 air miles to the northwest. It is believed that the stones were somehow dragged down to the nearest navigable stream and from there transported on rafts up the Coatzacoalcos River to the San Lorenzo area. The amount of labour involved must have been enormous and so would have the social controls necessary to see the job through to its completion.
Most striking are the “colossal heads,” human portraits on a stupendous scale. Several of these are now known from San Lorenzo, the largest of which is nine feet (more than 2.5 metres) high. The visages are flat-faced, with thickened lips and staring eyes. Each has a headgear resembling a football helmet, and it is entirely possible that these “helmets” were in fact protective coverings in a rubber-ball game that is known from Olmec figurines to have been played at San Lorenzo.
Olmec colossal basalt head in the Museo de la Venta, an outdoor museum near Villahermosa, Tabasco, Mexico.© Robert Frerck/Odyssey Productions
The central theme of the Olmec religion was a pantheon of deities each of which usually was a hybrid between jaguar and human infant, often crying or snarling with open mouth. This “were-jaguar” is the hallmark of Olmec art, and it was the unity of objects in this style that first suggested to scholars that they were dealing with a new and previously unknown civilization. There is actually a whole spectrum of such were-jaguar forms in Olmec art, ranging from the almost purely feline to the human in which only a trace of jaguar can be seen.
These Olmec monuments were generally carved in the round with great technical prowess, even though the only methods available were pounding and pecking with stone tools. Considerable artistry can also be seen in the pottery figurines of San Lorenzo, which depict nude and sexless individuals with were-jaguar traits.
Exotic raw materials brought into San Lorenzo from distant regions suggest that the early Olmec controlled a large trading network over much of Mesoamerica. Obsidian, used for blades, flakes, and dart points, was imported from highland Mexico and Guatemala. Most items were obviously for the luxury trade, such as iron ore for mirrors and various fine stones such as serpentine employed in the lapidary industry. One material that is conspicuously absent, however, is jade, which does not appear in Olmec sites until after 900 bce and the fall of San Lorenzo.
There is evidence that the Olmec sent groups from their Gulf coast “heartland” into the Mesoamerican highlands toward the end of the Early Formative, in all likelihood toguarantee that goods bound for San Lorenzo would reach their destination. San Lorenzo-type Olmec ceramics and figurines have been found in burials at several sites in the Valley of Mexico, such as Tlapacoya, and in the state of Morelos. The Olmec involvement with the rest of Mesoamerica continued into the Middle Formative and probably reached its peak at that time.
San Lorenzo is not the only Olmec centre known for the Early Formative. Laguna de los Cerros, just south of the Cerro Cintepec in Veracruz, appears to have been a large Olmec site with outstanding sculptures. La Venta, just east of the Tabasco border, was another contemporary site, but it reached its height after San Lorenzo had gone into decline.
Middle Formative period (900–300 bce)
Horizon markers
Once ceramics had been adopted in Mesoamerica, techniques of manufacture and styles of shape and decoration tended to spread rapidly and widely across many cultural frontiers. These rapid diffusions, called horizons, enable archaeologists to link different cultures on the same time level. Good horizon markers for the Early Formative are colour zones of red pigment set off by incised lines; complex methods of rocker stamping (a mode of impressing the wet clay with the edge of a stick or shell); the tecomate, or globular, neckless jar; and Olmec excised pottery. The beginning of the Middle Formative over much of Mesoamerica is marked by the diffusion of a very hard, white pottery, decorated with incised lines, and by solid pottery figurines with large, staring eyes formed by a punch. The people who replaced and probably overthrew the Olmec of San Lorenzo about 900 bce had such pottery and figurines, the ultimate origins of which are still a puzzle.
During the Middle Formative, cultural regionalism increased, although the Olmec presence can be widely detected. The transition to fully settled life had taken place everywhere, and burgeoning populations occupied hamlets, villages, and perhaps even small towns throughout Mesoamerica, both highland and lowland.
Olmec civilization at La Venta
La Venta was located on an almost inaccessible island, surrounded at that time by the Tonalá River; the river now divides the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. As San Lorenzo’s fortunes fell, La Venta’s rose, and between 800 and 400 bce it was the most important site in Mesoamerica.
At the centre of La Venta is a 100-foot (30-metre)-high mound of earth and clay that may well house the tomb of a great Olmec ruler. Immediately north of the Great Mound is a narrow north–south plaza flanked by a pair of long mounds. Beyond the plaza is a ceremonial enclosure surrounded by a “fence” made entirely of upright shafts of columnar basalt. A low, round mound on the north side of the ceremonial enclosure contained several tombs, one of which was surrounded and covered by basalt columns. In this tomb were found the bundled remains of two children, accompanied by magnificent ornaments of jade. Offerings were not only placed with the dead but were also deposited as caches in the site, especially along the north–south axis of the ceremonial centre.
Among the most beautiful objects manufactured by the Olmec were the concave mirrors of iron ore, which were pierced to be worn around the neck. These could throw pictures on a flat surface and could probably start fires on hot tinder. Olmec leaders at La Venta, whether they were kings or priests, undoubtedly used them to impress the populace with their seemingly supernatural powers. Olmec sculptors continued to produce the basalt monuments, including colossal heads and “altars,” that have been found at La Venta. Significantly, an increasing number of monuments were carved in relief, and some of these were stelae with rather elaborate scenes obviously based upon historical or contemporary events.
Olmec colonization in the Middle Formative
From the Middle Formative there are important Olmec sites located along what appears to have been a highland route to the west to obtain the luxury items that seemed to have been so desperately needed by the Olmec elite—e.g., jade, serpentine, iron ore for mirrors, cinnabar, and so forth. Olmec sites in Puebla, the Valley of Mexico, and Morelos are generally located at the ends of valleys near or on major passes; they were perhaps trading stations garrisoned by Olmec troops. The largest of these sites is Chalcatzingo, Morelos, a cult centre located among three denuded volcanic peaks rising from a plain. On a talus slope at the foot of the middle peak are huge boulders on which have been carved Olmec reliefs in La Venta style. The principal relief shows an Olmec woman, richly garbed, seated within the mouth of a cave; above her, cumulus clouds pour down rain.
Similar Olmec reliefs, usually narrative and often depicting warriors brandishing clubs, have been located on the Pacific plain of Chiapas (Mexico) and Guatemala. Since about 1960, spectacular Olmec cave paintings have been found in Guerrero, offering some idea of what the Olmec artists could do when they worked with a large spectrum of pigments and on flat surfaces.
Olmec culture or civilization did not spread eastward from its Veracruz–Tabasco centres into the Maya lowlands, but occasional Olmec artifacts have been found in Formative Maya contexts, such as at Seibal, in southern Petén, Guatemala. Maya Formative Period occupations, represented by settled farming villages and well-made ceramics, date to c. 1000 bce in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize. It seems reasonably certain, however, that at this early date great ceremonial centres, comparable to those of Olmec San Lorenzo or La Venta, were never constructed in the Maya lowlands.
It was formerly thought that the Olmec worshiped only one god, a rain deity depicted as a were-jaguar, but study has shown that there were at least 10 distinct gods represented in Olmec art. Surely present were several important deities of the later, established Mesoamerican pantheon, such as the fire god, rain god, corn god, and Feathered Serpent. Other aspects of mental culture are less well-known; some Olmec jades and a monument from La Venta have non-calendrical hieroglyphs, but none of this writing has been deciphered.
To sum up the Olmec achievement, not only was this the first high culture in Mesoamerica—one that had certainly achieved political statehood—but either it or cultures influenced by it lie at the base of every other Mesoamerican civilization.
Early Monte Albán
Monte Albán is a prominent series of interconnected hills lying near Oaxaca, Mexico. One of these was completely leveled off in Middle Formative times to serve as the base for a site that was to become the Zapotec people’s most important capital. Prior to that time, the Early Formative ancestral Zapotec had lived in scattered villages and at least one centre of some importance, San José Mogote. San José Mogote shows evidence of Olmec trade and contacts dating to the time of San Lorenzo.
At Monte Albán, during the earliest, or Monte Albán I, epoch of that site’s history, a peculiar group of reliefs was carved on stone slabs and affixed to the front of a rubble-faced platform mound and around a contiguous court. The reliefs are usually called danzantes, a name derived from the notion that they represent human figures in dance postures. Actually, almost all of the danzante sculptures show Olmecoid men in strange, rubbery postures as though they were swimming in honey. From their open mouths and closed eyes, it is assumed that they are meant to represent dead persons. On many danzantes one or more unreadable hieroglyphs appear near the heads of the figures, most likely standing for the names of the sacrificed lords of groups beaten in combat by the Zapotec. Several slabs also bear calendrical notations, and it can be stated that the Middle Formative elite of Monte Albán were the first in Mesoamerica to develop writing and the calendar (at least in written form).
Monte Albán: danzante sculptureDanzante sculpture at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The Valley of Mexico in the Middle Formative
The cultures of central Mexico tended to lag behind those of southern Mexico in the development of political and religious complexity. The presence of Olmec figurines and ceramics in Early Formative burials in the Valley of Mexico has been noted, but the local communities of that time were of a modest village sort, as were those of the succeeding Middle Formative. On the western shores of the great lake filling the Valley of Mexico, for instance, remains of several simple villages have been uncovered that must have been not unlike small settlements that can be found in the Mexican hinterland today. The people who lived at El Arbolillo and Zacatenco had simply terraced off village refuse to make platforms on which their pole-and-thatch houses were built. Metates and manos are plentiful; pottery is relatively plain—featuring the abundant hard, white-slipped ware of the Middle Formative—and small female figurines are present by the thousands. Subsistence was based upon corn farming and upon hunting. In some Middle Formative sites, however, such as Tlatilco, there is evidence of Olmec influence, as in the previous Early Formative Period. There are also indications that ceremonial pyramid construction began in the latter part of the Middle Formative at Cuicuilco, a site in the southern part of the valley, which was to become a major centre in the succeeding Late Formative Period.
The Maya in the Middle Formative
In the Maya highlands, the key archaeological region has always been the broad, fertile Valley of Guatemala around present-day Guatemala City. The earliest occupation is known as the Arevalo phase, a village culture of the Early to Middle Formative. It was followed by Las Charcas, a Middle Formative culture known largely from the contents of bottle-shaped pits found dug into the subsoil on the western edge of the modern city. Extremely fine ceramics have been excavated from them, including red-on-white bowls with animal figures, effigy vessels, three-footed cups, and peculiar three-pronged incense burners. Solid female figurines are also present.
The earliest Middle Formative cultures of the Maya lowlands are called, collectively, the Xe horizon. They apparently developed from antecedent Early Formative cultures of the Maya lowlands that have been discussed above. The problem of the origin of the Mayan-speaking people has not been solved. It may be that they were Olmec people who had been forced out of their homeland to the west by the collapse of San Lorenzo. There were already peoples in the Maya lowlands in Early Formative times, however, and if the early Maya were Olmec, they brought little of their Olmec culture with them. Another hypothesis is that the earliest Maya descended to their lowland homelands from the Guatemalan highlands.
In the Maya lowlands the Mamom cultures developed out of those of Xe times. Mamom shares many similarities with the highland Maya at Las Charcas: pottery is almost entirely monochrome—red, orange, black, and white—and figurines are female with the usual punched and appliquéd embellishments. Toward the end of the Middle Formative, or after about 600 bce, Mamom peoples began building small ceremonial centres and modest-sized pyramidal platforms.
Late Formative Period (300 bce–100 ce)
Probably the most significant features of the Late Formative are (1) the transformation of Olmec civilization in southeastern Mesoamerica into something approaching the earliest lowland Maya civilization and (2) the abrupt appearance, toward the end of the Late Formative, of fully urban culture at Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. Most of the distinctive cultures that were to become the great Classic civilizations began to take shape at this time. There was no unifying force in the Late Formative comparable to the earlier Olmec; rather, regionalism and local cultural integration were the rule. There were, however, horizon traits, particularly in pottery, that were almost universal. Ceramics became elaborate in shape, often with composite or recurved outlines, hollow, bulbous feet, and flangelike protrusions encircling the vessel. The use of slips of a number of different colours as pottery decoration at times approached the elaborate polychromes of Classic times.
The idea of constructing temple-pyramids was probably also a general trait. It was a Mesoamerican custom to bury a dead person beneath the floor of his own house, which was often then abandoned by the bereaved. As an elite class of noble lineages became distinguished from the mass of the people, the simple house platforms serving as sepulchres might have become transformed into more imposing structures, ending in the huge pyramids of the Late Formative and Classic, which surely had funerary functions. The deceased leader or the gods from which he claimed descent, or both, would then have been worshiped in a “house of god” on the temple summit. These pyramids became the focal point of Mesoamerican ceremonial life, as well as the centres of settlement.
ceramic vessel in the shape of a sharkVessel in the form of a shark, slip-painted ceramic, Colima, Mexico, 200 bce–500 ce; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Photograph by Joel Parham. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing, AC1996.146.25
Valley of Mexico
The Cuicuilco-Ticomán culture succeeded the Middle Formative villages of the valley but retained many of their traits, such as the manufacture of solid handmade figurines. Of considerable interest is the type site of Cuicuilco, located on the southwestern edge of the valley. Lava from a nearby volcano covers all of Cuicuilco, including the lower part of the round “pyramid” for which it is best known. Ceramic analysis and radiocarbon dating have proved that the flow occurred at about the beginning of the Common Era. Rising up in four tiers, the Cuicuilco pyramid has a clay-and-rubble core faced with broken lava blocks. The summit was reached by ramps on two sides. Circular temples were traditionally dedicated in Mesoamerica to Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent, and he may have been the presiding deity of Cuicuilco.
In the Valley of Teotihuacán, a kind of side pocket on the northeastern margin of the Valley of Mexico, Cuicuilco-Ticomán culture eventually took on a remarkable outline, for there is evidence that by the beginning of the Common Era a great city had been planned. There is little doubt that by the Proto-Classic stage (100 ce–300) it had become the New World’s first urban civilization (see below Teotihuacán).
Valley of Oaxaca
Occupation of the Monte Albán site continued uninterrupted, but ceramic evidence for Monte Albán II culture indicates that cultural influences from southeastern Mexico were reaching the Zapotec people. On the southern end of the site’s main plaza is a remarkable stone structure called Building J, shaped like an arrow pointing southwest and honeycombed with galleries. Some believe it to have been an astronomical observatory. Incised slabs are fixed to its exterior; these include some older danzantes as well as depictions of Zapotec place glyphs from which are suspended the inverted heads of dead chiefs—surely again the vanquished enemies of Monte Albán. Dates are given in the 52-year Calendar Round, with coefficients for days and months expressed by bar-and-dot numerals, a system that is first known for Monte Albán I and that became characteristic of the Classic Maya. Throughout its long Formative and Classic occupation, the dominant ware of Monte Albán is a fine gray pottery, elaborated in Monte Albán II into the usual Late Formative shapes.
Veracruz and Chiapas
La Venta suffered the fate of San Lorenzo, having been destroyed by violence around 400 bce. Olmec civilization subsequently disappeared or was transformed into one or more of the cultures of the southeastern lowlands.
One centre that retained a strong Olmec tradition, however, was Tres Zapotes, near the Tuxtla Mountains in the old Olmec “heartland.” Its most famous monument, the fragmentary Stela C, is clearly epi-Olmec on the basis of a jaguar-monster mask carved in relief on its obverse. On the reverse is a column of numerals in the bar-and-dot system, which was read by its discoverer, Matthew W. Stirling, as a date in the Maya calendar corresponding to 31 bce; this is more than a century earlier than any known dated inscription from the Maya area itself. Thus, it is highly probable that this calendrical system, formerly thought to be a Maya invention, was developed in the Late Formative by epi-Olmec peoples living outside the Maya area proper.
Izapan civilization
IzapaRuins at Izapa, Chiapas, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Izapa: ruinsRuins at Izapa, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
IzapaRuins at Izapa, Chiapas, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Izapa, type site of the Izapan civilization, is a huge temple centre near modern Tapachula, Chiapas, on the hot Pacific coast plain. Its approximately 80 pyramidal mounds were built from earth and clay faced with river boulders. A large number of carved stone stelae have been found at Izapa, almost all of which date to the Late Formative and Proto-Classic. Typically, in front of each stela is a round altar, often crudely shaped like a toad.
These stelae are of extraordinary interest, for they contain a wealth of information on Late Formative religious concepts prevalent on the border of the Maya area. Izapan stelae are carved in relief with narrative scenes derived from mythology and legend; among the depictions are warfare and decapitation, ceremonies connected with the sacred world tree, and meetings of what seem to be tribal elders. Many deities are shown, each of which seems derived from an Olmec prototype.
Sites with Izapan-style sculpture are distributed in a broad arc extending from Tres Zapotes in the former Olmec region, across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec into coastal Chiapas and Guatemala, and up into the Guatemalan highlands. Izapan civilization is clearly the intermediary between Olmec and Classic Maya in time and in cultural content, for the following early Maya traits are foreshadowed by it: (1) the stela–altar complex, (2) long-lipped deities, (3) hieroglyphic writing and Long Count dates on some monuments, (4) such iconographic elements as a U-shaped motif, and (5) a cluttered, baroque, and painterly relief style that emphasizes narrative. An important site pertaining to this Izapan culture is Abaj Takalik, on the Pacific slopes of Guatemala, to the east of Izapa. Three sculptural styles are represented there: Olmec or Olmecoid, Izapan, and Classic Maya. Among the latter is one stela with a date read as 126 ce, earlier than any monuments discovered in the Maya lowlands.
Perhaps it was not Izapa itself but the great site of Kaminaljuyú, on the western edge of Guatemala City, that transmitted the torch of Izapan civilization to the lowland Maya. This centre once consisted of more than 200 earth and clay mounds, most of which have been destroyed. The major occupation is ascribed to the Miraflores phase, the Late Formative culture of the Valley of Guatemala. Some of these huge Miraflores mounds contained log tombs of incredible richness. In one, the deceased lord was accompanied by sacrificed followers or captives. As many as 340 objects were placed with him, including jade mosaic masks, jade ear spools and necklaces, bowls of chlorite schist, and pottery vessels of great beauty. Also present in the tombs are peculiar “mushroom stones,” which may actually have been used in rites connected with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The earliest Maya civilization of the lowlands
By the Late Formative, the lowland Maya had begun to shape a civilization that was to become the greatest in the New World. The Petén-Yucatán Peninsula lacks many raw materials and has a relatively low agricultural potential. But what it does have in limitless quantities is readily quarried limestone for building purposes and flint for stonework. Cement and plaster could easily be produced by burning limestone or shells.
The heart of the Maya civilization was always northern Petén, in Guatemala, where the oldest dated Maya stelae are found, although this presents something of a problem in cultural-historical interpretation, since the earliest prototypes for these stelae—as mentioned above—have been found in Pacific-littoral and highland Guatemala. The Late Formative culture of Petén is called Chicanel, evidence of which has been found at many Maya centres. Chicanel pottery includes dishes with wide-everted and grooved rims, bowls with composite silhouette, and vessels resembling ice buckets. Figurines are curiously absent.
Tikal, Guatemala: North AcropolisMayan ruins of the North Acropolis at Tikal, Guatemala.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Tikal, Guatemala: North AcropolisNorth Acropolis, with stelae (foreground) among the Mayan ruins, at Tikal, Guatemala.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Architecture was already quite advanced and had taken a form peculiar to the Maya. Temple platforms were built by facing a cemented-rubble core with thick layers of plaster. At the site of Uaxactún, Structure E-VII-sub affords a good idea of a Chicanel temple-platform. It is a four-sided, stucco-covered, stepped pyramid with pairs of stylized god masks flanking stairways on each side. On its summit was a thatched-roof temple. At Tikal, the giant among Maya ceremonial centres, the so-called Acropolis was begun in Chicanel times, and there was a great use of white-stuccoed platforms and stairways, with flanking polychromed masks as at Uaxactún. Most importantly, there is evidence from Tikal that the Maya architects were already building masonry superstructures with the corbel vault principle—i.e., with archlike structures the sides of which extend progressively inward until they meet at the top. The large sizes of Chicanel populations and the degree of political centralization that existed by this time are further attested to by the discovery in the 20th century of the huge site of El Mirador, in the extreme northern part of Petén. The mass of El Mirador construction dwarfs even that of Tikal, although El Mirador was only substantially occupied through the Chicanel phase.
Chicanel-like civilization is also known in Yucatán, where some temple pyramids of enormous size are datable to the Late Formative. An outstanding site is the cave of Loltún in Yucatán, where a relief figure of a standing leader in pure Izapan style is accompanied by a number of unreadable hieroglyphs as well as a notation in the 260-day count. This inscription raises the question of writing and the calendar among the lowland Maya in the Late Formative. In the early 21st century archaeologists discovered Maya hieroglyphs—in addition to stunning polychrome murals—dating from as early as c. 100 bce at the site of San Bartolo in northeastern Guatemala. The finding suggests that several important intellectual innovations considered to be typically Mayan were developed beyond the Maya area proper and appeared there before the close of the Formative. Izapan civilization nevertheless appears to have played a crucial role in this evolutionary process.
Early Classic period (100–600 ce)
Definition of the Classic
In the study of the Classic stage, there has been a strong bias in favour of the Maya; this is not surprising in view of the fact that the Maya have been studied far longer than any other people in Mesoamerica. But the concept of a “Classic” period is a case of the Maya tail wagging the Mesoamerican dog, since the usual span given to that stage—250–900 ce—is the period during which the Maya were erecting dated stone monuments. This brackets the Maya apogee, but for most areas of non-Maya Mesoamerica only the first half of the period may be accurately called a “golden age.” While the famous and yet mysterious Maya collapse took place at about 900 ce, in many other regions this downfall occurred almost three centuries earlier.
Qualitatively, there is little to differentiate the Classic from the Late Formative that preceded it. Various tendencies that were crystallizing in the last centuries before the Common Era reached fulfillment in the Classic. Two cultures stand out beyond all others. One is that of Teotihuacán, which during the Early Classic played a role in Mesoamerica similar to that which Olmec had performed in the Early Formative. The second is the lowland Maya civilization, which during its six centuries of almost unbroken evolution in the humid forests reached cultural heights never achieved before or since by New World natives. The contrast between the two—one urban and expansionist, the other less urban and non-expansionist—exemplifies well the cultural results of the ecological possibilities offered by highland and lowland Mesoamerica.
Teotihuacán
Teotihuacán, which was located in the Valley of Teotihuacán, a pocketlike extension of the Valley of Mexico on its northeastern side, was probably the largest city of the New World before the arrival of the Spaniards. At its height, toward the close of the 6th century ce, it covered about eight square miles and may have housed more than 150,000 inhabitants. The city was divided into quarters by two great avenues that crosscut each other at right angles, and the entire city was laid out on a grid plan oriented to these avenues. The Avenue of the Dead, the main north–south artery of the city, is aligned to a point 16° east of true north, which may have had astrological meaning.
Because irrigation plays some part in the present-day agricultural economy of the Valley of Teotihuacán, it has been suggested that the Early Classic city also was based upon this subsistence system. It is almost inconceivable, however, that a city of such proportions could have relied upon the food production of its own valley or even upon the Valley of Mexico, whether irrigated or not.
Planning and construction of Teotihuacán began, according to radiocarbon dates, about the beginning of the Common Era, in the Tzacualli phase. At this time, the major avenues were laid out and construction of the major ceremonial structures along the Avenue of the Dead began. Figurines and potsherds extracted from fill inside the 200-foot (61-metre)-high Pyramid of the Sun, the most prominent feature of Teotihuacán, prove that this was erected by the end of the Tzacualli phase. The pyramid rises in four great stages, but there is a fifth and much smaller stage between the third and fourth. An impressive stairway rises dramatically on its west side, facing the Avenue of the Dead. Reexamination suggested the presence of a huge tomb at its base, but this has never been excavated.
Pyramid of the SunPyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán, Mexico.© Dina/Fotolia
Teotihuacán: Pyramid of the MoonPyramid of the Moon, Teotihuacán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Teotihuacán: Pyramid of the MoonPyramid of the Moon at the northern tip of the Avenue of the Dead, Teotihuacán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)On the northern end of the Avenue of the Dead is the Pyramid of the Moon, very similar to that of the Sun but with an additional platform-temple jutting out on the south. This exhibits the talud-tablero architectural motif that is typical of Teotihuacán culture: on each body or tier of a stepped pyramid is a rectangular frontal panel (tablero) supported by a sloping batter (talud). The tablero is surrounded by a kind of projecting frame, and the recessed portion of the panel usually bears a polychrome mural applied to the stuccoed surface.
Near the exact centre of the city and just east of the Avenue of the Dead is the Ciudadela (“Citadel”), a kind of sunken court surrounded on all four sides by platforms supporting temples. In the middle of the sunken plaza is the so-called Temple of Quetzalcóatl, which is dated to the second phase of Teotihuacán, Miccaotli. Along the balustrades of its frontal stairway and undulating along the talud-tablero bodies of each stage of this stepped pyramid are sculptured representations of Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent. Alternating with the Feathered Serpents on the tableros are heads of another monster that can be identified with the Fire Serpent—bearer of the Sun on its diurnal journey across the sky.
QuetzalcóatlQuetzalcóatl, stone carving on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, Teotihuacán, Mexico.© Gordon Galbraith/Shutterstock.com
On either side of the Avenue of the Dead are residential palace compounds (probably occupied by noble families), which also conform to the Teotihuacán master plan. Each is a square, 200 feet (61 metres) on a side, and is surrounded by a wall. The pedestrian would have seen only the high walls facing the streets, pierced by inconspicuous doors. Within the compounds, however, luxury was the rule. Roofs were flat, constructed of large cedar beams overlaid by brush and mortar. Interior walls were plastered and magnificently painted with ritual processions of gods and various mythological narratives. Interconnected apartments were arranged around a large, central, open-air court.
These dwellings were the residences of Teotihuacán’s elite. Toward the periphery of Teotihuacán, however, the social situation may have been quite different. One excavation on the eastern side of the city disclosed a mazelike complex of much tinier and shoddier apartments that recall the poorer sections of Middle Eastern cities. It may be guessed that there lay the crowded dwellings of the artisans and other labourers who made the city what it was. There is also evidence that certain peripheral sections were reserved for foreigners.
Teotihuacán must have been the major manufacturing centre of the Early Classic, for the products of its craftsmen were spread over much of Mesoamerica. The pottery, particularly during the Xolalpan phase, which represents the culmination of Teotihuacán as a city and empire, is highly distinctive. The hallmark of the city is the cylindrical vessel with three slab legs and cover, often stuccoed and then painted with scenes almost identical to those on the walls of buildings. There are also vessels shaped like modern flower vases and cream pitchers. Thin Orange ware is a special ceramic type produced to Teotihuacán specifications, perhaps in southern Veracruz, and exported by its own traders. Figurines were produced by the tens of thousands in pottery molds.
ceramic dog vesselCeramic vessel in the form of a dog, from Teotihuacán, Mexico, 400–500 ce; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Photograph by Beesnest McClain. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Constance McCormick Fearing, AC1998.209.18
Among its many commercial specializations, obsidian was probably preeminent, for the Teotihuacanos had gained control of the mines of green obsidian above the present-day city of Pachuca, in Hidalgo. They also had a local but poorer quality source. Millions of obsidian blades, as well as knives, dart points, and scrapers, were turned out by Teotihuacán workshops for export.
The name Teotihuacán meant “City of the Gods” (or, “Where Men Became Gods”) in Aztec times, and although the city had been largely deserted since its decline, the Aztec royal house made annual pilgrimages to the site. Teotihuacán culture exerted a profound influence on all contemporary and later Mesoamerican cultures. Many Aztec gods, such as Tlaloc, his consort Chalchiuhtlicue, and Quetzalcóatl, were worshiped by the Teotihuacanos. Like the Aztec, the Teotihuacanos generally cremated their dead. In fact, there are so many congruences between Teotihuacán practices and those of the later Toltec and Aztec that some authorities believe them to have been speakers of Nahuatl language and the precursors of those people. Some linguistic authorities, however, believe that the Teotihuacanos spoke a Totonacan language, similar to what was spoken by the inhabitants of central Veracruz. It is not known whether the people of the city, like the Maya, were literate.
Teotihuacán was the greatest city of Mesoamerica, indeed, of all pre-Columbian America. Authorities are divided as to whether it was the capital of a great political empire. Some believe that Teotihuacán’s expansion was carried by force of arms; others believe its power to have been largely economic and religious. In either case, at its height in the 6th century Teotihuacán was the greatest civilization in Mesoamerica, with an influence that far outstripped that of the later Aztec empire. For the archaeologist, the universal spread of Teotihuacán ceramic and other traits constitutes an Early Classic horizon.
Cholula
The broad, fertile plains surrounding the colonial city of Puebla, to the southeast of the snowcapped volcanoes that border the Valley of Mexico, were from very ancient times an important centre of pre-Hispanic population. The modern traveler, approaching the city, sees to its west, in the distance, what looks like a sizable hill rising from the plain. This is actually the pyramid of Cholula, the largest single structure in Mexico before the Spanish conquest.
Archaeological exploration of the Cholula pyramid has shown that it was built from adobe in four great construction stages. In its final form, the pyramid measured 1,083 by 1,034 feet (330 by 315 metres) at the base and was about 82 feet (25 metres) high. By Late Postclassic times the pyramid had been abandoned for so long that the Spaniards who subdued (and massacred) the residents of Cholula considered it a natural prominence. All four superimposed structures within the pyramid were carried out according to strict Teotihuacán architectural ideas. The earliest structure, for instance, has the usual talud-tablero motif, with stylized insectlike figures painted in black, yellow, and red appearing in the tableros. Similar decoration, also in Teotihuacán style, is to be found in the later structures.
Great quantities of ceramics and pottery figurines have been recovered from the excavations, and these demonstrate a near archaeological identity between Early Classic Teotihuacán and Cholula. Because of the staggering size and importance of its pyramid, it has been suggested that Cholula was some kind of sister city to Teotihuacán. Cholula was surely part of the Teotihuacán cultural sphere and may well have participated in the administration of its empire. Excavations at the base of the pyramid have produced a previously unsuspected cultural element. Several enormous slabs were uncovered, two of which were a kind of altar, while the third was set upright as a stela. All are rectangular but with borders carved in low relief in the complex interlace motif that is the hallmark of the Classic Central Veracruz style.
Classic Central Veracruz
The Mesoamerican ball game was played throughout the area and still survives in attenuated form in northwestern Mexico. On the eve of the conquest, games took place in a rectangular court bordered on the long sides by walls with both sloping and vertical rebound surfaces. There were two teams, each composed of a small number of players. The ball was of solid rubber, of substantial size, and traveled with considerable speed around the court. It could not be hit or touched with the open hands or with the feet; most times the player tried to strike it with the hip. Consequently, fairly heavy protective padding was necessary to avoid injuries, which in some cases were fatal. Leather padding was worn over the hips, and pads were placed on the elbows and knees. A heavy belt was tied around the waist built up from wood and leather, while in some parts of the Maya region and in Late Formative Oaxaca, gloves and something resembling jousting helmets were worn.
hachaTotonac axe (hacha) made of andesite, from Veracruz, Mexico, 700–900 ce; in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.Photograph by Joel Parham. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Phil Berg Collection, M.71.73.182
The Classic Central Veracruz style is almost purely devoted to the paraphernalia of the ball game and to the ball courts themselves. At the site of El Tajín, which persisted through the end of the Late Classic, elaborate reliefs on the walls of the courts furnish details on how this equipment was used. Yugos (“yokes”) were the stone counterparts of the heavy protective belts. During the post-game ceremonies, which may have featured the sacrifice of the captain and other players on the losing side, these U-shaped objects were worn about the waists of the participants. On the front of the yugo was placed an upright stone object that may originally have functioned as a ball-court marker and that took two forms: hachas (“axes”), or thin stone heads, and palmas (“palms”). All are carved in an elaborate low-relief style in which life forms are enmeshed in undulating and interlaced scroll designs with raised borders. All of these items, and the style itself, may have evolved out of late Olmec art on the Gulf coast.
Very often the yugos represent the marine toad, a huge amphibian with swollen poison glands on the head; in its jaws is a human head. The earliest hachas, which were characteristically notched to fit on the yugos, were quite thick human heads and may well date to the Late Formative or Proto-Classic. In time, these become very thin and represent human heads wearing animal headgear. Palmas are paddle-shaped stone objects with trilobed bases and exhibit a much richer subject matter than either hachas or yugos, quite often illustrating brutal scenes of sacrifice and death, two concepts that were closely associated with the ball game on the Gulf coast.
Despite the definite presence of the style at Teotihuacán and Cholula, Classic Central Veracruz is focused upon north central Veracruz, where the type site of El Tajín is located, and contiguous parts of Puebla. Today, this region is dominated by speakers of Totonac, a distant relative of Mayan, and the Totonac themselves claim that they built El Tajín. Whether or not Classic Central Veracruz culture was a Totonac achievement, the style persisted through the Classic period and strongly influenced developments in distant regions.
Southern Veracruz
On the southern Gulf coast plain, Olmec traditions seemed to have lasted into the Early Classic and merged with Teotihuacán artistic canons to produce new kinds of art. Cerro de las Mesas, lying in the plains of the Papaloápan River not far from the coast, is one of these hybrid sites. Dozens of earthen mounds are scattered over the surface in a seemingly haphazard manner, and the archaeological sequence is long and complex. The site reached its apogee in the Early Classic, when the stone monuments for which it is best known were carved. Most important are a number of stelae, some of which are carved in a low-relief style recalling Late Formative Tres Zapotes, early lowland Maya, and Cotzumalhuapa (on the Pacific coast of Guatemala).
Cerro de las Mesas pottery, deposited in rich burial offerings of the Early Classic, is highly Teotihuacanoid, with slab-legged tripods predominating. At this and other sites in southern Veracruz, potters also fashioned large, hollow, handmade figures of the gods. An especially fine representation of the Old Fire God was found at Cerro de las Mesas. The most spectacular discovery, however, was a cache of some 800 jade objects. Many of the specimens in this treasure trove are of Olmec workmanship, obviously heirlooms from the much earlier Olmec civilization, while some are clearly Early Classic Maya.
The entire coastal plain from Cerro de las Mesas north to the borders of Classic Central Veracruz culture is famed for Remojadas-style pottery figurines, which must have been turned out in incredible quantity for use as burial goods. The Remojadas tradition dates to the Late Formative and lasts until the Early Postclassic. Figurines are hollow and largely mold-made in the Late Classic, while they were fashioned by hand in the Early Classic. The best-known Classic representations are the “smiling figures” of grinning boys and girls wearing loincloths, skirts, or nothing at all. All kinds of genre scenes are represented, including even lovers in swings, as well as more grim activities such as the heart sacrifice of victims tied down in what look like beds.
Classic Monte Albán
The cultural phases designated as Monte Albán III-A and III-B mark the Classic occupation of this major site in the Valley of Oaxaca. There can be little doubt that the people of Monte Albán were Zapotec speakers, who during Classic times had unequaled opportunity to develop their civilization unaffected by the major troubles that disturbed Teotihuacán and the Maya at the close of the Early Classic. Instead of the 18 or 19 sites known for the valley during the Late Formative, there now were more than 200, a testimony to Zapotec prosperity.
The Monte Albán Classic Period (III-A and III-B) lasted from 250 to 700 ce. During the earlier (III-A) part of the period (250–450) the site shows considerable influence from Teotihuacán. The Early Postclassic Period at Monte Albán (IV; 700–1000) was a time of significant cultural change; it is still uncertain, however, whether the Mixtec replaced the Zapotec at that time.
The Classic site of Monte Albán is quite spectacular. Stone-faced platforms are fronted by stairways with flanking balustrades and exhibit a close counterpart of the talud-tablero motif of Teotihuacán. The temple superstructures had colonnaded doorways and flat beam-and-mortar roofs. One of the best-preserved ball courts of Mesoamerica can be seen at Monte Albán, with a ground plan fashioned in the form of a capital I. Spectators watched the game from stone grandstands above the sloping playing surfaces.
Subsurface tombs were dug in many parts of the site as the last resting places of Monte Albán’s elite. The finest are actually miniature replicas of the larger temples on the surface, complete with facade and miniature painted rooms. The style of the funerary wall paintings is quite close to Teotihuacán, in which areas of flat colour are contained within very finely painted lines in red or black. Teotihuacán presence can also be seen in the finer pottery of Classic Monte Albán, but the manufacture is local as can be proved from the predominance of the fine gray ware that has always typified Monte Albán.
The tradition of literacy dates to Monte Albán I. By Classic times, inscriptions are abundant, appearing on stelae, lintels, slabs used as doors, and wall paintings. The 52-year Calendar Round was the only form of writing dates. The subject matter of these inscriptions can be related to the scenes that they accompany: quite often it is a bound captive standing on a place-glyph, presumably an enemy leader taken in war—an old Monte Albán preoccupation.
The Zapotec of Monte Albán, like the Maya, never exerted much cultural or other pressure on peoples beyond their lands. They did, however, control lands from the Tehuacán Valley in Puebla as far south as the Pacific shore of Oaxaca. Whether they themselves were also controlled by Teotihuacán has not been demonstrated.
Monte Albán: ancient Zapotec reliefAncient Zapotec relief at Monte Albán, Oaxaca state, Mexico.© Dmitry Rukhlenko/Shutterstock.com
The Maya highlands and Pacific coast
Little is known about the Guatemalan highlands between the demise of the Late Formative Miraflores culture and the onset of the Early Classic. But at the ancient site of Kaminaljuyú, on the western side of Guatemala City, a group of invaders from Teotihuacán built a miniature replica of their capital city. This happened about 400 ce, when Teotihuacán was at the height of its power.
This implanted Teotihuacán culture is called Esperanza. Mexican architects must have accompanied the elite, for Kaminaljuyú structures copy the older prototypes down to the last detail, including the support of the lower moldings around tableros with slate slabs. The abundant volcanic building stone, however, so freely used at Teotihuacán, was not present, so that Esperanza temple platforms are built from clay instead.
Each temple platform was rebuilt several times, the later structures being raised over the earlier. Within the stairways fronting each successive platform a great leader was buried. The rich burial furniture in the tombs is informative, for it included three classes of goods: (1) items such as Thin Orange pottery manufactured in Teotihuacán or in one of its satellite areas, (2) hybrid Teotihuacán-Maya pottery and other objects, probably made in Kaminaljuyú, and (3) pottery imported from Petén and of Early Classic Maya manufacture. Also discovered in one tomb was a slate mirror carved in Classic Central Veracruz style. Jade objects occur in abundance in the Esperanza tombs, and in one structure an enormous boulder was recovered; it had been imported from the Maya source along the Motagua River in the southeastern lowlands. The Esperanza elite were enormously wealthy.
What were they doing in the Maya highlands in the first place? Were they an army of imperial conquest? Or were their interests more in the realm of trade? Or both? It is not possible to be definite in these interpretations; but it is known that among the Aztec of the Late Postclassic there was an institution called the pochteca, a hereditary guild of armed merchants who traveled into distant lands looking for luxury goods to bring back to the royal house. Quite often the pochteca would seize lands of hostile peoples through which they passed, or they would provoke incidents that led to the intervention of the regular Aztec army.
It has been suggested that the Teotihuacanos in Kaminaljuyú were also pochteca. They had clear access to the Petén-Yucatán Peninsula and may have exercised political control over it. Kaminaljuyú may have been one of their principal bases of operations in the inclusion of the Maya, both highland and lowland, within the Teotihuacán state.
Within a zone only 75 miles long and 30 miles wide, on the Pacific coast plain of Guatemala, is a cluster of nine compactly built ceremonial centres that together form the Cotzumalhuapa civilization. It forms a puzzle, for there are strong affiliations with most other contemporary civilizations in Mesoamerica. Stylistic influence from the lowland Maya, Classic Central Veracruz, and Teotihuacán can be detected among others. While Cotzumalhuapa took form by the Early Classic, it continued into the Late Classic; but there are great problems in dating individual sculptures.
The problem of Cotzumalhuapa has been linked with that of the Pipil, a shadowy people living in the same region on the eve of the Spanish conquest, who spoke Nahua rather than Maya. It is possible that these Classic sites were actually Pipil capitals, but the case cannot be proved. There is some hieroglyphic writing on Cotzumalhuapa sculptures, mainly dates within what seems to be a 52-year Calendar Round, the glyphs for days being Mexican rather than Maya. There are no real texts, then, to help with the problem.
Classic civilization in the Maya lowlands: Tzakol phase
Archaeologists have divided the entire area occupied by speakers of Mayan languages into three subregions: (1) the Southern Subregion, essentially the highlands and Pacific Coast of Guatemala, (2) the Central Subregion, which includes the department of Petén in northern Guatemala and the immediately adjacent lowlands to the east and west, and (3) the Northern Subregion, consisting of the Yucatán Peninsula north of Petén proper. Between 250 and 900 the most brilliant civilization ever seen in the New World flourished in the forested lowlands of the Central and Northern subregions.
Lowland Maya civilization falls into two chronological phases or cultures: Tzakol culture, which is Early Classic and began shortly before 250 ce, and the Late Classic Tepeu culture, which saw the full florescence of Maya achievements. Tepeu culture began about 600 and ended with the final downfall and abandonment of the Central Subregion about 900. (These dates, based on the correlation of the Long Count system of the Maya calendar with the Gregorian calendar, are the most generally accepted; but there is a slight chance that a rival correlation espoused by the American archaeologist Herbert J. Spinden may be correct, which would make these dates 260 years earlier.)
One of the earliest objects inscribed with the fully developed Maya calendar is the Leiden Plate, a jade plaque, now housed in the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands, depicting a richly arrayed Maya lord trampling a captive underfoot. On its reverse side is a Long Count date corresponding to 320. Although it was found in a very late site on the Caribbean coast, stylistic evidence suggests that the Leiden Plate was made at Tikal, in the heart of northern Petén. In the mid-20th century the University of Pennsylvania’s ambitious field program at the Tikal site produced Stela 29, erected 28 years before, in 292. Both objects and, in fact, almost all early Tzakol monuments draw heavily upon a heritage from the older Izapan civilization of the Late Formative, with its highly baroque, narrative stylistic content.
Because of the Maya penchant for covering older structures with later ones, Tzakol remains in the Central Subregion have to be laboriously dug out from their towering Late Classic overburdens. Nevertheless, it is clear that at sites like Tikal, Uaxactún, and Holmul, Maya civilization had reached something close to its final form. Enormous ceremonial centres were crowded with masonry temples and “palaces” facing onto spacious plazas covered with white stucco. The use of the corbel vault for spanning rooms—a trait unique to the lowland Maya—was by this time universal. Stelae and altars (a legacy from Izapa) are carved with dates and embellished with human figures and perhaps gods. Polychrome pottery, the finest examples of which were sealed in the tombs of honoured personages, emphasizes stylized designs of cranes, flying parrots, gods, and men. These often occur on bowls with a kind of apron or basal flange encircling the lower vessel. Along with these purely Maya ceramics are vessels that show the imprint of distant Teotihuacán: the cylindrical vase supported by three slab legs, the “cream pitcher,” and the florero (“flower vase”).
Wall painting had already reached a high degree of perfection in the Central Subregion, as attested by an extremely fine mural at Uaxactún depicting a palace scene in which two important lords confer with each other. This mural art is quite different from that of Teotihuacán, being very naturalistic instead of formal and including a definite interest in portraiture. Nonetheless, excavations in Petén sites have shown that Teotihuacán influence was quite pervasive. From Tikal, for example, comes Stela 31, depicting a richly garbed Maya lord, festooned with jade ornaments, standing between two warriors from Teotihuacán. These foreigners carry shields that bear the visage of the Teotihuacán rain god, Tlaloc. It is certain that there was a three-way trading relationship between Tikal, Kaminaljuyú, and Teotihuacán in Early Classic times.
Thus, the Teotihuacán involvement with Tikal and the Central Subregion may have taken, as at Kaminaljuyú, the form of pochteca trading colonies that exerted some control over the lowland Maya. The lord on Stela 31 may have been a puppet ruler manipulated by tough merchant-warriors. Teotihuacán as a city and capital of an empire began to weaken toward the close of the 6th century. It could therefore be expected that the disruptions that effectively ended the life of the great Mexican capital would be reflected in the Maya area. This is exactly the case. In the Guatemalan highlands, Kaminaljuyú declined rapidly after 600 ce, and the entire Southern Subregion was to play little part in Maya culture until the Late Postclassic. The lowland Maya suffered some temporary reverses; few stelae were erected between 534 and 692, and there is evidence that existing monuments were mutilated.
Late Classic non-Maya Mesoamerica (600–900)
The cultural situation in Late Classic Mesoamerica is the reverse of that prevailing in the Early Classic: Central Mexico now played only a minor role, while the lowland Maya reached their intellectual and artistic heights. In contrast to the old Teotihuacanos, however, the Maya were not expansionistic. It is true that Maya cultural influence has been detected along the Gulf coast and in the states of Morelos and Tlaxcala—as in the painted murals of Cacaxtla in the latter state—but it is unlikely that this was the result of a military takeover. The outcome of this state of affairs, with no one people powerful enough or sufficiently interested in dominating others, was a political and cultural fragmentation of Mesoamerica after 600. It was not until the great Toltec invasions of the Early Postclassic that anything approaching an empire was to be seen again.
The decline in fortunes of the Valley of Mexico, and especially of Teotihuacán, cannot now be explained. Climatic deterioration, resulting in drier conditions and thus a diminished subsistence potential, may have been a factor.
Nevertheless, Teotihuacán was never completely abandoned, even though its great palaces had been burned to the ground and its major temples abandoned. People continued to live in some sections, but their houses were mere hovels compared to the dwellings of the Early Classic. In general, the Valley of Mexico was a cultural and political vacuum in Late Classic times.
One of the very few centres of the Late Classic in central Mexico that amounted to much was Xochicalco, in Morelos. Strategically located on top of a hill that was completely reworked with artificial terraces and ramparts, Xochicalco was obviously highly defensible, an indication of the unsettled times then prevailing in central Mexico. The site shows a bewildering variety of cultural influences, particularly Maya. The principal structure of Xochicalco is a temple substructure of masonry that is completely carved in relief with undulating Feathered Serpents, indicating that it was dedicated to the cult of Quetzalcóatl. All indications are that Xochicalco was a cosmopolitan and very powerful centre, perhaps the most influential west of Veracruz and northwest of the Maya area. It was literate and civilized at a time when most other parts of central Mexico were in cultural eclipse.
XochicalcoRuins at Xochicalco, near Cuernavaca, Mexico.Ted McGrath (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The Late Classic occupation of Oaxaca, especially of the Valley of Oaxaca, is designated as Monte Albán III-B (450–700). The Mixtec invasions of the valley probably began in earnest around 900. The Mixtec occupied the hilly, northern part of Oaxaca; their records, which extend to the 7th century, show them to have been organized into a series of petty states headed by aggressive, warlike kings. By the Postclassic, they had become the dominant force throughout Oaxaca and in part of Puebla.
The tendencies in central Veracruz art and architecture that began in the Late Formative culminated in the Late Classic at the great centre of El Tajín, placed among jungle-covered hills in a region occupied by the Totonac, whose capital this may well have been. Its most imposing structure is the Pyramid of the Niches, named for the approximately 365 recesses on its four sides. In this and other buildings at El Tajín, the dominant architectural motif is the step-and-fret. There are a number of other temple pyramids at the site, as well as palacelike buildings with flat, concrete roofs, a tour de force of Mesoamerican engineering knowledge. El Tajín’s three major ball courts are remarkably important for the reliefs carved on their vertical playing surfaces, for these give valuable information on the religious connotations of the sacred game. Like Xochicalco, El Tajín was in some way linked to the destiny of the lowland Maya, and the collapse of Maya civilization around 900 may have been reflected in the demise of the Veracruz centre.
Further down the Gulf coast plain, the Remojadas tradition of hollow pottery figurines continued to be active in the Late Classic, with a particularly large production of the mysterious smiling figures of dancing boys and girls, which were intended as funerary offerings. But in addition, there was a great deal of pottery and figurines that were fashioned under very strong Maya influence. In fact, much of southern Veracruz at this time was a cultural extension of the lowland Maya. There is no indication, however, that these peoples had any acquaintance with Maya literacy or with Maya building techniques.
Late Classic Lowland Maya (600–900)
Settlement pattern
There is still controversy over whether the Late Classic sites built by the lowland Maya were actually cities or whether they were relatively empty ceremonial centres staffed only by rulers and their entourages. The common people built their simple pole-and-thatch dwellings on low earthen mounds to keep them dry during the summer rains. Thus, total mapping of a particular site should always include not only masonry structures but house mounds as well. Several Maya sites have been so mapped. The mightiest Maya centre of all, Tikal in northern Petén, has a total of about 3,000 structures ranging from the tiny mounds up to gigantic temple pyramids; these are contained, however, within an area of six square miles. The Tikal population has been estimated from this survey to be 10,000–11,000 people, but perhaps as many as 75,000 within an even wider area could have belonged to Tikal.
This sounds very much like a city, but the evidence actually can be differently interpreted. First, at the time of the conquest the Maya generally buried their dead beneath the floors of houses, which were then abandoned. Thus, an increase in number of house mounds could just as easily indicate a declining population in which the death rate exceeded the birth rate. Second, the appearance of even such a tremendous centre as Tikal is quite different from that of such true cities as Teotihuacán. An ordinary Maya family typically occupied two or three houses arranged around a rectangular open space. These were grouped into unplanned hamlets near good water and rich, well-drained soils. A survey of Petén has shown that for every 50 to 100 dwellings there was a minor ceremonial centre; this unit has been called a zone. Several zones formed a district for which a major centre like Tikal acted as the ceremonial and political nucleus. Neither Tikal nor any other such centre shows signs of town planning or neatly laid out streets.
Tikal, Guatemala: Jaguar, Temple of theTemple of the Jaguar atop Pyramid I at Tikal, Guatemala.Dennis Jarvis (CC-BY-2.0) (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
There are also ecological factors that must have set certain limits upon the potential for urban life in the Maya lowlands. Slash-and-burn cultivation would have made for widely settled populations; and, as has been argued, the uniformity of the lowland Maya environment would have worked against the growth of strong interregional trade, always a factor in urban development. Yet these statements must be qualified. It is known that raised-field, or chinampa-type, farming was used in many places and at many times in the Maya lowlands. This would have allowed for greater population concentration. It is also known that there was a brisk trade in some commodities from one lowland Maya region to another.
What, then, can be concluded about lowland Maya urbanism? Clearly, the urban form, even at a metropolis such as Tikal, was not as large or as formally developed as it was at highland Teotihuacán. At the same time, a centre whose rulers could draw upon the coordinated efforts of 75,000 people must inevitably have had some of the functions of a true city—in governance, religion, and trade, as well as in the development of the arts and intellectual life.
Major sites
While there are some important differences between the architecture of the Central and Northern subregions during the Late Classic, there are many features shared between them. A major Maya site generally includes several types of masonry buildings, usually constructed by facing a cement-and-rubble core with blocks or thin slabs of limestone. Temple pyramids are the most impressive, rising in a series of great platforms to the temple superstructure above the forests. The rooms, coated with white stucco, are often little more than narrow slots because of the confining nature of the corbeled vaults, but this was probably intentional, to keep esoteric ceremonies from the public.
The so-called palaces of Maya sites differ only from the temple pyramids in that they are lower and contain a great many rooms. Their purpose still eludes discovery; many scholars doubt that they really served as palaces, for the rooms are damp and uncomfortable, and there is little or no evidence of permanent occupation. The temples and palaces are generally arranged around courts, often with inscribed stelae and altars arranged in rows before them. Leading from the central plazas are great stone causeways, the function of which was probably largely ceremonial. Other features of lowland sites (but not universal) are sweathouses, ball courts, and probably marketplaces.
Tikal, Guatemala: Jaguar, Temple of theTemple of the Jaguar atop Pyramid I at Tikal, Guatemala.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Tikal, Guatemala: Masks, Temple of theTemple of the Masks atop Pyramid II at Tikal, Guatemala.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Tikal, Guatemala: Masks, Temple of theTemple of the Masks atop Pyramid II at Tikal, Guatemala.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)There are more than 50 known sites that deserve to be called major. Most are in the Central Subregion, with probably the greatest concentration in northern Petén, where Maya civilization had its deepest roots. Tikal is the largest and best-known Classic site of the Central Subregion. It is dominated by six lofty temple pyramids, one of which is some 230 feet (70 metres) high, the tallest structure ever raised by the Mesoamerican Indians. Lintels of sapodilla wood still span the doorways of the temple superstructures and are carved with reliefs of Maya lords enthroned amid scenes of great splendour. Some extraordinary Late Classic tombs have been discovered at Tikal, the most important of which produced a collection of bone tubes and strips delicately incised with scenes of gods and men. Ten large reservoirs, partly or entirely artificial, supplied the scarce drinking water for the residents of Tikal.
Other important sites of northern Petén include Uaxactún, Naranjo, Nakum, and Holmul. To the southeast of Petén are two Maya centres—Copán and Quiriguá—that show notable differences with the Petén sites. Copán is located above a tributary of the Motagua River in western Honduras in a region now rich in tobacco. Its architects and sculptors had a ready supply of a greenish volcanic tuff far superior to the Petén limestone. Thus, Copán architecture is embellished with gloriously baroque figures of gods, and its stelae and other monuments are carved with an extraordinary virtuosity. Copán also has one of the most perfectly preserved ball courts in Mesoamerica. Quiriguá is a much smaller site 30 miles north of Copán. While its architectural remains are on a minor scale, it is noted for its gigantic stelae and altars carved from sandstone.
The principal watercourse on the western side of the Central Subregion is the Usumacinta River, originating in the Guatemalan highlands and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. For much of its course the Usumacinta is lined with such great Maya ceremonial centres as Piedras Negras and Yaxchilán. Even more renowned is Bonampak, a satellite of Yaxchilán located on a tributary of the Usumacinta. The discovery in 1946 of the magnificent murals embellishing the rooms of an otherwise modest structure astounded the archaeological world. From floors to vault capstones, its stuccoed walls were covered with highly realistic polychrome scenes of a jungle battle, the arraignment of prisoners, and victory ceremonies. These shed an entirely new light on the nature of Maya society, which up until then had been considered peaceful.
Mayan fresco from Bonampak, in Chiapas, Mex., original c. 800 ce, 20th-century reconstruction by Antonio Tejeda. Ygunza/FPG
Palenque: palaceRuins of the palace at Palenque, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Palenque, Mexico: palaceInterior of the palace at Palenque, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Palenque: Temple of the InscriptionsTemple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Palenque, MexicoTemple of the Sun (background), with the steps of the Temple of the Cross (foreground, right), at Palenque, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Palenque, MexicoTemple of the Inscriptions (rear) and Temple XIII (foreground) at Palenque, Chiapas state, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)In the hills just above the floodplain of the Usumacinta lies Palenque, usually considered to be the most beautiful of Maya sites. The architects of Palenque designed graceful temple pyramids and “palaces” with mansard-type roofs, embellished with delicate stucco reliefs of rulers, gods, and ceremonies. The principal structure is the Palace, a veritable labyrinth of galleries with interior courts; over it looms a four-story square tower that may have served as both lookout and observatory. A small stream flowing through the site was carried underneath the Palace by a long, corbel-vaulted tunnel. The temples of the Cross, Foliated Cross, and Sun were all built on the same plan, the back room of each temple having a kind of sanctuary designed like the temple of which it was a part. It can be supposed that all three temples served the same cult. The most extraordinary feature of Palenque, however, was the great funerary crypt discovered in 1952 deep within the Temple of the Inscriptions. Within a sarcophagus in the crypt were the remains of an unusually tall ruler, accompanied by the richest offering of jade ever seen in a Maya tomb. Over his face had been fitted a mask of jade mosaic, while a treasure trove of jade adorned his body.
Northward from the Central Subregion, in the drier and flatter environment of the Yucatán Peninsula, the character of lowland Maya civilization changes. Just north of Petén is the Río Bec zone, as yet little explored but noted for temple pyramids and palaces with flanking false towers fronted by unclimbable “stairways” reaching dummy “rooms” with blank entrances. Río Bec structures are carved with fantastic serpents in deep relief, a feature that becomes even more pronounced in the Chenes country to the northwest, in the modern state of Campeche. At Chenes sites, Maya architects constructed frontal portals surrounded by the jaws of sky serpents and faced entire buildings with a riot of baroquely carved grotesques and spirals.
This elaborate ornamentation of buildings is far more restrained and orderly in the style called Puuc, so named from a string of low hills extending up from western Campeche into the state of Yucatán. The Puuc sites were for the Northern Subregion what the Petén sites were for the Central, for they are very numerous and clearly were the focal point for Maya artistic and intellectual culture. Uxmal is the most important Puuc ceremonial centre and an architectural masterpiece. It has all of the characteristics of the Puuc style: facings of thin squares of limestone veneer over a cement-and-rubble core; boot-shaped vault stones; decorated cornices around columns in doorways; engaged or half-columns repeated in long rows; and lavish use of stone mosaics in upper facades, emphasizing sky-serpent faces with long, hook-shaped noses, as well as frets and latticelike designs of crisscrossed elements.
Ruins of one of the main buildings of the ancient Mayan city of Chichén Itzá, south-central Yucatán state, Mex.© spiritofamerica/Fotolia
Kabah: Codz PopSculpted figures on the east facade of Codz Pop (also called Palace of the Masks) at Kabah, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Kabah: El PalacioEl Palacio (“The Palace”) at Kabah, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Kabah: El PalacioEl Palacio (“The Palace”) at Kabah, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
KabahMayan ruins at Kabah, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)The nearby centre of Kabah, connected to Uxmal by a ceremonial causeway, has an extraordinary palace completely faced with masks of the Sky Serpent. Other major Puuc sites are Sayil, with a multistoried palace, and Labná. The Puuc style reaches east across the Yucatán Peninsula, for at Chichén Itzá, a great site that was to occupy centre stage during the Toltec occupation of the Northern Subregion, there are several buildings strongly Puuc in character.
Puuc sites may be said to represent a lowland Maya “New Empire” in the sense that their apogee occurred in the 9th and 10th centuries, a time during which the great Petén, or Central Subregion, centres were in decline or had collapsed. Just how late Puuc sites remained active, with major constructions being dedicated, remains something of a question. About 1000 a major change took place in northern Yucatán. It was marked by the construction of a number of Toltec-style temples and palaces at Chichén Itzá, a site that also has many Puuc-style edifices. It is not known if Toltec Chichén Itzá existed contemporaneously with such Puuc sites as Uxmal and Labná, and if so, for how long. Eventually, Chichén Itzá appears to have dominated northern Yucatán, lasting well into the Postclassic Period (about 1250). Questions also surround the bringers of Toltec-style architecture to Chichén Itzá. They may have been either central Mexican Toltecs or Gulf coast peoples who probably were Maya-speakers and who had adopted central-Mexican ways. In this connection, it should be noted that Puuc sites were under several influences from Gulf-coast Mexico, particularly from central Veracruz.
Maya art of the Late Classic
Maya art, at the height of its development, was fundamentally unlike any other in Mesoamerica, for it was highly narrative, baroque, and often extremely cluttered, unlike the more austere styles found elsewhere. It is essentially a painterly rather than sculptural tradition, and it is quite likely that even stone reliefs were first designed by painters. Much of this art has disappeared for all time because of the ravages of the wet, tropical environment on such perishable materials as wood, painted gourds, feathers, bark, and other substances. There must have been thousands of bark-paper codices, not one of which has survived from Classic times.
Mayan vesselMayan vessel with mythological scene, ceramic, Guatemala, 8th century; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.Photograph by Katie Chao. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1968 (1978.412.206)
Following the downfall of Teotihuacán, Maya artists were free to go their own way. Magnificently carved stelae and accompanying altars are found at most major sites, the greatest achievement in this line being found at Copán, where something approaching three-dimensional carving was the rule. Palenque and Yaxchilán specialized in graceful bas-reliefs placed as tablets or lintels in temple pyramids and palaces. In the Northern Subregion, however, the sculptor’s art was definitely inferior in scope and quality and shows strong influence from alien, non-Maya cultures.
A few wooden objects have somehow survived. Particularly noteworthy are the massive wooden lintels of Tikal, with scenes of lords and their guardian deities, accompanied by lengthy hieroglyphic texts. In ancient times, wood carvings must have been vastly more common than sculptures. The wet climate has also destroyed innumerable examples of mural art.
Maya pottery can be divided into two groups: (1) the pots and pans of everyday life, usually undecorated but sometimes with geometric designs, and (2) grave offerings. Vessels meant to accompany the honoured dead were usually painted or carved with naturalistic and often macabre scenes. To achieve polychrome effects of great brilliance, the Maya potters painted in semitranslucent slips over a light background, then fired the vessels at a very low temperature. Relief carving was carried out when the vessels were leather-hard, just before firing.
The most precious substance of all to the Maya was jade, to which their craftsmen devoted great artistry. Jade was mainly fashioned into thin plaques, carved in relief, or into beads. In the absence of metal tools, jade was worked by applying abrasives and water with cane or perhaps other pieces of jade.
The Maya calendar and writing system
It is their intellectual life that established the cultural superiority of the Maya over all other American Indians. Much of this was based upon a calendrical system that was partly shared with other Mesoamerican groups but that they perfected into a tool capable of recording important historical and astronomical information. Most Maya inscriptions that have been interpreted are calendrical inscriptions. Since the late 1950s it has been learned that the content of Classic Maya inscriptions was far more secular than had been supposed. For many years specialists believed that the inscriptions recorded little more than the passage of time and that, in fact, the Maya were time worshipers; but it has been shown that certain inscriptions recorded the birth, accession, marriage, and military victories of ruling dynasties. One very significant advance in following dynastic histories and plotting political territoriality was the discovery in 1958 of “emblem glyphs,” symbols standing for royal lineages and their domains.
Yet it would be misleading to contend that the hurly-burly of Maya court affairs and conquests was all that mattered, for some texts must have been sacred and god-oriented. At Palenque, in the similar temples of the Cross, Foliated Cross, and Sun, the dates inscribed on the tablets in the sanctuaries fall into three groups. The very latest seem to refer to events in the lives of reigning monarchs. An earlier group must deal with distant but real ancestors of those kings, while the very earliest fall in the 4th millennium bce and apparently describe the birth of important gods to whom the respective temples were dedicated and who may have been regarded as the progenitors of Palenque’s royal house.
The meaning of many non-calendrical signs and even of complete clauses is not known, but there is a difference between this and assigning an actual Maya word to an ancient glyph or a sentence to a glyphic clause. While it is certain that the language of the Classic inscriptions was Mayan, it is also certain that it was more archaic than any of the Mayan languages spoken at the time of the conquest, six centuries after the Classic downfall. The four extant Maya codices—the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, the Dresden Codex, and the Grolier Codex—none dating earlier than 1100, contain a strong phonetic component, in fact a kind of syllabary, which can be successfully read as Yucatec Maya, but the Classic peoples of the Central Subregion more likely spoke an ancestor of the Cholan branch of Maya. Furthermore, Maya hieroglyphic writing covers the entire span from about 250 ce to the conquest, during which time both the language or languages and the writing system itself must have undergone extensive evolution.
In writing systems in general, there is usually a development from pictographic signs, in which a picture stands for a word or concept, through logographic systems, in which words are still the basic unit but phoneticism is employed to reduce ambiguities (as in Chinese), to phonetic syllabaries, and finally to alphabets. Probably most Classic Maya hieroglyphs are logograms with a mainly ideographic orientation, and it seems that there was a considerable degree of flexibility in how the words and sentences could be written. By the Postclassic, this had been codified into a much more rigid system closely resembling that of Japanese, in which a well-defined syllabary can supplement or even replace logograms. There are approximately 300 to 500 logograms in Classic Maya (the number varies according to how one separates affixes from so-called main signs), but it will probably be many years before the majority of these are satisfactorily deciphered. Great progress, however, has been made in unraveling their meaning in specific contexts. Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey
Maya mathematics included two outstanding developments: positional numeration and a zero. These may rightly be deemed among the most brilliant achievements of the human mind. The same may also be said of ancient Maya astronomy. The duration of the solar year had been calculated with amazing accuracy, as well as the synodical revolution of Venus. The Dresden Codex contains very precise Venusian and lunar tables and a method of predicting solar eclipses.
Maya chronology consisted of three main elements: a 260-day sacred year (tzolkin) formed by the combination of 13 numbers (1 to 13) and 20 day names; a solar year (haab), divided into 18 months of 20 days numbered from 0 to 19, followed by a five-day unlucky period (Uayeb); and a series of cycles—uinal (20 kins, or days), tun (360 days), katun (7,200 days), baktun (144,000 days), with the highest cycle being the alautun of 23,040,000,000 days. All Middle American civilizations used the two first counts, which permitted officials accurately to determine a date within a period defined as the least common multiple of 260 and 365: 18,980 days, or 52 years.
The Classic Maya Long Count inscriptions enumerate the cycles that have elapsed since a zero date in 3114 bce. Thus, “9.6.0.0.0,” a katun-ending date, means that nine baktuns and six katuns have elapsed from the zero date to the day 2 Ahau 13 Tzec (May 9, 751 ce). To those Initial Series were added the Supplementary Series (information about the lunar month) and the Secondary Series, a calendar-correction formula that brought the conventional date in harmony with the true position of the day in the solar year.
Both Classic and recent Maya held the tzolkin as the most sacred means of divination, enabling the priests to detect the favourable or evil influences attached to every day according to the esoteric significance of the numbers and the day-signs. Jacques Soustelle
Classic Maya religion
It has been denied that there was any such thing as a pantheon of deities in Classic times, the idea being that the worship of images was introduced by the Toltec or Itzá invaders, or both, in the Postclassic. Several gods who played significant roles in the Postclassic codices, however, can be identified on earlier Maya monuments. The most important of these is Itzamná, the supreme Maya deity, who functioned as the original creator god, as well as lord of the fire and therefore of the hearth. In his serpent form he appears on the ceremonial bar held in the arms of Maya rulers on Classic stelae. Another ophidian deity recognizable in Classic reliefs is the Feathered Serpent, known to the Maya as Kukulcán (and to the Toltecs and Aztecs as Quetzalcóatl). Probably the most ubiquitous of all is the being known as Bolon Tzacab (first called God K by archaeologists), a deity with a baroquely branching nose who is thought to have functioned as a god of royal descent; he is often held as a kind of sceptre in rulers’ hands.
The Classic Maya lavished great attention on their royal dead, who almost surely were thought of as descended from the gods and partaking of their divine essence. Many reliefs and all of the pictorial pottery found in tombs deal with the underworld and the dangerous voyage of the soul through that land. Classic Maya funerary ceramics show that this dark land was ruled by a number of gods, including several sinister old men often embellished with jaguar emblems, the jaguar being associated with the night and the nether regions.
The Classic, as well as the Postclassic, Maya practiced human sacrifice, although not on the scale of the Aztecs. The victims were probably captives, including defeated rulers and nobles. Self-sacrifice or self-mutilation was also common; blood drawn by jabbing spines through the ear or penis, or by drawing a thorn-studded cord through the tongue, was spattered on paper or otherwise collected as an offering to the gods. Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey
The four main categories of documents that provide knowledge of the Maya civilization and its religion are: archaeological remains; native books in hieroglyphic writing; books in native languages written in Latin script by learned Indians; and early accounts written in Spanish by conquerors or priests.
From surviving temples, tombs, sculpture, wall paintings, pottery, and carved jades, shells, and bone, a significant amount of valuable information can be gained—e.g., representations of godheads and ritual scenes. Perhaps the most important archaeological source, however, is the hieroglyphic texts carved on stone monuments or stone or bone artifacts and painted on pottery. These, insofar as they can be translated, provide descriptions of ceremonies and beliefs.
Four native hieroglyphic books of pre-Columbian date survived the Spanish conquest. The Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices are named for the cities in which three of the codices are now housed. The Grolier Codex is named for the Grolier Club in New York City, where the fragment was first displayed to 20th-century scholars. It is housed in Mexico City. Written on bark paper, these codices deal with astronomical calculations, divination, and ritual. They appear to be Postclassic copies of earlier Classic originals.
The corn god (left) and the rain god, Chac, drawing from the Madrid Codex (Codex Tro-Cortesianus), one of the Mayan sacred books; in the Museo de América, Madrid.Courtesy of the Museo de America, Madrid
After the Spanish conquest, books were written by learned Indians who transcribed or summarized hieroglyphic records. Such is the case of the Books of Chilam Balam" class="md-crosslink">Books of Chilam Balam, in Yucatec Maya, and of the Popol Vuh" class="md-crosslink">Popol Vuh, in K’iche’, a highland Maya language. The former consist of historical chronicles mixed with myth, divination, and prophecy, and the latter (which shows definite central Mexican influences) embodies the mythology and cosmology of the Postclassic Guatemalan Maya. The Ritual of the Bacabs covers religious symbolism, medical incantations, and similar matters.
The most important of the early accounts written by the Spanish themselves is Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (“Report on the Affairs of Yucatán”), which dates to 1566. It describes Postclassic rather than Classic religion, but given the deeply conservative nature of Maya religion, it is highly probable that much of this description is pertinent for the earlier period. Landa’s account is also an excellent description of other aspects of Maya life in 16th-century Yucatán.
To these archaeological, ethnohistorical, and historical sources may be added the observations of modern ethnologists about the present-day Maya. Thus, in the Guatemalan highlands, the 260-day calendar still survives, as do ancient prayers to and information about Maya gods.
It is likely that a simpler religion of nature worship prevailed in Early Formative times. This probably began to undergo modification during the Middle Formative, as astronomical knowledge became more precise. Certainly by the Late Formative (300 bce, if not earlier), with the appearance of major centres and pyramid and temple constructions, an elaborate worldview had evolved. Deified heavenly bodies and time periods were added to the earlier-conceived corn and rain gods. Concepts derived from priestly speculation were imposed upon the simpler religious beginnings. Religion became increasingly esoteric, with a complex mythology interpreted by a closely organized priesthood.
Creation
The Maya, like other Middle American Indians, believed that several worlds had been successively created and destroyed before the present universe had come into being. The Dresden Codex holds that the end of a world will come about by deluge: although the evidence derived from Landa’s Relación and from the K’iche’ Popol Vuh is not clear, it is likely that four worlds preceded the present one. People were made successively of earth (who, being mindless, were destroyed), then of wood (who, lacking souls and intelligence and being ungrateful to the gods, were punished by being drowned in a flood or devoured by demons), and finally of a corn gruel (the ancestors of the Maya). The Yucatec Maya worshiped a creator deity called Hunab Ku, “One-God.” Itzamná (“Iguana House”), head of the Maya pantheon of the ruling class, was his son, whose wife was Ix Chebel Yax, patroness of weaving.
Four Itzamnas, one assigned to each direction of the universe, were represented by celestial monsters or two-headed, dragonlike iguanas. Four gods, the Bacabs, sustained the sky. Each world direction was associated with a Bacab, a sacred ceiba, or silk cotton tree, a bird, and a colour according to the following scheme: east–red, north–white, west–black, and south–yellow. Green was the colour of the centre.
The main act of creation, as stated in the Popol Vuh, was the dawn: the world and humanity were in darkness, but the gods created the Sun and the Moon. According to other traditions, the Sun (male) was the patron of hunting and music, and the Moon (female) was the goddess of weaving and childbirth. Both the Sun and the Moon inhabited the earth originally, but they were translated to the heaven as a result of the Moon’s sexual license. Lunar light is less bright than that of the Sun because, it was said, one of her eyes was pulled out by the Sun in punishment for her infidelity.
Because the Maya priests had reached advanced knowledge of astronomical phenomena and a sophisticated concept of time, it appears that their esoteric doctrines differed widely from the popular myths.
Cosmology
The Maya believed that 13 heavens were arranged in layers above the earth, which itself rested on the back of a huge crocodile or reptilian monster floating on the ocean. Under the earth were nine underworlds, also arranged in layers. Thirteen gods, the Oxlahuntiku, presided over the heavens; nine gods, the Bolontiku, ruled the subterranean worlds. These concepts are closely akin to those of the Postclassic Aztec, but archaeological evidence, such as the nine deities sculptured on the walls of a 7th-century crypt at Palenque, shows that they were part of the Classic Maya cosmology.
Time was an all-important element of Maya cosmology. The priest-astronomers viewed time as a majestic succession of cycles without beginning or end. All the time periods were considered as gods; time itself was believed to be divine.
The gods
Among the several deities represented by statues and sculptured panels of the Classic period are such gods as the young corn god, whose gracious statue is to be seen at Copán, the sun god shown at Palenque under the form of the solar disk engraved with anthropomorphic features, the nine gods of darkness (also at Palenque), and a snake god especially prominent at Yaxchilán. Another symbol of the corn god is a foliated cross or life tree represented in two Palenque sanctuaries. The rain god (Chac) has a mask with characteristic protruding fangs, large round eyes, and a proboscis-like nose. Such masks are a common element in Puuc architecture.
The four hieroglyphic manuscripts, especially the Dresden Codex, depict a number of deities whose names are known only through Postclassic documents. Itzamná, lord of the heavens, who ruled over the pantheon, was closely associated with Kinich Ahau, the sun god, and with the moon goddess Ix Chel. Though Itzamná was considered an entirely benevolent god, Ix Chel, often depicted as an evil old woman, had definitely unfavourable aspects.
The Chacs, the rain gods of the peasants, were believed to pour rain by emptying their gourds and to hurl stone axes upon the earth (the lightning). Their companions were frogs (uo), whose croakings announced the rains. Earth gods were worshiped in the highlands, and wind gods were of minor importance in Maya territory.
The corn god, a youthful deity with an ear of corn in his headdress, also ruled over vegetation in general. His name is Ah Mun, and he is sometimes shown in combat with the death god, Ah Puch, a skeleton-like being, patron of the sixth day-sign Cimi (“Death”) and lord of the ninth hell. Several other deities were associated with death—e.g., Ek Chuah, a war god and god of merchants and cacao growers, and Ixtab, patron goddess of the suicides.
In Postclassic times, central Mexican influences were introduced—e.g., the Toltec Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcóatl), called Kukulcán in Yucatán and Gucumatz in the Guatemalan highlands.
The ancient Maya’s attitude toward the gods was one of humble supplication, since the gods could bestow health, good crops, and plentiful game or send illness and hunger. Prayers and offerings of food, drink, and incense (pom) were used to placate the gods. A strong sense of sin and a belief in predestination pervaded the Maya consciousness. Humankind had to submit to the forces of the universe. The priests, because of their astronomical and divinatory knowledge, determined favourable days for such undertakings as building houses and hunting.
Death
As was noted above, the Classic Maya buried the dead under the floors of their houses. High priests or powerful lords were laid to rest in elaborate underground vaults. The dead were believed to descend to the nine underworlds, called Mitnal in Yucatán and Xibalba by the K’iche’. There is no evidence of a belief among the Maya in a heavenly paradise, such as that which prevailed in central Mexico. The modern Lacandón, however, believe that the dead live forever without work or worry in a land of plenty located somewhere above the earth.
Eschatology
The present world, the Maya believed, is doomed to end in cataclysms as the other worlds have done previously. According to the priestly concept of time, cycles repeat themselves. Therefore, prediction was made possible by probing first into the past and then into the future: hence the calculations, bearing on many millennia, carved on temples and stelae. Evil influences were held to mark most of the katun endings. The Chilam Balam books are full of predictions of a markedly direful character. The priests probably believed that the present world would come to a sudden end, but that a new world would be created so that the eternal succession of cycles should remain unbroken.
Sacrifice
Sacrifices made in return for divine favour were numerous: animals, birds, insects, fish, agricultural products, flowers, rubber, jade, and blood drawn from the tongue, ears, arms, legs, and genitals. Evidence of human sacrifice in Classic times includes two Piedras Negras stelae, an incised drawing at Tikal, the murals at Bonampak, various painted ceramic vessels, and some scenes in native manuscripts. Only in the Postclassic era did this practice become as frequent as in central Mexico. Toltec-Maya art shows many instances of human sacrifice: removal of the heart, arrow shooting, or beheading. At Chichén Itzá, in order to obtain rain, victims were hurled into a deep natural well (cenote) together with copper, gold, and jade offerings. Prayers for material benefits (which were usually recited in a squatting or standing position), fasting and continence (often for 260 days), and the drawing of blood from one’s body often preceded important ceremonies and sacrifices.
These practices had become so deeply rooted that, even after the Spanish conquest, Christian-pagan ceremonies occasionally took place in which humans were sacrificed by heart removal or crucifixion. The last recorded case occurred in 1868 among the Chamula of Chiapas.
The priesthood
Bejeweled, feather-adorned priests are often represented in Classic sculpture. The high priests of each province taught in priestly schools such subjects as history, divination, and glyph writing. The priesthood, as described by Landa, was hereditary. Ahkin, “he of the sun,” was the priests’ general title. Specialized functions were performed by the nacoms, who split open the victims’ breasts, the chacs who held their arms and legs, the chilans who interpreted the sacred books and predicted the future. Some priests used hallucinatory drugs in their roles as prophets and diviners.
Rites
Ritual activities, held on selected favourable days, were complex and intense. Performers submitted to preliminary fasting and sexual abstinence. Features common to most rites were: offerings of incense (pom), of balche (an intoxicating drink brewed from honey and a tree bark), bloodletting from ears and tongues, sacrifices of animals (human sacrifices in later times), and dances. Special ceremonies took place on New Year’s Day, 0 Pop, in honour of the “Year-Bearer”—i.e., the tzolkin sign of that day. Pottery, clothes, and other belongings were renewed. The second month, Uo, was devoted to Itzamná, Tzec (fifth month) to the Bacabs, Xul (sixth) to Kukulcán, Yax (10th) to the planet Venus, Mac (13th) to the rain gods, and Muan (15th) to the cocoa-tree god. New idols were made during the eighth and ninth months, Mol and Ch’en, respectively.
Both the Classic and Postclassic Maya practiced a typically Middle American ritual ball game, as evidenced by numerous grandiose ball courts at Tikal, Copán, and Chichén Itzá. No court, however, has been found at Mayapán, and Landa does not mention that game. It appears, therefore, that the Yucatec had ceased to play it, while it remained of the utmost importance in central Mexico.
Archaeological remains at Uxmal and Chichén Itzá point to phallic rites, doubtless imported into the Yucatán from the Gulf coast. The Chilam Balam books strongly condemn the Mexican immigrants’ sexual practices, which were quite alien to Maya tradition.
Sorcery
Ahmen, “he who knows,” was the name given to sorcerers and medicine men, who were both prophets and inflicters or healers of disease. They made use of a mixture of magic formulas, chants, and prayers and of traditional healing methods, such as administering medicinal herbs or bleeding. Belief in witchcraft is widespread among present-day Maya Indians, as it most probably was in pre-Columbian times.
The evolution of Maya religion parallels that of Mexican religions from the Classic to the Postclassic era, with the sun worship and human sacrifice complex gaining importance as it did in Mexico proper.
The profoundly original feature of Maya religious thought, in comparison with that of other pre-Columbian civilizations, is the extraordinary refinement of mathematical and astronomical knowledge, inextricably mixed with mythological concepts. Even the most learned Aztec priests never reached the intellectual level of their Maya counterparts of the 1st millennium, nor did they conceive of the eternity of time and of its “bearers,” the divinized time periods. The ancient Maya may be said to have been among the very few people in history (along with the Zurvanites of Iran) who worshiped time.
The simple, naturalistic religion of the corn-growing peasants, however, subsisted apart from the priesthood’s abstract speculations and has partly survived to this day among the Christianized Maya Indians or the unevangelized Lacandón. Jacques Soustelle Gordon R. Willey
Society and political life
There is a vast gap between the lavishly stocked tombs of the Maya elite who ran the ceremonial centres and the simple graves of the peasantry. Careful measurements of the skeletons found in tombs and graves have also revealed that persons of the Maya ruling class were much taller than the tillers of the soil who provided them tribute. It is likely that this gulf was unspannable, for throughout Mesoamerica the rulers and nobility were believed to have been created separately from commoners.
The most revealing testimony to this royal cult is the temple pyramid itself, for almost every one explored has a great tomb hidden in its base. On death, each ruler might have been the object of ancestor worship by members of his lineage, the departed leader having become one with the god from whom he claimed descent. Ancestor worship, in fact, seems to be at the heart of ancient and modern society and religion among the Maya.
The ordinary folk may have participated in the ceremonies of even the greatest Maya centres. The modern highland Maya have a complex ceremonial life in which a man advances through a series of cargos, or “burdens,” each one of which brings him greater prestige, costs him a great deal of money, and requires that he reside in the otherwise nearly empty centre for a year at a time carrying out his religious duties. The same may have prevailed in Classic times, though all activities were then under the direction of a hereditary and divine elite class, long since destroyed by the Spaniards.
Warfare apparently was a continuing preoccupation of the Maya lords. Translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions show that in some cases such warfare led to territorial aggrandizement and the domination of one centre or polity by another; however, the principal purpose of war appears to have been to gain captives for slavery and sacrifice.
It has often been said that the Maya realm was a theocracy, with all power in the hands of the priests. That this is a misconception is apparent from the monuments themselves, which show kings, queens, heirs, and war prisoners, but no figures surely identifiable as priests. In 16th-century Yucatán, the priesthood was hereditary, and it is reported that younger sons of lords often took on that vocation. Quite probably such a class was also to be found among the Late Classic Maya, but neither for the Maya nor for any other Classic civilization of Mesoamerica can the term theocracy be justified.
The collapse of Classic Maya civilization
In the last century of the Classic period, Maya civilization went into a decline from which it never recovered. Beginning about 790 in the western edge of the Central Subregion, such ceremonial activity as the erection of stelae virtually came to a standstill. During the next 40 years this cultural paralysis spread gradually eastward, by which time the great Classic civilization of the Maya had all but atrophied. A date in the Maya calendar corresponding to 889 is inscribed on the last dated monuments in the Central Subregion; soon after the close of the 9th century it is clear that almost all of this region was abandoned.
For this event, which must have been one of the greatest human tragedies of all time, there are few convincing explanations. It now seems that the Classic Maya civilization in the region of its greatest development went out “not with a bang but a whimper.” Massive foreign invasions can be discounted as a factor, but non-Maya elements did appear in the west at the same time as ceremonial activity terminated. These became the inheritors of whatever was left of the old civilization of the Central Subregion after 900 ce, having established trading colonies and even a few minor ceremonial centres on its peripheries.
Whatever incursions did take place from the west were piecemeal and probably the result of the general decline, rather than its cause. Similarly, there is little reason to believe that there were peasant revolts on a general scale. The only real fact is that most of the inhabitants of the Central Subregion went elsewhere. Probably some were absorbed by such still flourishing ceremonial centres of the Northern Subregion as Uxmal and Kabah, while others might have migrated up into the congenial highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala. Although a population explosion and severe ecological abuse of the land must have played their role in the tragedy, the full story of the decline and fall of this brilliant aboriginal civilization remains to be told. Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Postclassic period (900–1519)
Definition of the Postclassic
The final period of pre-Columbian Meso-American history is referred to as the Postclassic. Its beginning is usually placed at 900, and it terminates with the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519 or with his conquest of the Aztec in 1521. The 900 date is based on two considerations: first, the 10th century was the period of the catastrophic collapse of the lowland Maya civilization and the cessation of the custom of erecting monuments dated by the Long Count; second, 900 was also the approximate date of the founding of the city of Tula in central Mexico and the rise of a people called the Toltec, who, according to the historical annals, built the first great empire in Meso-America. At one time it was thought that the date marked the collapse of all of the regional Classic civilizations of the area as the result of massive population dislocation. But it now appears that some Classic civilizations declined as early as 750, whereas others persisted until as late as 1200. The period is usually divided into two phases: Early Postclassic (900–1200) and Late Postclassic (1200–1519), the former equivalent with the period of the Toltec, the latter with that of the Aztec. The Postclassic civilizations of Meso-America came to an abrupt end with the coming of the Spanish in the early 16th century. For an account of the Spanish conquest, see Latin America, history of: The colonial period.
The Postclassic Period as a whole has also been distinguished from the Classic on the basis of assumed major changes in Meso-American political, economic, and social institutions. It has been asserted, for example, that the Classic period was one of relatively peaceful contact between polities, of the absence of large imperialistic states and empires (and of the militaristic élan and organization that accompanies such states). The Classic has been further characterized by the absence of true cities, by theocratic rather than secular government, and by an overall superiority of arts and crafts, with the exception of metallurgy, which appears for the first time in the Postclassic Period. In contrast, the Postclassic was characterized as a period of intense warfare and highly organized military organization, of empires and cities, of secular government, and of overall artistic decline.
Subsequent research, however, has cast considerable doubt on these conclusions. Many of the contrasts were drawn from events in the lowland Maya area and applied to the entire culture area; others were concluded essentially by a comparison of the Classic Maya of the lowland tropical forest of northern Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula with the Postclassic Aztec living in central Mexico in a dry mountain basin 7,000 feet above sea level. The differences, in part, are the product of separate culture evolution, conditioned by ecological factors. Cities and large states comparable to those built by the Toltec and Aztec were present in Early Classic times at Teotihuacán in central Mexico and probably at Monte Albán in Oaxaca. Militarism was at least significant enough to be a major artistic theme throughout the Classic period, even among the lowland Maya. One could also question the criterion of artistic decline, since a number of Postclassic crafts were highly developed, such as Aztec sculpture, Mixtec ceramics and metallurgy, and Zapotec architecture.
Monte Albán: pre-Columbian ruinsPre-Columbian ruins at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The separation between Postclassic and Classic is therefore little more than a convenient way of splitting up the long chronicle of Meso-American cultural development into manageable units for discussion and analysis. The Postclassic is a period also in which historical traditions combine with archaeological data, whereas the Classic either lacks a written history or, in the case of the lowland Maya, provides little more than cryptic biographies of kings. Perhaps this is the best rationale for definition of the period.
Society, culture, and technology
At the time of the Spanish conquest, Meso-America was occupied by a number of peoples speaking languages as distinct from each other as English is from Chinese. On the central Gulf coast and adjacent escarpment were the Totonac; in Oaxaca and adjacent portions of Puebla and Guerrero two major ethnic groups, the Mixtec and the Zapotec, shared the western and eastern portions of the area, respectively; and in Michoacán lived the Tarascan. Various peoples of the Maya linguistic family occupied most of Guatemala, the Yucatán Peninsula, eastern Tabasco, and highland Chiapas; a detached group, the Huastec (Huaxtec), occupied the north Gulf coast. An equally widespread family, the Nahua (to which the Aztec belonged) occupied most of the Central Plateau, a huge area in the northwest frontier, portions of Guerrero, the Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala (where they were known as the Pipil), and the Gulf coast. Some detached groups had spread beyond the frontier of Meso-America into Nicaragua and Panama. The linguistic family to which the Nahua belong (the Uto-Aztecan) is the only Meso-American family with affinities to languages north of the Rio Grande, including those of such western U.S. Indians as the Hopi, Paiute, and Shoshone.
One of the Nahua-speaking nations, the Mexica, or Tenochca (or the Aztec, as they are commonly called), were the dominant people in Meso-America in 1519, having created by conquest an empire estimated as covering some 80,000 square miles (207,000 square kilometres) and having a population of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 people.
All of these diverse ethnic groups shared a common cultural tradition, but separate historical origins and environmental factors had also produced a substantial degree of regional differentiation. Most of the cultural characteristics of the area go back at least to the beginning of the Postclassic, and many appeared in Classic times. The various regional cultures and languages have great time depths and undoubtedly were present during the Classic period. Common institutional characteristics included organization into centralized polities, including populations minimally in the tens of thousands, with a formal government, supported by a highly organized taxation system; stratification into social classes (including slave and serf classes); occupational specialization—in some areas full time with a guildlike organization; highly organized local and interregional trade involving professional merchants and regularly meeting markets; and a professional priesthood.
The technological base of this elaborate institutional structure seems weak by western European standards, since the primary technology (i.e., the tools used to manufacture other technology) was based on chipped and ground stone, metal being reserved primarily for ornaments. Since draft animals were absent, all power was based on human energy. The economic base of the civilization was a highly productive agriculture, but the basic tools were primitive—stone axes for clearing vegetation and a number of wooden digging tools for working the soil. The crop complex was rich, with corn (maize) serving as the staple food and beans an important source of protein. But the list of secondary crops was large: chili peppers, tomatoes, squashes, sweet potatoes, cassava (manioc), cotton, tobacco, cacao, pineapples, papayas, maguey, nopals (prickly pears), sapotes (zapotes), peanuts (groundnuts), avocados, amates (paper figs), and many others.
Many crops were limited to particular environmental zones, thus acting as a major stimulus to trade. In many areas, particularly the tropical lowlands, the slash-and-burn, or swidden, system of farming was employed: forests were cleared, planted for up to three years, and rested for longer periods to restore fertility and eliminate the more difficult weeds. This regular rotation of fields resulted in high production per capita but had low demographic potential because in any given year most of the land lay fallow. In some lowland areas permanent grain and orchard cropping were practiced. In the drier highlands a number of specialized techniques were used, and agriculture generally was more intensive. Particularly important were terracing, irrigation, and swamp reclamation. The per capita productivity of highland agriculture was probably less (because of the higher labour input), but the demographic capacity was considerably greater than that in the lowlands. As a result of these highly effective approaches to farming, the population was dense when compared to western Europe in the 16th century. Population estimates for the conquest period have varied from 3,000,000 to 30,000,000; a reasonable estimate is between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000.
The diet of the average Meso-American was relatively uniform throughout the area. Dried corn was boiled in lime-impregnated water to soften the hull, ground into a dough on milling stones (manos and metates), and then either made into tortillas or mixed with water and drunk as a gruel called posol. The tortillas were eaten with sauces prepared from chili peppers and tomatoes, along with boiled beans. This was essentially the diet of the peasant, with the addition of pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, at higher altitudes. To this were added the other crops in minor quantities and combinations depending on the specific local environment. Luxury foods included cocoa drinks, meats (from game or from the only two domestic animals of significance, the hairless dog and the turkey), and fish. The diet of the peasant, as is the case even today, was low in animal protein; but apparently the quantity of vegetable protein ingested made up for this deficiency.
Major Postclassic Meso-American crafts were weaving of cotton and maguey fibre; ceramics for pottery vessels, figurines, and musical instruments; stone sculpture; featherwork used for personal and architectural ornament; lapidary work (jadeite, jade, serpentine, and turquoise); metalwork (using gold, copper, and, more rarely, silver) for ornaments and a few tools; woodworking, the products including large dugout canoes, sculpture, magnificently made drums, stools, and a great variety of household items; baskets for containers and mats; painting; and, most particularly, stone and lime concrete masonry architecture.
Handicrafts of the Tarasco Indians on display in Tzintzuntzan, Mex.Emil Muench
Knowledge and belief
On the intellectual, ideological, and religious levels, although some diversity and certain elaborations occurred in some regions, there was a fundamental unity to the Meso-American area, the product of centuries of political and economic ties. The religion was polytheistic, with numerous gods specialized along the lines of human activities. There were gods for basic activities such as war, reproduction, and agriculture; cosmogenic gods who created the universe and invented human culture; and gods of craft groups, social classes, political systems, and their subdivisions. Gods were all-powerful and had to be constantly propitiated with offerings and sacrifices, a concept reaching its peak in personal bloodletting and human sacrifice. Certain gods, such as the god of rain (called Tlaloc in central Mexico), were found throughout the area. A fundamental concept was that of a quadripartite multilevel universe that, by 1519, had gone through five creations and four destructions. Meso-American religion heavily emphasized the astral bodies, particularly the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, and the observations of the movement of these bodies by the astronomer-priests were extraordinarily detailed and accurate. The major purpose of these observations was astrological, and the Meso-American priests had developed a number of time counts, or calendrical rounds, based in part on these observations. Two basic calendars, a 260-day divinatory calendar and one based on the solar year of 365 days, were found throughout the area.
One of the great intellectual achievements of Meso-American civilization was writing; in Postclassic times books were made from the inner bark of the paper-fig tree and used to record calendars, astronomical tables, dynastic history, taxes, and court records.
Religion was a pervasive force in Meso-American life, as the art demonstrates; and considerable surplus energy was devoted to it (e.g., temple construction, support of a numerous professional priesthood). Many writers have stated that the major focus of Meso-American culture was in this sphere. In fact, the contrast between Postclassic and Classic was in part based on the presumed even greater emphasis on religion in the art and architecture of the latter period.
The historical annals
The rise of the Aztec
A major characteristic of the Postclassic, in contrast to the Classic, is the abundant historical documentation. The Aztec record is particularly rich, and much of it is undoubtedly genuine, although there is always the possibility that records were rewritten or tampered with for political reasons. One of the functions of Meso-American writing was to record the succession and achievements of dynastic lines, and consequently it served as a validation of power. Virtually all of the dynasties of the local states recorded their history. A problem in the utilization of these documents, other than the low number of survivals, is the fact that many of them have strong mythological overtones. The Aztec themselves, for example, as creators of a great empire, explained their rise in part to the fact that they were the chosen people of the war god Huitzilopochtli and were the sustainers of the sun god Tonatiuh. They started their history as a poor, nomadic tribe from the north, who entered the Basin of Mexico, led by a magician-priest, and ultimately settled on the lake islands because of a series of astrological predictions and signs. They lived for a while as a subject people and then embarked on their destined role as conquerors and priests of the sun god. Virtually all historical traditions of local groups begin with a migration, a period of trials, and ultimate success—and some records even claim that the people were hunters and gatherers during the early part of their history.
On the northern frontier of Meso-America, in the arid Mexican Plateau, true hunters and gatherers, referred to as the “Chichimeca” by the civilized peoples, did actually reside in 1519. The name Chichimeca was frequently applied to the migrant groups. It is difficult to see how hunting and gathering bands could successfully invade areas of dense civilized populations; but agricultural groups, during periods of dynastic weakness, undoubtedly could. In fact, the term Chichimeca was also applied to agricultural but less civilized peoples (such as the Otomí in central Mexico) and thus connoted a lack of polish or a rustic life-style. Since the northwestern portion of Meso-America was occupied by such people and since they were Nahua in speech, the legends of periodic north–south migrations of invaders, though they may have a factual basis, probably refer to movements of agricultural rather than hunting and gathering peoples.
The histories of these invading groups take on a more convincing historical character after the legends of migration. In the Aztec case they record the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325. By 1376 the Aztec had increased in numbers and prestige sufficiently to obtain a member of the ruling family of Culhuacan, a neighbouring state, to rule as their tlatoani, or king. His name was Acamapichtli. The Aztec at this time were paying tribute to another state, Azcapotzalco, on the lake shore; and they remained under this obligation through the reigns of his two successors, Huitzilhuitl (c. 1390–1415) and Chimalpopoca (1415–26). During the reign of Chimalpopoca, Maxtla, the ruler of Azcapotzalco, attempted to secure tighter control over subject states by replacing their tlatoanis with his own men. He succeeded in arranging the assassination of Chimalpopoca and the exile of Nezahualcóyotl, ruler of Texcoco, a state on the east shore of Lake Texcoco. In response to these acts, a coalition was formed between Nezahualcóyotl, Itzcóatl (Chimalpopoca’s successor), and another small state (Tlacopan), and the power of Azcapotzalco was broken.
A triple alliance was then formed between Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, which by 1519 resulted in the dominance of Aztec Tenochtitlán. Under the Aztec rulers Itzcóatl (1428–40), Montezuma I (1440–69), Axayacatl (1469–81), Tizoc (1481–86), Ahuitzotl (1486–1502), and Montezuma II (1502–20), and the two Texcocan rulers—Nezahualcóyotl (1431–72) and Nezahualpilli (1472–1516)—the triple alliance succeeded in conquering the vast domain described above. Tlacopan seems to have been relegated to an inferior political role early in the history. The records of the Aztec and neighbouring states in the Basin of Mexico between 1300 and 1519 are relatively free from mythological tales and have sufficient cross-referencing to present a reasonably clear picture of military events, dynastic succession, institutional changes, and economic development. The period from 1200 to 1300 is essentially one of migration legends of the dynasties of the various states, the historical traditions of which are discussed below.
The question of the Toltec
The historical traditions also state that these migrations were responsible, along with a series of natural disasters, for the collapse of a great empire ruled by a people called the Toltec from their capital of Tollan, or Tula. Many dynasties of the conquest period, not only in central Mexico but even as far afield as highland Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula, claimed descent from the Toltec, apparently as a result of their dispersion after the fall of Tula.
The traditions describe the Toltec as the first civilizers, the first city builders, and the originators of craft skills and astrological knowledge. The major questions are: Did the Toltec really exist as a people? Where was Tula? Did these people actually play the extraordinary political and cultural role ascribed to them? To begin with, the annals themselves are in fundamental disagreement with respect to dates and the lists of Toltec kings. There are at least three major chronologies of the Toltec Empire (see below table). The dates by Ixtlilxóchitl, a learned mestizo of the post-conquest period, place the Toltec well within the Classic period of Meso-American archaeology, but the others correlate them with the early portion of the Postclassic. Most writers favour the later dates, but this would mean that the Toltec were not the first civilized peoples in central Mexico, as they claim.
Chronologies of the Toltec empire Ixtlilxóchitl Anales de Cuauhtitlán Codex Ramírez Chalchiuhtlanetzin 510–562 Huetzin 896–? Ixtlilcuechahauac 562–614 Totepeuh ?–887 Mixcoatl 900–947 Huetzin 614–666 Ihuitimal 887–923 Totepeuh 666–718 Topiltzin 923–947 980–999 Nacoxoc 718–770 Matlacxochitl 947–983 1000–34 Mitl-tlacomihua 770–829 Nauhyotzin 983–997 1034–49 Xihuiquenitzan 829–833 Matlaccoatzin 997–1025 1049–77 Iztaccaltzin 833–885 Tlilcoatzin 1025–46 1077–98 Topiltzin 885–959 Huemac 1047–1122 1098–1168
Adding further doubt to the veracity of the Toltec history is the admixture of myth and magic in the annals, not only at the beginning (which, like the histories of later dynasties, begins with a migration under a magician priest) but throughout the narrative. The ruler Topiltzin, for example, is also called Quetzalcóatl (the Nahua name for the Feathered Serpent god); he is opposed by Tezcatlipoca (also an Aztec god) and is driven out of Tula. He flees with his followers to the Gulf of Mexico and embarks on a raft of serpents. The story sounds like a duplicate of the cosmic myth or conflict between the two gods (see below Cosmogony and eschatology). Notably, the Maya in Yucatán had a tradition of a landing on the west coast made by foreigners, under a leader named Kukulcán (which is the Maya word for Feathered Serpent), who founded a city at Chichén Itzá and ruled over the Maya.
In spite of all the objections, the traditions of a great empire and of the city of Tula are so persistent that they must refer to some historical event and, indeed, have some archaeological support.
Archaeological remains of Postclassic civilization
The early Postclassic period (900–1200) in central Mexico is associated with three major sites, all of which began in Classic times: Cholula in Puebla, Xochicalco in Morelos, and Tula in Hidalgo. Cholula was a major centre as far back as Early Classic times, probably as a political dependency of Teotihuacán. It reached its maximum growth in Late Classic times, following the collapse of Teotihuacán, when the largest structure ever built by Meso-Americans was erected (see above Cholula).
In Postclassic times Cholula continued as a major religious and cultural centre. Xochicalco probably was of minor significance in Early Classic times; but it went through a phase of explosive growth in the Late Classic and was probably abandoned by 1200, possibly earlier. Tula, on the other hand, a small centre in the Late Classic, went through a rapid growth during the period 900–1200 and then declined to a provincial centre in the Late Postclassic. There is a strong suggestion that the demise of Classic Teotihuacán was in part related to the emergence of one or all of these major centres.
Tula
The location of the Toltec capital of Tollan, or Tula, is not certain. The archaeological site located on a low ridge near the modern town of Tula has been the persistent choice of all historians since the conquest, in part because of the coincidence of place-names. There is further support for this identification in that the annals provide a great number of place-names near the modern Tula that have persisted since the conquest. There is also support for the identification in that the glyph Ce Acatl, the birthday and birth name of the great Toltec leader Topiltzin, has been found carved on a hill near Tula. Moreover, the sculpture from the site is heavily loaded with symbolism that relates to the Quetzalcóatl cosmology and cosmogony. It clearly was the city of the god Quetzalcóatl. The confusion between the god and the ruler can be ascribed to the fact that the name Quetzalcóatl may have served as a title of office carried by all Toltec rulers. The archaeological dates are in agreement with the Anales de Cuauhtitlán and the Codex Ramírez (see below The nature of the sources).
The major factors that have made some researchers reluctant to accept this identification lie in the claim that Tula was the capital of a great pan-Meso-American empire and that the Toltec were the first civilizers in central Mexico. Archaeologically, it is quite clear that Tula was preceded by the great Classic centre of Teotihuacán. Tula as a site does not really approach the earlier Teotihuacán or the later Tenochtitlán in size, in the number of public buildings, or in estimated population, although studies indicate that Tula had a population of between 30,000 and 60,000. Furthermore, although some basic stylistic elements of the art and architecture of Tula are widespread, the style, in an integrated specific sense, is limited (with one notable exception) to a small area in central Mexico. These facts make it difficult to accept Tula as the capital of a great empire. But archaeological evidence of even the Aztec empire is skimpy. In both cases, this may mean that the expansion was a rapid, explosive one that failed to last long enough to register these effects. But at least in the case of Tenochtitlán it did result in the rapid growth of a truly gigantic urban centre.
Because of these objections and because Teotihuacán fits better the description of the Toltec as the builders of the first truly civilized society in central Mexico, that site must still be considered a possible candidate.
The art and architecture of Tula shows a striking similarity to the later art and architecture of Tenochtitlán, and the themes represented in the art indicate a close approximation in religious ideology and behaviour. The symbols of sun sacrifice and the marching predators represented in sculpture both suggest that the concept that the Aztec had of themselves as the warrior-priests of the sun god was directly borrowed from the people of Tula.
On the basis of the symbolism represented in the carvings on a temple pyramid at Tula called Structure B, it has been concluded that the pyramid was dedicated to the god Quetzalcóatl, lending further support to the identification of the site as the Toltec capital.
Chichén Itzá
Chichén Itzá: Temple of the WarriorsTemple of the Warriors, Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)Also in support of the identification of Tula as the Toltec capital are the architectural characteristics and stylistic features of the sculpture of a large site in northern Yucatán called Chichén Itzá. The resemblance between the two sites is extraordinarily close. At Chichén are found flat beam and masonry roofs (contrasting sharply with the typical Maya corbeled vault), serpent columns, colonnaded halls attached to the bases of temples, altars with Atlantean figures, sculptured representations of skulls and crossbones, marching felines, canines and raptorial birds devouring human hearts, and depictions of warriors with typical Toltec accoutrements. Furthermore, there are even scenes showing Toltec and Maya warriors in combat. The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá looks like an attempt to duplicate Structure B at Tula.
One of the puzzling aspects of the relationship between the two sites is that the public architecture of Chichén Itzá is actually more monumental than that at Tula, leading at least one Meso-American specialist to believe that Tula’s style was derived from Chichén. Many of the stylistic features themselves, however, have prototypes in Classic Teotihuacán, whereas there is little in Classic Maya culture that could be considered as the source. What is more probable—and this agrees with the Toltec version of the relationship—is that the Toltec state in Yucatán was politically independent from Tula and was larger in area and population. The presence of rival states in central Mexico such as Xochicalco and Cholula may have kept the core of the Toltec polity relatively restricted in space. The much larger area and population controlled by the Toltec state at Chichén would explain the differences in the scale of architecture. The superior military organization and equipment of the Toltec perhaps explains their apparent success in Yucatán.
Chichén Itzá: El CastilloEl Castillo (“The Castle”), Chichén Itzá, Yucatán, Mexico.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Archaeological unity of the Postclassic
The Postclassic period of Meso-American archaeology generally is a period characterized by considerable regionalism combined with a certain degree of uniformity. To a great extent, the latter was the product of the large states and extensive trade networks centred in the central plateau region. The Early Postclassic in some areas may be described as a continuation of the Late Classic; on the Gulf coast, for example, sites like El Tajín continued to be occupied, while in the Valley of Oaxaca (although Monte Albán was abandoned) the Zapotec tradition continued with the new centre at Mitla. In other areas, new styles either began or reached their climactic development, such as the Mixteca–Puebla style in painting, ceramics, and metallurgy, which evolved either in western Oaxaca or, more probably, at Cholula in Puebla. On the Guatemalan Pacific piedmont and in Tabasco, two specialized ceramic traditions (both of which began in Late Classic times) evolved: (1) plumbate (so called because of its slip, which had an unusually high iron content in the natural clay that fired to a lead-colour glaze); and (2) Fine Orange (so called because of its fine-grained, temperless paste). Wares of these two styles were widely traded.
The unity of the Postclassic consisted primarily of the diffusion of religious ideology, particularly the sun god–warfare–sacrificial complex and of the related institutional development such as the military orders (the latter probably originated at Classic Teotihuacán). This ideology clearly originated in central Mexico, at either Cholula or Tula or both. The specific artistic style of representation of the themes in painting and sculpture spread as well. Along with this was diffused a specific style of representation of the social calendar and writing generally and much greater emphasis on the 52-year cycle. The specific style most probably originated at Cholula.
In the highland areas of Meso-America the Late Postclassic was a period of maximum population growth. The Early Postclassic was, however, the period of maximum expansion of sedentary peoples on the northern frontier, probably the product of minor changes in climate as a result of increased rainfall. This frontier retracted substantially in Late Postclassic times, possibly because the rainfall decreased. This was perhaps the major factor in the precipitate arrival of barbarous tribes into the plateau, as the annals state.
The Postclassic, over large areas of the lowlands, on the other hand, was strikingly different. One of the most intriguing problems of Meso-American archaeology is the peculiar sequence of events in the lowland Maya area. At the time of European contact much of the northern portion of Yucatán was well settled. A narrow band of densely settled country also extended along the east coast south to modern Belize City and along the entire length of the west coast (where it joined another area of substantial settlement in the south Gulf coast). Most of the heart of the peninsula, the department of Petén in Guatemala, and large portions of the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico (the most densely settled portion of the Classic Maya territory) were virtually abandoned.
One of the major problems of Meso-American archaeology is the explanation of this massive population decline. The immediate causes are clear: it must have been the product of migrations out of the area or a set of internal factors that caused a decline in situ or both. Various hypotheses as to processes and causes have been suggested. These may be grouped in the following categories: natural disasters (earthquakes, famines, epidemics, and hurricanes have all been suggested); ecological processes (primarily the deterioration of the natural environment by overintensification of land use in response to population pressure); and sociopolitical processes (internal warfare, invasion from outside, peasant revolts, breakdown of critical trade networks). Some of these hypotheses are clearly derivations from others or are not explanations but rather are descriptions of events that were produced by other processes. It seems certain that the causes were multiple and in some way related. Of great interest is the fact that at least one other lowland area, the Pacific Coastal Plain of Guatemala, experienced a comparable Postclassic decline. William T. Sanders
Aztec culture to the time of the Spanish conquest
The nature of the sources
At the time of the Spanish conquest the dominant people of Meso-America were the Aztec. This description is based primarily on written documents from the 16th century but also includes some archaeological data. The literature, both published and unpublished, of the 16th century is enormous and takes in all aspects of Aztec culture. Much of it covers the period within a few decades after the conquest, and it is uncertain how much change had occurred because of the introduction of Spanish culture. Some Aztec institutions, such as the military orders, were immediately abolished by the Spaniards; and the sources, therefore, give only the barest outline of their organization. This information, however, combined with archaeological data, gives a fairly detailed picture of Aztec culture at the time of the Spanish conquest. The sources can be classified by content and purpose into five categories, each of which is described below.
Accounts written by the conquistadores
Eyewitness accounts of Aztec culture on the eve of the conquest are, of course, the most directly pertinent sources because they describe Aztec culture before it became transformed by the Spanish conquest. Important among these are the Cartas de Relación (“Letters of Information”), sent by Hernán Cortés to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, and the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632; The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Religious rites and ceremonies, temples, and paraphernalia of the cults are often described in these accounts. Their value, however, is lessened by the writers’ ignorance of Náhuatl (the Aztec language at the time of the conquest), their lack of understanding of the Indian way of thinking, and their deep hostility to the native religion, which they considered to be inspired by the devil. These documents, therefore, have been interpreted with utmost caution.
Roman Catholic missionaries also wrote accounts of the Aztec. Paradoxically, the priests generally showed more understanding and tolerance than did the laymen. Thanks to their training and theological knowledge, they were able to analyze the Indian mind and to gain insight into the meaning of the myths and ritual. The missionaries, as a rule, learned the native languages, especially Náhuatl.
Postconquest histories of the Aztec written in Spanish
Within a few decades of the conquest, a series of histories had been written in the Spanish language, based in part on Aztec books and in part on information supplied by the upper class. Among the most detailed of these is the three-part Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firma (“History of the Indies of New Spain”), written in about 1580 by the Dominican friar Diego Durán.
Postconquest ethnographic accounts written in Spanish and Náhuatl
These works are comparable in methodology and subject matter to the kinds of studies of native peoples conducted by present-day anthropologists. Probably the finest of them was written by Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún was a Franciscan priest who arrived in Mexico very early (1529), learned the Náhuatl tongue, and spent his life building a wonderful monument, a real encyclopaedia called the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (“General History of the Things of New Spain”). His work covers virtually all aspects of Aztec culture. It contains particularly detailed accounts of religion, ethnobotany, folk medicine, and economics, dictated to him in Náhuatl by Aztec noblemen and priests. As a source, it has the added value of being written in both Náhuatl and Spanish. One of the most complete versions of this work, written in Náhuatl, is called the Florentine Codex.
“Siguense veynte y seis addiciones desta postilla” (1560–79; “A Sequence of Twenty-six Additions to the Admonitions”) by Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún. The 26 additional admonitions to the appendix of Sahagún's doctrinal writings exhort the Aztecs to pursue Christian virtues. The writings preserve a record of the Aztec culture and Nahuatl language.The Newberry Library, Gift of Edward E. Ayer, 1911 (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
The codices
Aztec sacred books and works, which were kept in the temples, and other native books have become known in Western scholarship as codices. Sacred books were written (or rather, painted) on deerskin or agave-fibre paper by scribes (tlacuiloanime), who used a combination of pictography, ideograms, and phonetic symbols and dealt with the ritual calendar, divination, ceremonies, and speculations on the gods and the universe. Because of their religious content only a small fraction of these escaped destruction by the Spaniards; the few specimens that have survived—such as the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Borgia, the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, and the Codex Cospi—usually come accompanied by Spanish notations. These sources are limited in scope and subject matter but nevertheless are valuable documents. Their interpretation is far from easy. Only a few of them, such as the Borbonicus, are truly Aztec, while others, such as the Borgia, seem to emanate from the priestly colleges of the “Mexica-Puebla” area, between the central highlands and the Oaxaca Mountains.
An illustration from a reproduction of the Codex Magliabecchi depicting an Aztec priest performing a sacrificial offering of a living human heart to the war god Huitzilopochtli.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-USZC4-743)
Other native books, either pre-Cortesian or post-Cortesian, also afford valuable material. Examples include such manuscripts as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, the Azcatitlan, and the Codex of 1576, which describe the history of the Aztec tribe and state and occasionally depict religious scenes and events; the Codex Badianus, an herbal with magnificent drawings of medicinal plants; and the Codex Mendoza and the Matrícula de tributos, both tax documents of the Aztec empire. A number of books were written in the Latin alphabet—either in Náhuatl or in Spanish—by learned Aztec chroniclers, who used ancient pictographic manuscripts as their basis. Among those that were prepared in central Mexico are the CodexChimalpopoca (also called the Anales de Cuauhtitlán; “Annals of Cuauhtitlán”), in Náhuatl, and the Codex Ramírez (also called the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas; “History of the Mexicans Through Their Paintings”), in Spanish; both are anonymous compilations.
Official ecclesiastical and government records
Much of this literature is unpublished. Its purpose was administrative rather than intellectual, but it has provided an extraordinarily rich source of information for all 16th-century ethnic groups. The documents vary from tax lists, censuses, and marriage and baptismal records to broad geographic-economic surveys. Among the most valuable of the last type are the Relaciones geográficas of 1579–85, a series of surveys ordered by Philip II of his overseas possessions. Formal questionnaires were drawn up that demanded information from each town in the empire on virtually all aspects of Meso-American life: questions on the natural environment and resources, crops, population history, settlement patterns, taxes paid, markets and trade, the language, native history and customs, and progress of the missionization program. William T. Sanders Jacques Soustelle
Agriculture
The homeland of the Aztec, from which they ruled their vast domain, was a large (about 3,000 square miles), mountain-rimmed basin with a floor at approximately 7,000 feet above sea level. The surrounding ranges reached a maximum elevation of 18,000 feet in the volcano of Popocatépetl. The annual rainfall varied from 20 to 35 inches (500 to 900 millimetres) in the valley floor to a maximum of 50 inches on the southern escarpment. Approximately 80 percent of the rain fell between May 1 and October 1. Because of the high elevation, the area suffered from severe winter frosts that normally began in mid-October and lasted until the end of March. Normally, the rainfall was adequate for corn, even in the drier portions of the basin, but a major problem was the timing of the rains and the frosts. A delay of the rainfall to mid- or late June, accompanied by early autumn frosts, could produce crop disasters.
Another major problem for the pre-Hispanic cultivator was the paucity of level land. Much of the land surface is sloping, and the problem of soil erosion was acute. Furthermore, of the 1,600 square miles of relatively level land, 400 square miles were occupied by a chain of lakes; and much of the immediate lakeshore plain was waterlogged.
Because of the effect of elevation on the growing season, the areas above 8,300 feet were also unsuitable for cultivation, removing an additional 400 square miles from the agricultural resource. Even within zones of cultivation, the presence of steep slopes and thin soil further reduced the area of cultivation. It is doubtful that more than 50 percent of the basin was suitable for labour-intensive methods of cultivation. Yet in 1519 it supported a population of 1,000,000 to 1,500,000; i.e., a density of 500 people per square mile (200 per square kilometre), the densest population in Meso-American history. This was achieved by an extraordinarily intensive system of farming that involved a number of specialized techniques. Soil fertility was maintained by plant and animal fertilizers, by short-cycle fallowing, and by irrigation. In gently sloping terrain, erosion was controlled by earth and maguey terraces, in steeper areas by stone terracing. The problem of humidity was solved by canal irrigation of both the floodwater and permanent type. Much of the irrigation was done just before planting in April and May in order to give crops a head start and hence avoid the autumn frosts. Terracing functioned also as a method of conserving moisture. There is also evidence that dry-farming techniques were applied to store moisture in the soil. The most significant achievement of Aztec agriculture, however, was that of swamp reclamation, even including colonization of the lakes. This system of farming, called chinampa, was first applied to Lake Chalco. The lake covered approximately 60 square miles and apparently varied in its character from swamps to ponds of fairly deep, open water. By a process varying from digging drainage ditches to artificial construction of land from lake mud and vegetation, most of the lake was converted to highly productive agricultural land. A series of masonry causeway dikes were constructed across the lake to control flooding. By a system of dikes and sluice gates the Aztec even managed to convert a portion of saline Lake Texcoco, the largest and lowest lake in the basin, to a freshwater bay for further chinampa colonization.
The total area colonized was probably in the neighbourhood of 30,000 acres, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, depended on these lands for much of its food. By a comparable method, much of the waterlogged lakeshore plain was also converted into agricultural land. Particularly notable is the fact that all of these techniques of food production were achieved by human power and simple hand tools.
Aside from agriculture, the basin had a number of major resources, some of which were exploited not only for local consumption but also to supply other areas of Meso-America. Obsidian, natural glass of volcanic origin, was a superb material for a great variety of stone tools; and the northeastern ranges of the basin contained one of Meso-America’s major deposits. Basalt for manos and metates (milling stones) was also abundant. Lake Texcoco was a major source of salt, and the lakes generally provided waterfowl, fish, and other aquatic foodstuffs. The great pine forests above the limits of agriculture were a major source of lumber. On the other hand, the basin, because of its high elevation, was unsuitable for a great variety of tropical products, including cotton, paper, tropical roots and fruits, tobacco, copal incense, rubber, cacao, honey, precious feathers and skins, and such prized goods as metal, jade, and turquoise. The major motivation of Aztec conquest was to obtain control of these resources.
Social and political organization
Aztec technology differed little from that of other Meso-American groups. One of its distinctive aspects was differentiation by status levels. The use of most of the extra-local resources noted above was limited to a small upper and middle class; and there were striking differences in dress, housing, and diet by social class. Commoners, for example, wore clothing woven from maguey fibre, while the upper classes wore cotton garments. The use of imported foods, at least on a regular basis, was limited to the upper and middle classes. Commoners lived in small adobe or stone and mud huts, the upper and middle class in large multiroomed palatial houses of cut stone, lime plaster, and concrete.
Aztec social and political organization can be divided into a number of levels of increasing size and complexity of organization. The nuclear family—that is, a pair of cohabiting adults and their unmarried children—formed the lowest level of organization. The nuclear family functioned in procreation, education of children, and as a unit of food preparation and consumption, with a well-defined division of labour between husband and wife. Among the Aztec, however, a number of nuclear families usually resided together in a single cooperating household, or extended family. Such a family usually consisted of a man, his married sons or brothers, and their families. The average peasant household of this type was small. Up to three nuclear families occupied a small multiroom house divided into apartments for each family. The houses were usually placed within a courtyard fenced with organ cactus or adobe walls, forming a compound. The extended family household probably functioned as a unit of land use and food production. In the towns, however, some households could be considerably larger, and the household of Montezuma II included several thousand people.
A number of households, varying from a few score to several hundred, were organized into an internally complex corporate group referred to as a calpulli by the Aztec and translated as barrio (“ward”) by the Spaniards. Questions about the structure and function of this level of Aztec organization have caused a great deal of debate among Meso-American specialists. It is clear, however, that it was a physical and territorial unit as well as a socially organized one. It was a unit of land tenure. Calpulli lands were owned communally but were distributed among various households. The household retained the right of usufruct, but only the calpulli as a whole could sell or rent lands.
The calpulli rural communities varied considerably in physical appearance. Some were isolated, tightly nucleated physical settlements surrounded by their agricultural land, whereas in others houses were dispersed through the land holdings. In a few cases, they were physically attached as wards to one or more other calpulli. These differences corresponded to ecological, economic, and political factors. Rural, dispersed settlements were found on terraced hillsides in which houses were tightly integrated with the terrace; in the chinampa area, each house was placed on its chinampa holding. On the other hand, nucleated, isolated calpulli were found in areas of level land, and the ward type was usually found in the towns and cities. In the latter case, many lost their agricultural character and became units of craft specialization. The calpulli was a unit of political administration within the larger unit that will be referred to here as the state. It was ruled by a council of household heads presided over by a chief selected by the council from within a particular lineage. The calpulli functioned as a unit of taxation to the central government, as a unit of corvée labour, and as a military regiment.
The structure of the calpulli is open to question. Some sources call it a kin group, “a lineage” with a common ancestor; and as a result some anthropologists have referred to it as a clan, or sib. There is no evidence, however, of either exogamy or unilineal descent; in fact, marriage records from the post-conquest period show a strong tendency toward endogamy. There is some evidence of internal ranking and significant status differentiation, another non-clanlike feature. The sources also mention smaller territorial subdivisions, referred to as barrios pequeños, or “little wards.” If these are descent lines, then the calpulli resembled quite closely a type of kin group called by anthropologists a ramage, or a conical clan. This is a group with a myth of common descent, divided into ranked senior and junior lineages based on the seniority of older versus younger brother in the group genealogy. In support of this reconstruction is the statement that the calpulli god was a deified ancestor.
The calpulli also functioned as a unit of education, for each possessed a school for young men—the telpuchcalli—primarily for military and moral instruction.
Above the level of the calpulli was the state. With the exception of those historical periods when larger polities, such as the Aztec empire, emerged, such states in Meso-America, including the Basin of Mexico, were small. Just prior to the Aztec expansion there were 50 or 60 such states in the basin, with an average size of about 50 to 60 square miles. In 1519 these once independent domains had an average population of 25,000 to 30,000 people. In less densely settled areas, the territories were larger and populations smaller. The range of size was from a few thousand up to 100,000.
The average small state included a central town with a population of several thousand, the balance of the population consisting of the rural calpulli. The central town was divided into wards that corresponded in size and to a certain degree in structure to the rural calpulli but were clearly different in function; they in turn were divided into barrios pequeños. At the head of the state was an official called the tlatoani, to whom all household heads owed allegiance, respect, and tax obligations. The tlatoani’s position was fixed within a particular lineage, the particular choice varying from state to state. In some areas, succession passed from father to son; in others, the succession went through a series of brothers and then passed to the eldest son of the eldest brother. In still other states, the office was elective, but the choice was limited to sons or brothers of the deceased ruler. The office was accompanied by all of the trappings and sumptuary behaviour typical of despotic states. The ruler resided in a large, multiroom masonry palace inhabited by a great number of wives, servants, and professional craftsmen. He was carried in a sedan chair in public and treated with exaggerated respect by his subordinates. The tlatoani held considerable power: he appointed all lesser bureaucrats, promoted men to higher military status, organized military campaigns, and was the distributor of booty and tribute; he collected taxes in labour, military service, and goods from his supporters; he owned private estates manned by serfs; he was the final court of appeal in judicial cases; and he was titular head of the religious cult and head of the town market.
Many of these functions were delegated to a large staff of professional administrators: priests, market supervisors, military leaders, judges, tax collectors, and accountants. The tax collectors, or calpixque, were especially important administrators because they acted as the rulers’ agents in collecting goods and services from the calpulli chiefs.
Most of these positions were appointed and selected from two classes—the pipiltin (plural of pilli), and the professional warriors. Society was divided into three well-defined castes. At the top were the pipiltin, nobles by birth and members of the royal lineage. Below them was the macehual class, the commoners who made up the bulk of the population. At the base of the social structure were the mayeques, or serfs, attached to private or state-owned rural estates. Within these three castes, a number of social classes could be differentiated, according to wealth, occupation, and political office. The Aztec system made a distinction between ascribed and achieved status. By a system of promotions, usually as a reward for military deeds, commoners were appointed to such political offices as calpixque and judges. Many pipiltin held no political office and, unless they had inherited private estates, were forced to live off the largess of the ruler. Commoners who had captured four enemy warriors in combat were promoted to the rank of tecuhtli, entered one of the military orders, were assigned a private estate with serfs for their maintenance, and acted as an elite professional army. The children of both pipiltin and tecuhtli could enroll in the religious college, or calmecac, where they could be trained as priests or political administrators. The calmecac apparently was also open to certain other commoners, such as wealthy and influential merchants and craftsmen.
Aside from the commoner-warriors, the macehual class was further differentiated into class levels. Certain occupations were accorded higher prestige than others (merchants, lapidarians, goldsmiths, and featherworkers are mentioned, and the list probably included stone sculptors); and all urban occupations were assigned higher status as compared with rural farming. Since occupations were restricted to calpulli membership and since the calpulli were kin groups, it follows that crafts tended to be hereditary. In small towns the craft specializing group would have to be the barrio pequeño. In the cities it was definitely the larger unit, but in either case crafts would be found within hereditary corporate groups.
The system of social stratification emphasized ascribed status but also permitted considerable vertical mobility. The land-tenure system was an important aspect in maintaining both processes, as could be expected in a basically agrarian society. Although most of the land was held in common by the calpulli, private estates with serfs helped to maintain the prestige of the pilli class and similar estates assigned to political office; and the tecuhtli positions freed able commoners from the necessity of subsistence procurement.
The taxation system also helped to maintain the social system. All heads of households owed military service to the tlatoani. For the pipiltin and tecuhtli, this was the only tribute demanded. Urban craftsmen also paid tribute in their craft products but were exempt from corvée labour. That obligation, plus taxes in agricultural products, were the burdens of the rural peasants, and the mayeques owed their labour and agricultural produce to their overlord.
Two other elements in the Aztec social system were pawns and slaves. The former were poor men who could sell themselves or members of their household for a specified period of time. Their rights were carefully defended by Aztec law, and they were not slaves but more like indentured servants. True slaves did exist and in some parts of Meso-America were used as workers or servants. Among the Aztec, the mayeques were their counterpart. Slaves were bought in lowland markets and used primarily for human sacrifice.
The high development of craft specialization—much of it full-time—in Aztec towns has been noted above. But many rural communities also had part-time specialities, a feature due in part to the heterogeneity of the highland environment, with its highly local distribution of resources. Foreign goods were brought into the Aztec homeland by great caravans of professional merchants called pochteca, who frequently undertook journeys exceeding a year in length. As a group the merchants enjoyed very high prestige and even had their own tribunals. Various merchant wards of a great number of towns and cities in central Mexico were organized into one great trading guild that had its centre at Tenochtitlán. They also organized and administered the town markets, another highly evolved aspect of Aztec institutions. These markets were held in great open plazas—in smaller towns every fifth day, in larger towns and cities daily, although in the latter case the market population reached a peak every fifth day.
The centres and the political organization of large states such as the Aztec empire were fundamentally similar in character to small ones; but the vast differences in size (Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, may have had 140,000 to 200,000 inhabitants in 1519) demanded some changes. Generally, when one central Mexican state conquered another, the ruler of the conquering town extorted an annual tribute, but there was little attempt at political integration. In the case of the Aztec, this policy was generally maintained, but many conquered states were given Aztec governors. Furthermore, conquest was usually accompanied by an exchange of women from the two ruling lineages (conqueror and conquered), and successors to the throne of the conquered states were through these women, from the royal lineage of Tenochtitlán. As a result, the ruling class gradually tended toward a single kin group. Because of the great number of states conquered by the Aztec (400 to 500), some form of intermediate-level territorial and administrative organization became imperative. The states conquered by the Aztec were grouped into 38 provinces. One town in each province served as capital, and an Aztec tax collector-governor was placed there to supervise the collection, storage, and disposition of the tribute. In many provinces, the Aztec established garrisons. These consisted of warriors and their families culled from all of the towns of the Valley of Mexico, and they were assigned lands in the conquered province. Since they supported themselves, they were colonists as well as troops. The planting of colonists, combined with such factors as the merchant guild and royal family intermarriage, suggests that the Aztec elite were attempting to integrate more closely the population of the Valley of Mexico as a kind of core nationality for the empire. Other indications that the Aztec were in the process of achieving further political integration are statements in several relaciones that the tax collectors served as courts of appeals in serious judicial cases and also that the Aztec introduced the cult of their national god Huitzilopochtli to conquered provinces.
Tenochtitlán
Tenochtitlán itself was a huge metropolis covering more than five square miles. It was originally located on two small islands in Lake Texcoco, but it gradually spread into the surrounding lake by a process, first of chinampa construction, then of consolidation. It was connected to the mainland by several causeway dikes that terminated in smaller lakeside urban communities. The lake around the city was also partly covered with chinampas with numerous rural settlements. Together, the complex of settlements—the city, the chinampa villages, and the settlements along the lakeshore plain—must have appeared from the air as one gigantic settlement. The population in 1519 was about 400,000 people, the largest and densest concentration in Meso-American history.
The majority of people in the city were non-food-producing specialists; i.e., craftsmen, merchants, priests, warriors, and administrators. In Tenochtitlán, as in other larger towns, the larger calpulli formed craft guilds. Guild organization was internally complex, an economic development related to the higher level of political integration and the greatly expanded trade and tax base that accrued from it. The great market in the barrio of Tlatelolco was reported by the Spaniards to have had 60,000 buyers and sellers on the main market day. The Spaniards also described the enormous canoe traffic on the lake moving goods to the market. There is even evidence that many chinampa cultivators, in response to the expanded market, were shifting from the production of staple crops to truck gardening.
The Aztec capital was originally two separate cities, Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlán, which merged into one through the conquest of Tlatelolco. The division was maintained for administrative purposes, however, and with further growth it became necessary to divide Tenochtitlán into four great wards (also referred to as calpulli). Each ward contained 12 to 15 calpulli, some 50 to 60 in all. Tlatelolco must have had 10 to 20 calpulli as well, bringing the total up to perhaps 80.
With this enormously expanded tax base, the central government became internally complex. The Spaniards described the palace of Montezuma II as containing 300 rooms grouped around three courts. Land titles dating from after the conquest give it an area of 10 acres. Aside from the private apartments of the king, the palace included libraries, storehouses, workshops for royal craftsmen, great halls for justice and other councils, and offices for an army of accountants. The sources even describe a royal zoo and aviary and a number of country retreats. The internal organization of the taxation, military, and judicial departments must have been far more complex than in small states; but precise data is lacking.
Within the city there were literally hundreds of temples and related religious structures. There were at least two large complexes, religious centres of the dual cities of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. Each of the four great wards of Tenochtitlán, as well as each calpulli, had smaller temple complexes, so that the total number must have run into the hundreds. The great temple complex of Tenochtitlán consisted of three large pyramid temples (the principal temple platform, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, was 100 feet high and measured 300 feet on a side at its base). There were also six small pyramid temples, three calmecac buildings (dormitories and colleges for priests), a ball court, a great wooden rack for the skulls of sacrificed victims, a sacred pool, a sacred grove, and several large open courts. All of these structures were placed within a vast walled enclosure, 1,200 feet on a side. The temple complex at Tlatelolco was at least half as large.
Aztec religion
Perhaps the most highly elaborated aspect of Aztec culture was the religious system. The Aztec derived much of their religious ideology from the earlier cultures of Meso-America or from their contemporaries. This was particularly true during the final phase of their history, when their foreign contacts broadened. Indeed, much confusion about Aztec religious ideology stems, in part, from the fact that Aztec civilization was still in a process of assimilation and reorganization of these varied religious traditions. Moreover, as the empire expanded and Tenochtitlán evolved into a heterogeneous community, the religious needs correspondingly changed from those of a simple agrarian society. The ruling class, particularly, demanded a more intellectual and philosophical ideology.
The Aztec approach to contact with the supernatural was through a complex calendar of great ceremonies, which were held at the temples and were performed by a professional priesthood that acted as the intermediary between the gods and human beings. Many of these were public in the sense that the populace played the role of spectators. Elements in all the ceremonies were very similar and included ritual ablutions to prepare the priests for the contact; offerings and sacrifices to gain the gods’ favour; and theatrical dramas of myths by masked performers in the form of dances, songs, and processionals. Each god had his special ceremony that, considering the richness of the pantheon, must have filled the calendar. These ceremonies must have played a significant recreative function, as do ceremonies held in honour of patron saints in present-day Mexico.
Aztec religion heavily emphasized sacrifice and ascetic behaviour as the necessary preconditions for approaching the supernatural. Priests were celibate and were required to live a simple, spartan life. They performed constant self-sacrifice in the form of bloodletting as penitence (by passing barbed cords through the tongue and ears). This pattern of worship reached its climax in the practice of human sacrifice; it was in this aspect of Aztec culture that religion, war, and politics became closely related. Ideologically at least, Aztec warfare was waged for the purpose of obtaining sacrificial victims. The tribute lists, of course, demonstrate that there was a more mundane purpose as well, and it would be a serious mistake to think of Aztec warfare as functioning primarily in the religious sphere.
The cult of the gods required a large professional priesthood. Spanish documents indicate that the priesthood was one of the most elaborate of Aztec institutions. Each temple and god had its attendant priestly order. At Tenochtitlán the high priests of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli served as heads of the entire priestly organization. Within the orders were priests in charge of ceremonies, of the education of novices, of astrology, and of the temple lands. (These consisted of specific rural communities assigned by the state to particular temples.) Furthermore, there were several grades of priests. As noted above, the priests maintained a number of schools, or calmecacs, where sons of the nobility and certain commoners were given instruction. Most of the novices ultimately left the priesthood and carried out economic and political functions; others remained, joined the priesthood on a permanent basis, and lived at the calmecac.
Much of Aztec religion probably was practiced at home at special household altars. Common archaeological artifacts are small baked-clay idols or figurines, representing specific gods apparently used in these household ceremonies, along with incense burners. William T. Sanders
Cosmogony and eschatology
The Aztec believed that four worlds had existed before the present universe. Those worlds, or “suns,” had been destroyed by catastrophes. Humankind had been entirely wiped out at the end of each sun. The present world was the fifth sun, and the Aztec thought of themselves as “the People of the Sun.” Their divine duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun with his tlaxcaltiliztli (“nourishment”). Without it the sun would disappear from the heavens. Thus the welfare and the very survival of the universe depended upon the offerings of blood and hearts to the sun, a notion that the Aztec extended to all the deities of their pantheon.
The first sun was called Nahui-Ocelotl, “Four-Jaguar,” a date of the ritual calendar. Humankind was first destroyed by jaguars. The animal was considered by the Aztec as the nahualli (“animal disguise”) of the creator god Tezcatlipoca.
At the end of the second sun, Nahui-Ehécatl, “Four-Wind,” a magical hurricane transformed all people into monkeys. That disaster was caused by Quetzalcóatl (the Feathered Serpent) in the form of Ehécatl, the wind god.
A rain of fire had put an end to the third sun, Nahuiquiahuitl, “Four-Rain.” Tlaloc as the god of thunder and lightning presided over that period.
The fourth sun, Nahui-Atl, “Four-Water,” ended in a gigantic flood that lasted for 52 years. Only one man and one woman survived, sheltered in a huge cypress. But they were changed into dogs by Tezcatlipoca, whose orders they had disobeyed.
Present humanity was created by Quetzalcóatl. The Feathered Serpent, with the help of his twin, Xólotl, the dog-headed god, succeeded in reviving the dried bones of the old dead by sprinkling them with his own blood. The present sun was called Nahui-Ollin, “Four-Earthquake,” and was doomed to disappear in a tremendous earthquake. The skeleton-like monsters of the west, the tzitzimime, would then appear and kill all people.
Two deeply rooted concepts are revealed by these myths. One was the belief that the universe was unstable, that death and destruction continually threatened it. The other emphasized the necessity of the sacrifice of the gods. Thanks to Quetzalcóatl’s self-sacrifice, the ancient bones of Mictlan, “the Place of Death,” gave birth to men. In the same way, the sun and moon were created: the gods, assembled in the darkness at Teotihuacán, built a huge fire; two of them, Nanahuatzin, a small deity covered with ulcers, and Tecciztécatl, a richly bejeweled god, threw themselves into the flames, from which the former emerged as the sun and the latter as the moon. Then the sun refused to move unless the other gods gave him their blood; they were compelled to sacrifice themselves to feed the sun.
Cosmology
According to the Aztec cosmological ideas, the earth had the general shape of a great disk divided into four sections oriented to the four cardinal directions. To each of the four world directions were attached five of the 20 day-signs, one of them being a Year-Bearer (east, acatl, “reed”; west, calli, “house”; north, tecpatl, “flint knife”; south, tochtli, “rabbit”), a colour (east, red or green; west, white; north, black; south, blue), and certain gods. The fifth cardinal point, the centre, was attributed to the fire god Huehuetéotl, because the hearth stood at the centre of the house.
Above the earth, which was surrounded by the “heavenly water” (ilhuicáatl) of the ocean, were 13 heavens, the uppermost of which, “where the air is delicate and frozen,” was the abode of the Supreme Couple. Under the “divine earth,” teotlalli, were the nine hells of Mictlan, with nine rivers that the souls of the dead had to cross. Thirteen was considered a favourable number, nine extremely unlucky.
All of the heavenly bodies and constellations were divinized, such as the Great Bear (Tezcatlipoca), Venus (Quetzalcóatl), the stars of the north (Centzon Mimixcoa, “the 400 Cloud-Serpents”), the stars of the south (Centzon Huitznáua, “the 400 Southerners”). The solar disk, Tonatiuh, was supposed to be borne on a litter from the east to the zenith, surrounded by the souls of dead warriors, and from the zenith to the west among a retinue of divinized women, the Cihuateteo. When the night began on the earth, day dawned in Mictlan, the abode of the dead.
Deities
The ancient tribes of central Mexico had worshiped fertility gods for many centuries when the Aztec invaded the valley. The cult of these gods remained extremely important in Aztec religion. Tlaloc, the giver of rain but also the wrathful deity of lightning, was the leader of a group of rain gods, the Tlaloques, who dwelt on mountaintops. Chalchiuhtlicue (“One Who Wears a Jade Skirt”) presided over fresh waters, Huixtocíhuatl over salt waters and the sea. Numerous earth goddesses were associated with the fertility of the soil and with the fecundity of women, as Teteoinnan (“Mother of the Gods”), Coatlicue (“One Who Wears a Snake Skirt”), Cihuacóatl (“Serpent-Woman”), and Itzpapálotl (“Obsidian-Butterfly”). Their significance was twofold: as fertility deities, they gave birth to the young gods of corn, Centéotl, and of flowers, Xochipilli; as symbols of the earth that devoured the bodies and drank the blood, they appeared as warlike godheads. Tlazoltéotl, a Huastec goddess, presided over carnal love and over the confession of sins.
Xipe Totec, borrowed from the faraway Yopi people, was a god of the spring, of the renewal of vegetation, and at the same time the god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him.
The concept of a supreme couple played an important role in the religion of the old sedentary peoples such as the Otomí. Among the Aztec it took the form of Intonan, Intota (“Our Mother, Our Father”), the earth and the sun. But the fire god Huehuetéotl was also associated with the earth. In addition, Ometecuhtli (“Lord of the Duality”) and Omecihuatl (“Lady of the Duality”) were held to abide in the 13th heaven: they decided on which date a human being would be born, thus determining his destiny.
Among the fertility gods are to be counted the “400 Rabbits” (Centzon Totochtin), little gods of the crops, among which are Ometochtli, the god of octli (a fermented drink), and Tepoztécatl, the god of drunkenness.
The Aztec brought with them the cult of their sun and war god, Huitzilopochtli, “the Hummingbird of the Left,” who was considered “the reincarnated Warrior of the South,” the conquering sun of midday. According to a legend probably borrowed from the Toltec, he was born near Tula. His mother, the earth goddess Coatlicue, had already given birth to the 400 Southerners and to the night goddess Coyolxauhqui, whom the newborn god exterminated with his xiuhcoatl (“turquoise serpent”).
Tezcatlipoca, god of the night sky, was the protector of the young warriors. Quetzalcóatl, the ancient Teotihuacán deity of vegetation and fertility, had been “astralized” and transformed into a god of the morning star. He was also revered as a wind god and as the ancient priest-king of the Toltec golden age: the discoveries of writing, the calendar, and the arts were attributed to him.
Mythology of death and afterlife
The beliefs of the Aztec concerning the other world and life after death showed the same syncretism. The old paradise of the rain god Tlaloc, depicted in the Teotihuacán frescoes, opened its gardens to those who died by drowning, lightning, or as a result of leprosy, dropsy, gout, or lung diseases. He was supposed to have caused their death and to have sent their souls to paradise.
Two categories of dead persons went up to the heavens as companions of the sun: the Quauhteca (“Eagle People”), who comprised the warriors who died on the battlefield or on the sacrificial stone, and the merchants who were killed while traveling in faraway places; and the women who died while giving birth to their first child and thus became Cihuateteo, “Divine Women.”
All the other dead went down to Mictlan, under the northern deserts, the abode of Mictlantecuhtli, the skeleton-masked god of death. There they traveled for four years until they arrived at the ninth hell, where they disappeared altogether.
Offerings were made to the dead 80 days after the funeral, then one year, two, three, and four years later. Then all link between the dead and the living was severed. But the warriors who crossed the heavens in the retinue of the sun were thought to come back to earth after four years as hummingbirds. The Cihuateteo were said to appear at night at the crossroads and strike the passersby with palsy.
Worldview
The world vision of the Aztec conceded only a small part to man in the scheme of things. His destiny was submitted to the all-powerful tonalpohualli (the calendrical round); his life in the other world did not result from any moral judgment. His duty was to fight and die for the gods and for the preservation of the world order. Moreover, witchcraft, omens, and portents dominated everyday life. That such a pessimistic outlook should have coexisted with the wonderful dynamism of Aztec civilization is in itself a remarkable achievement.
Aztec ritual calendar
Tonalpohualli, an Aztec term meaning “the count of days,” was the name of the ritual calendar of 260 days. It ran parallel to the solar calendar of 365 days, which was divided into 18 months of 20 days and five supplementary unlucky days. The word tonalli means both “day” and “destiny”: the 260-day calendar was mainly used for purposes of divination. The days were named by the combination of 20 signs—natural phenomena such as wind and earthquake, animals like rabbit and jaguar, plants such as reeds, and objects like flint knife and house—with the numbers 1 to 13. Thus the calendrical round included 20 series of 13 days.
Specialized priests called tonalpouhque interpreted the signs and numbers on such occasions as birth, marriage, departure of traders to faraway lands, and election of rulers. Each day and each 13-day series were deemed lucky, unlucky, or indifferent according to the deities presiding over them. Thus Ce-Coatl (“One-Snake”) was held as favourable to the traders, Chicome-Xochitl (“Seven-Flower”) to the scribes and the weavers, and Nahui-Ehécatl (“Four-Wind”) to the magicians. The men who were born during the Ce-Ocelotl (“One-Jaguar”) series would die on the sacrificial stone, those whose birth took place on the day Ometochtli (“Two-Rabbit”) would be drunkards, and so on. The tonalpohualli dominated every aspect of public and private life. Jacques Soustelle
Andean civilization
For several thousand years before the Spanish invasion of Peru in 1532, a wide variety of high mountain and desert coastal kingdoms developed in western South America. The extraordinary artistic and technological achievements of these people, along with their historical continuity across centuries, have encouraged modern observers to refer to them as a single Andean civilization.
Principal sites of Andean civilization.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
A look at a modern map reveals that no single South American state encompasses all of the territories controlled by the Inca (Inka) before the coming of the Spanish; rather these territories were spread over parts of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and in 1532 they were all part of a single Inca state called Tawantinsuyu, the “Realm of the Four Parts.” Earlier, local hegemonies—some coastal, others centred in the mountains, and still others bridging these geographic barriers—had risen, expanded, and eventually collapsed.
The Inca of Cuzco (Cusco) were themselves newcomers to most of the regions that they came to dominate. Such rapid expansion did not allow for complete consolidation; and the Spanish were able to take advantage of what had been a recent incorporation of numerous regional ethnic groups and the resentments that the Inca victory had created among the ethnic lords. Some of these, like Don Francisco Cusichaq, lord of Xauxa, the earliest colonial capital, lived long enough after 1532 to testify before a Spanish court of inquiry that he regretted having opened the country to the Europeans. For 30 years his bookkeepers had recorded on their knotted quipu (khipu) accounts not only everything the Spanish had received from Xauxa warehouses but also, on separate knot-strings, everything that had been considered stolen.
The outsider visiting the Andes perceives two overwhelming geographic realities: the Pacific coastal desert stretching for thousands of miles and the high Andes rising parallel to the coast. These contrasting regions—utter desert on the coast and high, looming mountains to the east (where the bulk of the pre-Columbian population lived above 10,000 feet [3,000 metres])—could, and at several times in Andean history did, coalesce into a single political entity. Thus, it is possible to speak of a single Andean civilization, even if at times, early and late, there was no political integration. One indicator of this social unity is extant even now: Quechua, one of the Andean languages, is still spoken by some 10,000,000 people from northern Ecuador to northern Argentina, a distance of thousands of miles.
The nature of Andean civilization
The coastal desert was inhabited for millennia by fishermen, and many of their settlements have been studied by archaeologists. The people in these communities were familiar with the sea and depended heavily on its products, but from very early times they also used and possibly cultivated native varieties of cotton. Textiles have been the major art form in the Andes for thousands of years. It is known that these textiles—found preserved in the coastal sands—have woven into them a wealth of information on Andean peoples; and, while the information in the textiles still cannot be read, it is believed that they will eventually be as revealing as have been the Meso-American codices.
In modern Peru irrigation eventually may permit the cultivation of the lower reaches of most rivers. Still, it is useful to note that of some 50 rivers descending from the Andean glaciers to the Peruvian coast, only three have water flowing through them year-round. Such an ambitious irrigation scheme would be most productive only if the waters were tapped quite high on the western slope and if several rivers were connected through canals high in the Andes, thus allowing the scarce waters of three or four valleys to be pooled into a single one as needed. Rumours of such a project reached the first Spaniards in Peru: in the final decade before the invasion, the Inca were said to be planning to bore through a mountain in what today is northern Chile, so that water from the Amazonic watershed would flow westward to the deserts and thus alter the continental divide.
Archaeologists, particularly non-Peruvian scholars, have concentrated on the study of coastal peoples: they have found that sites are more accessible along the Pan-American Highway; that the hot and dry climate presents none of the challenges of the high altitudes; and that the remains, mummified in the desert sands, are immediately rewarding. Pottery finds have portrayed such things as fishing or warfare, diseases, weapons, cultivated plants, and differences in rank and in sexual habits among the Andeans. Usually this evidence has been recovered by professional grave looters but sometimes also by archaeologists themselves. One of the most remarkable of the latter type of finds is the grave of a Moche leader that was discovered near the village of Sipan on the northern coast of Peru in the mid-1980s. Since the mid-20th century architectural studies of ceremonial and political centres have allowed researchers to follow changes in the location and the architectural features of important Andean cities. Distance from the sea and the degree of dependence on maritime products, the proximity to irrigation waters from the highlands, and the repeated efforts to control militarily more than a single irrigated valley have all received attention from archaeologists.
A major question remains: did these coastal polities extend upward to the Andean highlands to control areas beyond the slopes where the irrigation works tapped the rivers? The Peruvian historian María Rostworowski has pointed to similarities, found in colonial administrative papers, between coastal places-names and personal names in the Cajamarca Highlands, an area due east and above the coastal political entities. The colonial papers have not explained the presence of such distant colonies, but they have introduced a topic fundamental to understanding Andean success: given the apparently inhospitable environments of both the desert coast and the nearby high Andes, how could so many separate societies have fed such enormous populations and constructed highways, palaces, and temples in what were clearly urban centres for so many centuries?
Agricultural adaptation
One answer to this question was suggested in the 1930s by the German geographer Carl Troll. His solution took into account a unique aspect of Andean ecology: the greatest population concentration (more than 1,000,000 people) and the highest agricultural productivity occurred around Lake Titicaca, which is some 12,500 feet above sea level. Nowhere else in the world—not even in Tibet or Nepal—has cultivation been so successful at such a high altitude. The effort to understand the ramifications of this paradox is far from complete, but Troll’s insights have proved fertile: (1) The fields and terraces clustered around the lake were located just a few degrees south of the Equator, where daytime temperatures are truly tropical. (2) At this altitude climatic contrasts are not so much seasonal as diurnal, i.e., summer by day and winter by night. Contrasts of 55 to 70 °F (30 to 40 °C) within a single 24-hour period are not uncommon, and nearly 300 nights of frost per year have been recorded on the high, windy plateau (puna) surrounding the lake. (3) Populations settled in such circumstances seem to have endured as others have survived in the Arctic, the Kalahari, and the Gobi, but it is clear that in the Andes a far denser population fared much better than have groups in other environmentally harsh regions, acquiring with time an intimate familiarity with the agricultural and pastoral possibilities of high altitude.
These peoples cultivated many varieties of tubers, of which only the potato has achieved widespread use in the world. But since the soils at this altitude were easily exhausted, “second- and third-year” tubers had to be domesticated to take advantage of the nutrients left unused in the soil. Then, as now, it was usual to allow the ground to rest—for 6, 8, or even 10 years—after which some of the “rested” acreage was returned to cultivation annually, a rotation pattern that is still familiar to the local people.
The upper elevation limit of cultivation has varied throughout the centuries, as the climate has fluctuated. Thus, considerable effort was invested in the development of ever more frost-resistant varieties of tubers. Modern observers have noted that tubers grown close to and above about 13,000 feet were mostly of the pentaploid varieties, bitter hybrids resulting from selection and crossing by the grower. Although they usually required additional nurture and processing that were beyond the procedures familiar today, the bitter varieties represented a gain in total productivity.
A significant improvement in agriculture was the construction of massive terraces, which not only extended the cultivated area but also created protected microclimates where particular varieties could flourish. It has been suggested that an “amphitheatre” found in the Cuzco region was actually an experimental field where the concentric terraces reproduced tiny variations in the upland environment. When the use of highland irrigation and raised-ridged fields are taken into account, it becomes clear that these upland populations were highly familiar with, and respectful of, the potential for high-altitude agriculture and were intent on gaining additional acreage in circumstances that elsewhere would not have seemed worth the effort.
Another incentive for settlement at high altitudes was the presence of glacier-fed pastures for alpaca herds. The llama—it and the alpaca were the two camelids domesticated by the Andean peoples—could live at altitudes ranging from sea level to those in the high mountains. The alpaca’s habitat, however, was much narrower; it did best above 13,000 feet, and its preference for a swampy range was catered to by pastoralists. It has been found that even today alpaca-herding is a full-time occupation, almost impossible to combine with agriculture. While Andean herders did belong to wider ethnic groups, they tended to be specialists, relying for their food staples on their kinsmen closer to Lake Titicaca.
Present-day distribution and use of these animals (known collectively as camelids) tends to mask their importance in pre-Columbian times. A European inspector, reporting in the 1560s on the camelid wealth of a single Aymara chiefdom near Lake Titicaca, claimed, “I have heard of an Indian who is not even a lord, one don Juan Alanoca of Chucuito, who has more than 50,000 head.” Such control of vast herds, combined with the hundreds of varieties of high-altitude tubers and grains, helps to explain the density of Andean populations.
The cold as a resource
Beyond such skilled manipulation of the natural geography there lay an awareness of frost. As noted above, in the high Andes frost can occur almost every night of the year. Elsewhere people have endured the cold; in the Andes the cold was transformed into a positive and even creative factor.
It is not known when this step was taken. For at least 1,000 years people in the Andes have been aware that the sharp alternation between tropical noon and arctic midnight can be utilized. Any animal or vegetable tissue exposed to this daily contrast can be processed into nutritive products that keep for decades, and the process can be achieved either at the household or the state level.
Chuño is the name popularly used for processed tubers, but a rich vocabulary for tubers exists in the Quechuan (Andean) languages: there is a separate term for each plant and for each mode of preparation. Chuño cannot be made where a diurnal temperature extreme is absent; thus, north of modern Cajamarca in northern Peru no chuño is prepared, since nocturnal frosts are rare or absent. Animal tissues also can be handled in this manner. After 1532 European meats were added to those of local birds, fish, and camelids. The name for these preserved meats is charqui, or jerky (ch’arki in Quechua), the one Andean word that has made its way into common English usage.
Such food reserves allowed both the peasants and the state to compensate for natural and man-made calamities. They filled thousands of warehouses—many of which are still extant—that were built in ways and places so as to use the tiny differences of exposure to the sun, winds, and humidity. Those built by the state or by the ethnic lords along the more than 15,500 miles of roads provided food for both human and camelid porters, for the armies, and for priests traveling to the many shrines.
The presence of such large stores made possible the incredible forays of Spaniards like Diego de Almagro, who reached Chile from Cuzco across thousands of miles of deserts and snow-covered mountains. As late as 1547, 15 years after the Spanish invasion, one Spaniard, Polo de Ondegardo, reported that he had fed 2,000 soldiers for seven weeks with the food still stored above Xauxa, which had been the first European capital. A detailed archaeological study of an Inca storage system was made by the American anthropologist Craig Morris, who found almost 500 warehouses at Huánuco Pampa. There were some 1,000 warehouses at Xauxa and many more near Cuzco, the Inca capital.
The highlands and the low countries
The cultivators of high-altitude tubers and lowland crops—the plants of which seem botanically far apart at first glance—were actually in continuous contact. This point was stressed by the pioneer Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello and was later verified by foreign scholars. The inhabitants all along the Andean highlands were aware of the diverse populations and climates of the Pacific coastal deserts to the west and of the Amazon lowlands to the east. The Chilean researcher Lautaro Núñez has traced the several societies who inhabited a single valley: products and settlement patterns changed through the centuries, but at all times each successive ethnic group accumulated resources from diverse ecological niches into a single system.
By adding written Spanish sources to the information provided by archaeologists, it is possible to explain further the density of the Andean population and its great productivity. Throughout the Andes, south of Cajamarca, political units large and small were characterized by a dispersed settlement pattern. The preferred location of the seat of power frequently was at very high altitudes, almost at the upper limit of cultivation, and kinsmen of these highlanders were settled permanently at 3, 5, or even 10 days’ walk from the political centres. The German anthropologist Jürgen Golte has stressed that the agricultural calendar permitted such absences, since crops matured at different dates according to altitude; but many outliers were too far away from the political and demographic nucleus to permit seasonal migrations. The outlier communities could be large or small and could be established on the dry Pacific shore or in wet Amazonic enclaves. The Lupaca (Lupaqa), an Aymara-speaking polity whose political centre was located on the puna on the shores of Lake Titicaca, controlled outliers on both slopes.
Other ethnic groups reached in only one direction. For example, the two lords of the Karanga (Caranga), on what today is the highest part of the Bolivian High Plateau, do not seem to have controlled any outliers of their own on the Amazonic slope. Their main puna farms and most of their subjects lived above 12,000 feet, and their camelid herds were pastured even higher. The Karanqa also controlled corn (maize) fields at less lofty altitudes in what today is Chilean territory, several days’ walk away. Farther west and closer to the coast were their fruit and coca-leaf gardens. Finally, even farther north, across the Atacama Desert near the modern city of Arica, the Karanqa had their “own” fishers.
One unexpected feature of such outliers is that they were usually multiethnic: several political centres shared settlements of salt miners, fishers and seaweed gatherers, cultivators of hot peppers and coca leaves, and timber cutters and honey gatherers. The political mechanisms by which conflicting groups could reach truces, even if temporary, or the means by which caravans moved with safety when connecting the central settlements with their multiple outliers are still not known.
This diverse pattern of settlement and political control and of pooling dispersed resources and populations has been named “Andean ecological complementarity” or the “vertical archipelago.” Such complementarity went beyond the efficient control of the nocturnal cold and of the high altitude. Even if many details of how it worked still escape understanding, it is obvious that each ethnic group was able to diversify the risks that would have existed if each had been concentrated in any of the separate Andean ecological tiers. Beyond defensive strategies, in ecological complementarity it is possible to detect new opportunities that would permit massive storage of a wide range of foods going beyond those grown locally. Eventually there emerged dense populations and large polities like the Inca. It is notable that the foci of Andean civilizations across the centuries—Chavín, Huari (Wari), Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco), Cuzco—were all located on the high puna.
The pre-Inca periods
The names the several prehistoric populations called themselves are not known, and archaeologists have come to distinguish the various peoples and civilizations by descriptive terms—the Late Preceramic, the Initial (or Lower Formative) Period, the Early Horizon, the Early Intermediate Period, the Middle Horizon, the Late Intermediate Period, and the Late Horizon (also called the Upper Formative, or Inca, Period). Each of the periods lasted for centuries, some for millennia. These designations stress the differences between the peoples who inhabited the coast and those who lived in the highlands, although contacts between the two areas were frequent at all times in prehistory. What have been termed “horizons” in Andean studies were much shorter periods of time when wide areas of the central Andes were united culturally and politically with one another and with sections of the Pacific coast.
The Late Preceramic
There is ample evidence of human occupation by 3500 bc, at which time there was already considerable diversity along the Pacific. In the central and northern coastal areas lived people who cultivated beans, squash, cotton, and chili peppers and who exploited the sea, catching fish with cotton nets and shell or composite hooks, collecting shellfish, and hunting sea mammals. One group at Chilca, south of modern Lima, built conical huts of cane thatched with sedge. The dead were buried wrapped in twined-sedge mats and the skins of the guanaco, a wild camelid. Some people camped in winter on the lomas, patches of vegetation outside the valleys that were watered at that season by fogs. In summer, when the lomas dried up, they built camps along the shore. The lomas provided wild seeds, tubers, and large snails; deer, camelids (probably guanaco), owls, and foxes were hunted. The lomas had long been shrinking, and the winter camps were abandoned (c. 2500 bc) in favour of permanent fishing villages. Nowhere are the deposits thick enough to show stratification, but they have been arranged in chronological order by comparing the implement types and noting their distribution within the shrinking patches of vegetation. Some small patches still survive.
In the far south, the lomas were and still are more extensive than in the centre, and projectile points are abundant in them and in caves in the valleys. Deer can still be seen on the lomas, and it appears that hunting of them and of guanaco was the main activity in Late Preceramic times.
In the far north, in the Talara region and extending north into Ecuador, are stone tools and mangrove-dwelling mollusks, left by people who enjoyed a wetter climate than that now prevailing, and one inland site at El Estero, provisionally dated somewhat earlier (c. 5000 bc), has well-made polished stone axes and mortars that indicate the exploitation of forests and grasslands yielding seeds.
Much longer periods of occupation have been postulated for the highlands: the American scholar Richard S. MacNeish has suggested a human presence as early as 15,000 bc in the Ayacucho Basin, which would correspond to the traditional “first wave” of immigrants into the New World. Since there has been much less research in the highlands than on the coast, little is known of the highland Late Preceramic. The caves at Lauricocha at about 13,000 feet in the central Andes, which had been occupied by deer and camelid hunters since nearly 8000 bc, were still used, at least as summer camps, by hunters who employed small leaf-shaped points. Gourds, squash, cotton, and lucuma, with seed plants such as quinoa and amaranth, were cultivated in the Ayacucho Basin before 3000 bc; corn and beans came within the next millennium. There were also ground stone implements for milling seeds. It has been claimed that llamas and guinea pigs long had been domesticated.
After about 2500 bc came a great increase in the speed of development, which is best known on the coast. Population increased, and stable settlements were established in many places. By 2000 bc there were perhaps 100 villages on the coast with populations of 50 to 500 people, with a few of up to 1,000, indicating a total population of about 50,000. This was a far cry from the thinly scattered bands and occasional villages of about 1,000 years before. Considerable variation has been observed from place to place, but most sites have shown a predominance of seafood, including fish, shellfish, sea lions, and sea birds.
On the north central coast, the stretch between the Casma and Huarmey rivers was heavily populated. One site, at Culebras, was a large village on a terraced hillside, with semi-subterranean houses whose underground parts were lined with basalt blocks and whose upper parts were built of lighter materials such as adobe blocks. They originally had hard clay floors, and some had guinea-pig hutches consisting of stone-lined tunnels connecting two rooms at floor level. The guinea pig, normally vegetarian, appears to have been taught to feed on small fish. A site at Huarmey has provided the earliest known instance of corn on the coast, and it also occurred in the top Preceramic levels at Culebras.
Burials at Culebras were tightly flexed, wrapped in twined mats and cotton cloth, and accompanied by gourd vessels and beads and pendants of stone, shell, or bone. The skulls of these people were deformed by having been bound to cradleboards in infancy. There was a cemetery, but many burials were under house floors. No ceremonial buildings are known in this area.
Farther north, at the mouth of the Chicama River, is Huaca Prieta, which was the first Preceramic site to be excavated. A thick midden, it contains some subterranean houses lined with cobblestones and roofed with earth supported by whalebones and wooden beams. The twined textiles found there were the vehicle for a peculiar art style, showing highly stylized crabs, double-headed snakes, birds, and human beings, expressed by warp manipulation designed to bring groups of warps of one colour to one face. The dyes have faded, and the only way to recover the designs is by examination under a microscope. Such textiles were not confined to this area, but they have been more fully studied there. Woven textiles were rare, and weaving was combined with twining in a way that shows that a loom was not used.
Unlike the area farther north, sites along the central coast had ceremonial buildings, of which the most remarkable is El Paraíso in the Chillón Valley. This is an imposing stone-built structure on an artificial mound, with a central stairway leading up to a group of rectangular rooms. The central block, which occupied a commanding position in a side valley, has been partly reconstructed, but there were extensive wings that may have been residential, though they now appear as little more than piles of stones. Floodwater farming may have been practiced there, but definite signs of it have been obliterated by modern cultivation. At Río Seco, a few miles to the north, are two pyramids, constructed by filling a group of preexisting rooms with boulders, building adobe-walled rooms on top of them, and finally filling these up also.
Apart from one site, Kotosh, near modern Huánuco in the central Andes, little is known of the highland final Preceramic. A Japanese research team has found structures of undressed stone chosen to present flat wall surfaces, set in mud, covering an area of at least 200 by 100 yards (180 by 90 metres), in some parts of which was a succession of buildings piled up to a considerable height. Among these were two superimposed temples, the lower being a rectangular structure on a stepped platform about 26 feet high. The floor was surrounded by a broad, low bench, and each outside wall had two or three rectangular niches. The walls and floor were covered with two coats of mud plaster, and beneath the central niche at one end was a pair of crossed forearms modeled in the same material. This temple was later buried in boulders surrounded by a retaining wall and covered by a new floor on which a second temple was built, of which little remains. The burial of the first temple to act as a raised foundation for the second recalls the construction at Río Seco.
The Initial Period
The next epoch, called the Initial Period by the American scholar John H. Rowe, and the Lower Formative by the Peruvian archaeologist Luis G. Lumbreras, began with the introduction of pottery. The earliest ceramics have yielded radiocarbon dates of about 1800 bc, although Rowe has suggested that even a date of 2100 bc is plausible. Ceramics from this period have been found on the central coast between Las Haldas, in the Casma-Huarmey region, and Lima. These are considerably later than the earliest pottery finds at Puerto Hormiga on the northern coast of Colombia near Panama (before 3000 bc) and Valdivia in Ecuador (c. 2700 bc). The period ends with the spread of the Chavín cult (also called the Early Horizon; see below).
Lumbreras has stressed agriculture as a more telling indicator: while no single starting date has been cited for this achievement, beans may have been cultivated for centuries if not millennia before the date of the earliest pottery. Bottle gourds and squashes were other cultivated species. Potatoes and other tubers, so important in later times, did not keep well in highland circumstances; but some researchers believe that Andean peoples were reliant on wild tubers and rhizomes 10,000 years ago, although these groups had not yet domesticated them. It has been demonstrated that on the coast virtually all the crops that were important in 1532 (with the notable exception of corn) were already known and in daily use during the Initial Period.
The introduction of pottery at first made little difference to the general pattern of life; cooking continued to be done by roasting on hot stones. On the coast, there was a gradual increase in the consumption of cultivated plants, grown mainly in the lower reaches of the valleys; but the basic reliance on seafood continued. An important innovation was the development, or possibly the introduction, of the heddle loom, but, if it was introduced, its origin is not known. At first it seems only to have been used for making plain-weave cotton cloth. Village life and temple buildings spread over the country, except to the far south, where conditions favoured the continuance of hunting and gathering. Corn spread from the centre over most of the coast, and cassava, or manioc (an edible root), and peanuts (groundnuts) appeared there for the first time, their ultimate source being the Amazonian lowlands.
New ceremonial centres showed considerable diversity. Examples include La Florida, a huge pyramid in Lima that formed the nucleus of a yet-unmapped building complex. The Tank site at Ancón consists of a series of stone-faced platforms on a hill. Las Haldas has a platform and three plazas; two smaller similar sites are also known. The old centres at El Paraíso and Río Seco had been abandoned, but, in the highlands, Kotosh continued to be occupied. Any constructions at Yarinacocha in a wet, stoneless area would have been of wood or other perishable materials.
The variety of the pottery suggests that it was derived from several different sources. In the Lima area, the earliest examples are neckless jars and incurved bowls with thickened rims and rounded bottoms, very uneven in shape. Some later types are pebble polished and the jars thinner. Other later types include bottles with straight spouts, which may have simple incised or applied decoration, and open bowls. Finally, as the period drew to a close, tan-coloured decorated wares, with punctate or red-painted areas outlined by incised lines, as well as orange ware with black stripes, were produced. A type found on the south coast is a small, double-spouted bottle with simple negative-painted decoration, the first appearance of a form long-lived in that area and of a decorative technique that later spread widely over the country.
In the highlands, the earliest pottery at Kotosh consists predominantly of simple bowls with somewhat constricted mouths, and bowls with gently rounded bases meeting the vertical to outsloping concave walls at a sharp angle. There are rare double-spout-and-bridge bottles, closed vessels with two tubular spouts connected by a solid bridge. The ware is mainly dark gray, black, or dark brown to sombre red, and it may have a red slip. The decoration—which was either applied to a broad zone covering most of the walls or, on the neckless jars, formed a ring around the mouth—consists of linear incision, hatching, stamped circles, punctation, or excision. Postfired painting in red, yellow, and white frequently covers excised, hatched, and stamped areas. Despite the fact that Kotosh was on the eastern side of the Andean watershed, its pottery had little in common with that of Yarinacocha, save some similar decorations and the double-spout-and-bridge bottle.
The first known pottery of Yarinacocha is far from primitive. It consists mainly of bowls, mostly with complex outlines. Large open bowls with a broad labial flange, concave sides, and in some cases a second flange where side meets base, could have been cooking pots. Small bowls with inward-sloping sides meeting the rounded base at a sharp angle could have served for drinking; and a shallow bowl, with rounded base meeting the low, slightly outsloping concave sides at a lesser angle, may have been a plate for solid food. There are shards from large urns that may have served for brewing cassava beer. Decoration of finely hatched or cross-hatched geometrical areas, outlined by broad incised lines, occurs on most vessels, and one has a similarly executed feline face. In spite of severe weathering, postfired red paint, later so characteristic of the south coast, is found on some vessels.
The Early Horizon
The Early Horizon emerged after the appearance and rapid spread of the Chavín art style, ending the regional isolation of the Initial Period. The Chavín art style derives its name from the ruined temple complex of Chavín de Huántar in the Andean highlands of central Peru. The dates suggested for the emergence of the style beyond the environs of the temple, however, vary among scholars. Rowe dated it from 1400 bc, while Lumbreras suggested 850 bc; and the very designation of Chavín as a horizon has been challenged. But even those who have most favoured dropping the concept of horizon for this period have noted that in about 1000 bc there was an invasion of highlanders into the coastal Casma Valley who brought with them radically different architectural styles, ceramics, and food plants and animals that supplanted those in the valley; such a penetration was clearly a unification of the coast and the highlands into a single polity.
Chavín came to cover most of the north and centre of Peru, and its influence affected a good part of the south coast, excluding only the southern highlands. The art style, which is regarded as the expression of a cult, is expressed in painted textiles (of which few have survived), in pottery, and chiefly in stone carvings. Archaeologists at one time generally agreed that the chief object of worship was a cat, probably the jaguar, but this has been questioned, although many natural bird, animal, and human forms had feline mouths and other attributes. Feline representations were widespread, whereas some unquestioned deities were confined to the immediate neighbourhood of Chavín.
Chavín monuments and temples
Most Chavín temples seem to have been ceremonial centres without people living around them, although the complex at Chavín itself seems to have been accompanied by a considerable town. The remainder appear to have been focuses for scattered settlements. The most elaborate temple known is that at Chavín, which lies at an elevation of 10,530 feet on a tributary of the Marañón River, east of the Callejón de Huaylas district of the Santa River. The temple consists of a group of stone platforms formed of rubble faced by walls of coursed masonry in which two thin courses alternate with one thick one. They are honeycombed with galleries running parallel to the walls at different levels and ventilated by shafts. The oldest part of the temple is a U-shaped structure, with the open top of the U facing east; the rectangular central arm contains a cruciform gallery, at the crossing of which stands a remarkable prismatic shaft of white granite, some 15 feet high, carved in low relief to represent a standing human figure with snakes typifying the hair and a pair of great fangs in the upper jaw.
This figure, which has variously been called El Lanzón, the Great Image, and the Smiling God, is thought to have been the chief object of worship in the original temple. The southern arm of the temple was subsequently twice widened by rectangular additions, into which some of the original galleries were prolonged. After the second addition, the two were joined by a freestanding facade having a central portal with a lintel supported on two cylindrical columns. The lintel bears 14 eagles in low relief, supplied with feline jaws with prominent fangs behind the beak, and each column is entirely covered by a mythical bird bristlingwith feline fangs and faces. These have been interpreted as attendants of the god worshiped in that part of the temple, who had perhaps superseded the Smiling God and could have been the god shown on the Raimondi Stone, now in Lima. The stone shows the Staff God, a standing semihuman figure having claws, a feline face with crossed fangs, and a staff in each hand. Above his head, occupying two-thirds of the stone, is a towering, pillarlike structure fringed with snakes and emerging from a double-fanged face, which Rowe interpreted as a symbolic treatment of his hair as a tongue coming out of a mouth. Unlike the Smiling God, this figure has been found in areas as far from Chavín as the northern and southern coasts of Peru. Except for the columns, which are of black slate, the stones of the facade are light in colour on the south side and dark on the north. East of the facade is a small sunken court of the same period, which contained a number of slabs with carvings in low relief, and to the east of this is a much larger court surrounded by platforms. Within this court is a square, slightly sunken area, in which was found the Tello obelisk, a rectangular pillar carved in low relief to represent a caiman and covered with Chavín symbolic carvings, such as bands of teeth and animal heads. This is considered to be an object of worship like the Smiling God and Staff God. Carvings found on and around the temple include a cornice of projecting slabs, on the underside of which are carved jaguars, eagles, and snakes, and a number of tenoned heads of men and the Smiling God; they are thought to be decorations or the attendants of gods rather than objects of worship.
On the coast, the temples were built mostly of adobe. In the Nepeña Valley, two temples—Cerro Blanco and Punkurí—differ so much that they must also differ in age, but it is not known which is the earlier. Cerro Blanco is a massive platform of conical adobes and stones, supporting rooms with walls bearing Chavín decoration, including eyes and feline fangs, modeled in mud plaster in low relief and painted red and greenish yellow. Punkurí has a low, terraced platform with a wide stairway on which stands a feline head and paws, modeled from stone and mud, and painted. By the paws was buried a woman, believed to have been sacrificed. At Moxeke and Pallca in the Casma Valley to the south, there are terraced, stone-faced pyramids with stone stairways. The first has niches containing clay-plastered reliefs of mud, stone, and conical adobes showing felines, snakes, and human beings of Chavinoid character painted in polychrome. Also in Casma is a temple at Cerro Sechín, consisting of a series of superimposed platforms with a central stair, on either side of which, at the bottom level, stands a row of irregularly shaped flat stones with incised designs showing standing men carrying clubs, severed heads, and other designs. Lacking Chavín characteristics, these have been interpreted variously as ancestral Chavín or derived from it, the latter being the more plausible. There is a Chavín ceremonial centre at Garagay in the Chillón Valley but none to the south.
The pottery of Chavín and Paracas
Chavín pottery is best known from the decorated types found in the galleries in the temple at Chavín and in graves on the northern coast, where it is called Cupisnique. Until the end of the period, the ware was monochrome—dull red, brown, or gray—and hard and stonelike. Vessels were massive and heavy, especially in the early part of the period. The main forms are open bowls with vertical or slightly expanding sides and flat or gently rounded bases, flasks, and stirrup-spouted bottles. The surface may be modeled in relief or decorated by incision, stamping, brushing, rouletting, or dentate rocker-stamping, all of which may be applied to particular zones in contrast with other smooth ones. Some bowls have deeply incised designs on both the inside and outside faces. Many of the forms and decorative features, apart from specifically Chavinoid designs (particularly feline fangs), were already present at Kotosh in the previous phase.
Considerable time changes are represented in Chavín pottery; for example, the earliest stirrup spouts were relatively small and very thick and heavy, and the spout had a thick flange. As time went on, the stirrups became lighter and the spouts longer; the flange was reduced and finally disappeared. The necks of the flasks underwent similar changes. The decoration on some of these is extremely striking; one has incised flower designs, and another has a roughened surface in which there are a number of concave circular depressions with a notably high polish. The Cupisnique stirrup-spouted vessels, some of which were modeled in the form of human beings, animals, or fruits, were the beginning of a north-coast tradition of naturalistic modeling, which persisted throughout its history. Toward the end of the period, a bichrome (dark red on cream) pottery came into use.
There is a considerable area on the south Peruvian coast with its focus in the Ica Valley, where strong influences from Chavín have been found in the Paracas pottery style, and two painted textiles in pure Chavín style have survived from the same valley. Paracas pottery was very different from that of Chavín, but various motifs have enabled the two to be correlated closely. Paracas began at practically the same time as Chavín, about 1000 bc, and lasted throughout its span and beyond it, perhaps to about 200 bc. The most characteristic form of Paracas pottery was a closed globular vessel with a somewhat flattened base, which had two narrow spouts connected by a flat bridge, or more frequently, with one spout replaced by a human or bird head. Simple round-based bowls were very common. The ware was most commonly black or very dark brownish, and much of the surface was covered with decoration outlined by incision and painted in polychrome with hard, shiny, resinous colours after firing. A panel bearing a feline face on one end of a spout-and-bridge vessel was one of the most frequent forms of decoration. Paracas is also distinguished for its gorgeous embroidered textiles, generally found in the mummy bundles of the important dead. Embroidery had a popularity at this time that it afterward lost, but a surprisingly wide range of weaving techniques were also used in various parts of the coast.
The Early Intermediate period
The Early Horizon was succeeded by what has been termed the Early Intermediate Period. The onset of the Early Intermediate marked the decline of Chavín’s cultural influence and the attainment of artistic and technological peaks in a number of centres, both on the coast and in the highlands.
The southern coast
The beginning of the period is best determined by the evolution of the Paracas pottery style into that of the Nazca (Nasca) area on the southern coast; this is traditionally estimated to have occurred about 200 bc, but Rowe’s date of 400 bc is probably more reliable, since this is the area where his detailed succession was worked out. Nazca ware is marked by the introduction of slip painting applied before firing, which took the place of the resin painting applied afterward; but the style evolved continuously, and the polychrome tradition continued. The most common forms were bowls and beakers, all with rounded bases, but double-spout or head-and-spout jars were also characteristic. In contrast to the Moche area on the northern coast, figure modeling played a very minor role. Designs were painted in up to eight colours and fell into two main groups: one characterized by stylized but recognizable life forms, such as birds, fish, or fruits, with some humans; the other depicting mythical subjects such as complex demons. Between approximately middle and late Nazca, mythical figures became increasingly angular and elongated and developed a tangled mass of appendages. Trophy-head representations, which were modeled as complete vessels as well as painted in profile on simple vessels, increased greatly at the same time. Because Nazca art was less realistic than that of Moche, little can be learned of the appearance and life of the people.
In the time of the Nazca style what has been described as a small city was located in each of the south-coast valleys of Pisco, Ica, Nazca, and Acarí. At Cahuachi, in Nazca, this included a ceremonial centre consisting of six pyramids, which were terraced and adobe-faced natural hills associated with courts. Tambo Viejo in Acarí was fortified, which supports inferences drawn with some difficulty from late Nazca art that a concern with warfare developed at that time.
The northern coast
A cultural peak was reached in the valleys of Pacasmayo, Chicama, and Moche on the northern Peruvian coast. A large proportion of this area has been grouped by archaeologists into a Moche culture, although some of the territory encompassed by these valleys was not part of the polity called Moche. The Japanese archaeologist Izumi Shimada has referred to this kind of control as “horizontally discontinuous territoriality.” The coast–highland “vertical” type of polity described above appears to have emerged later in coastal history. Thus, this “horizontal discontinuity” may have been related to coastal trade, as products were sought north of the desert coast, while at a later time it may have coexisted with “verticality.”
The Moche culture is distinguished by a ceremonial pottery style, commonly covered with a white or red-and-white slip, which may have had decoration painted on it, chiefly in red on the white parts. Some pots are molded in forms that include figures, animals, plants, and weapons; and some have molded designs in low relief. Molding and painting both convey highly realistic impressions of the people, things, and scenes they represent and are a vivid source of information about the life and activities of the people, though some important aspects, such as agricultural processes, are not represented. Moche pottery has been divided into five phases that were originally defined mainly by differences in the stirrup-spouted jars, but this has been extended to other forms—for example, bell-shaped bowls, double vessels, and jars with collars. The prevalence of stirrup spouts and the quality of the modeling connect Moche much more closely with Chavín–Cupisnique than with the intermediate styles, in which features such as the spout-and-bridge vessels suggest intrusive influences from the south. Among Moche buildings are adobe pyramids, like the enormous Huaca del Sol in the Moche Valley, palaces with large rooms (on terraces in the case of the Huaca de la Luna near the Sol), and fortified structures perched on the sides of valleys. These structures reinforce the evidence, provided by warriors and enthroned dignitaries depicted on pots, for the existence of an aggressive hierarchical state, and it may be inferred that this grew up as the result of dependence on highly developed irrigation systems in the restricted areas available in the valleys.
Mask of copper and gold alloy with eyes of shell, found in the Huaca de la Luna, Moche River valley, c. 400 bc–ad 600; in the Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Germany.Ferdinand Anton
There were no towns in the northern valleys. Dispersed communities, built in places where they would not use the valuable irrigated agricultural lands, seem to have been situated in ways suggesting dependence on one of the ceremonial centres.
The north highlands
In the north highlands, the remarkable pottery style of Recuay has been found in the Callejón de Huaylas region. This pottery is related to the negative-painted representative of Gallinazo in the Santa Valley and is painted with black negative designs over white and red, one of the most characteristic being a feline in profile with a comb on the head. There is a good deal of lively modeling, but it is much less naturalistic than that of Moche. A typical feature is a broad, nearly horizontal flange surrounding the mouth of a jar, and many jars also have a horizontal spout below the flange. Most of this pottery has come from stone-lined graves, and some stone buildings of two or three stories may have belonged to the people who made it.
The Cajamarca Basin is the site of a pottery style (called cursive) that was entirely independent of known outside influences and that spanned at least the Early Intermediate Period and the Middle Horizon. It has lightly painted running-scroll designs, which vaguely recall writing (whence the name cursive), as well as small animals and faces, in brownish black or red on a cream background, mostly on open bowls with ring bases. It was traded widely in the north, and south as far as Huari, during the Middle Horizon.
The south highlands
Large urban and ceremonial centres emerged at this time near the shores of Lake Titicaca. One site, Pucará, includes a well-built, horseshoe-shaped sanctuary of concentric walls of red sandstone enclosing a slightly sunken terrace lined with white-sandstone slabs. Within the terrace is a sunken court some 50 feet square and seven feet below the surface, also lined with white sandstone and reached by a stairway. This court contains two stone-lined grave chambers, and the outer horseshoe wall has small chambers, each containing one or two altarlike slabs in its thickness. There are also squat stone statues of men carrying trophy heads and stelae (upright sculptured slabs of stone) bearing recessed geometrical carvings and snakes. The pottery includes a reddish-buff micaceous ware painted in red, black, and yellow; cats, human or bird heads, and geometrical figures are all outlined by incision. The faces have the eyes divided vertically, one half of each eye black, the other half the natural colour of the ware. Pucará occurred early in the period, before the main development of Tiwanaku, and it may have taken shape about 400 bc. It appears to have controlled an area between the site and Lake Titicaca or farther.
Tiwanaku is a well-known ceremonial centre whose stone remains are now a tourist attraction in the Andes second in popularity only to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The occupation of the ceremonial centre is believed to have begun very early in the period, since some of the earliest pottery shows similarity to that found at Pucará.
The ceremonial buildings—whose exact age is uncertain—include a large stepped pyramid or platform called Acapana (Akapana), with foundations of buildings on the top; a semi-subterranean temple with stone heads tenoned into the walls; and a low rectangular platform called Calasasaya (Kalasasaya), enclosed by a retaining wall of upright stones alternating with smaller rectangular blocks. In one corner of the platform stands a great monolithic doorway, not in its original position, cut from a large block of lava. At the top of the doorway is carved a central low-relief figure attended by three rows of smaller winged figures that appear to run inward toward him (see photograph). The central figure, carrying staves that may represent a spear thrower and darts, has been likened to the Chavín Staff God and for convenience may be called the Doorway, or Gateway, God. Versions of the Doorway God and his attendants are found almost everywhere within the range of Tiwanaku influence in the subsequent Middle Horizon. Another feature of the site is a number of large and finely finished stone blocks with niches, doorways, and recessed geometric decorations. Tiwanaku masonry is sometimes held together by accurately cut notches, sometimes by copper clamps set in either straight or T-shaped grooves. Several massive monolithic statues have been found in and around Tiwanaku, the largest being 24 feet high. They resemble pillars bearing relief designs, and some carry beakers.
Doorway god and accompanying “angels” on the Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku. The main figure has been variously described as a sun god, a thunder god, or Viracocha.Georg Gerster—Rapho/Photo Researchers
Decorated Tiwanaku pottery is a finely polished polychrome, which commonly has a red slip with designs painted in various colours. Felines and hawks in profile, with eyes divided vertically into black and white halves, are common designs, as are geometric figures such as triangles and steps. Like all Tiwanaku art, the designs are stiff and formal. The shapes include a tall, graceful, hollow-sided beaker and various types of bottles and hollow-sided bowls with flat bases, including a form bearing a jaguar head and tail on the rim.
The Middle Horizon
Both Pucará and Tiwanaku were early forms of what became known as the Middle Horizon, an expansion of multiple-valley political rule that had two centres: one in the southern Altiplano, the other centred on Huari (Wari), near the modern Peruvian city of Ayacucho. This development is usually dated about ad 600. Some Tiwanaku effigy vessels have been discovered at Huari, but otherwise they seem to have been independent entities. Subsequent research has located parallel occupations near each other in the vicinity of the modern city of Moquegua.
The American archaeologist William H. Isbell has argued that Huari was a true state which displayed archaeological manifestations of administrative recording, had storage facilities on a scale suggesting major revenues, contained status tombs and palaces, and had other symbols and ornaments of a ruling class. Huari colonies and control also have been detected in the evidence. Attempts to explain what Huari and Tiwanaku were doing outside the areas of their immediate control have pointed toward religious proselytism, as well as to trade. It has also been suggested that, although these polities employed an extensive form of control, they did not attempt to rule all of the intervening territories.
After a period of consolidation, the expansion was intensified, eventually reaching Cajamarca and the Chicama Valley in the north and the Ocoña Valley on the far southern coast, by about 800. The growth of the empire and its nature is shown by a number of features. One was the spread of Huari pottery styles and local copies of them, some bearing the Doorway God and other religious figures but many with neutral or secular motifs such as bands of chevrons. These generally were polychrome wares, and figures appearing on them—mythological, human, or animal—may have the eyes divided vertically into black and white halves, as at Tiwanaku. A result of the increasing dominance of Huari styles was the obliteration of the old pottery styles over the whole coast from Nazca to Moche. The southern burial custom of huddled, cloth-wrapped mummies spread northward along the coast, displacing the older fashion of extended burial. The presence of large groups of storage buildings at Piquillacta in the Cuzco Valley and at Viracochapampa, near Huamachuco far to the north, suggests military activity like that of the later Incas. On the coast, some great cities in the north—of which Chan Chan, near modern Trujillo, is the best-known—originated at this time, apparently under southern influence, and the rectangular Great Enclosure Compounds in the Virú Valley may be an expression of the same phenomenon. All these changes, taken together, point strongly to military conquest.
Tiwanaku designs, derived through Huari, are seen on coastal textiles as well as on pottery, and they are found particularly on tapestry. Besides recognizable figures like the Doorway God and his attendants, there are many examples, perhaps somewhat later in date, on which only the divided eyes—in black and white or other combinations of colours—can be inferred to belong to human or animal figures.
Pachacamac, on the central coast, which survived until Inca times as a great temple and oracle, was established as a ceremonial centre by the beginning of the Middle Horizon. At that time it also became a considerable town, with a degree of independence in the Huari empire, as is demonstrated by the presence of its own local variety of coastal Huari pottery—distinguished by the frequent depiction of a creature, sometimes called a griffin, with a winged feline body, human hands, and an eagle head, or sometimes the head alone—from Pachacamac north to Chicama, south to Nazca, and inland to Huancayo. Its influence may have been more religious than political, as in Inca times.
The Moche pottery style disappeared from the Chicama and neighbouring valleys under Huari pressure, but it is unlikely to have become entirely extinct because many features of it reappeared later on Chimú pottery. It probably survived, along with a remnant of the Moche state, in some valleys farther north (including perhaps Lambayeque), but the succession there has not been sufficiently worked out to demonstrate this.
When the Huari empire reached its maximum extent, about 800, it collapsed at the centre. Huari was abandoned, as it appears was Cajamarquilla, a large urban centre near Lima. Also at this time, it appears that construction peaked at Tiwanaku—which is estimated to have had 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants—although the city’s influence on the region continued. Thereafter, few signs of urban life occur in the south, except at Pachacamac, until Inca times. Curiously, the decline of the cities in the south appears to have coincided with the beginnings of urban settlement on the northern coast at Chan Chan, Pacatnamú, and other places.
After Huari fell, signs of new influences from there disappeared in the provinces, but various changes evolved in local pottery styles. Among these was the development of a new style on the north-central coast. One of the most distinctive products of this style was a face-collar jar, in many cases oval, decorated in pressed relief with cats and other Huari-derived designs and painted in washy black, white, and orange on a buff ground (Huari Norteño B). Other examples are the Epigonal styles of Nazca and Ica, characterized by bowls and flasks with occasional Huari motifs, such as animal heads, carried out in what has been described as “a slovenly, rounded and hasty” manner.
The Late Intermediate Period
The Chimú state
The Late Intermediate Period began about 1000 (Rowe has said 900) with the dying out of the signs of unity imposed by Huari. The seeds of the Chimú state were probably sown at the same time, but they are not recognizable until considerably later. Elsewhere there were small independent states, which on the central and southern coasts were in most cases no bigger than a single valley, to judge from the distribution of the distinct pottery styles.
There were few new advances in techniques, and perhaps the most notable was the spread of bronze to the Peruvian coast from northwest Argentina and Bolivia, where tin ore was found and where the manufacture of bronze appears to have originated during the Middle Horizon. A hard alloy of copper and arsenic had been used previously in the centre and north. Pottery improved in quality in most areas, though its artistic character was not equal, for instance, to the earlier products of Moche and Nazca. There was a tendency toward standardization and toward reduction in the number of colours, which went with a degree of mass production. The modeling tradition of the north coast revived, but it was dull and lifeless by comparison with that of Moche times and was generally executed in black ware. In other parts, entirely new styles evolved. That of Chancay, on the central coast, was thin, dull red or cream in colour, with rather a dusty-looking cream slip and painted decoration in black. A common shape was an egg-shaped jar with a flaring collar and a pair of small loop handles, which were sometimes turned into a figure by modeling a face on the collar and adding ill-shaped limbs. Bowls and beakers with slightly bowed, almost vertical sides, were other common shapes. The porosity of the ware and the flaky nature of the slip made this pottery inferior in quality to that of other coastal areas. In the south, pottery of an attractive style was made in the Ica Valley. It was hard, well-burnished buff or red ware, covered with painted, textile-derived patterns in black, white, and red, although some vessels also depicted small birds and fish. Highly characteristic are bowls with a rounded base meeting the inward-sloping sides at a sharp angle and a thickened rim of triangular section.
It is difficult to determine whether any new textile techniques were adopted, but it is unlikely since the extreme versatility of the Peruvian weavers appears already to have covered most of the imaginable varieties at one time or another. On the other hand, fashions varied, and a relevant instance is the use of tapestry. Tapestry was known in the Early Horizon, suffered something of an eclipse in the Early Intermediate Period, and grew greatly in popularity in the Middle Horizon, when notable examples were produced. During the Late Intermediate Period its popularity waned again, although it was used for the finest garments on into the Inca Period; but in Chimú textiles it was generally confined to borders and other small areas. Textiles were similar over the whole coast, and to distinguish between those of different areas is a task for specialists. Some of the most characteristic types were garments adorned with regular rows, horizontal or diagonal, of stylized birds or fish, executed in brocade or double cloth.
In most of the northern valleys irrigation systems reached their maximum extent; and the Virú Valley—which has been the most thoroughly studied—is deceptive in this respect, because much of the land went out of cultivation, possibly owing to removal of part of the population to other valleys by the Chimú rulers. In some cases, the systems of more than one river were connected, and water was taken, for instance, from the Chicama Valley to that of Moche, where Chan Chan was situated.
The legendary Chimú ruler Ñançen Pinco, who began to expand the state, is thought to have begun his reign about 1370, and the names of two predecessors are known; so it is a fair guess that the state was taking shape in the first half of the 14th century, when distinctively Chimú pottery forms appeared. Various rather exotic pottery styles dating before this time have been found in the northern area, but insufficient work has been done on their distribution in time and space. An early type consisted of bottles on a ring base with a loop handle and a narrow, tapering spout, decorated with geometric designs and cursive scrolls in black on a red-and-white ground. There were double whistling vessels, with modeled figures on one vessel connected to a tapering spout on the other by a flat, arched bridge; some early examples were of orange ware with a few dark-red stripes on the spout and bridge, but later ones were black. Carinated whistling vessels of black ware with hornlike projections above the ears on a ring base, with a tapering spout connected to a figure by a bridge, also have been found at an early stage. Similar vessels with two spouts connected by a bridge had a considerable range in time. Another form was a bottle, of black ware, with a tapering spout emerging from a modeled figure or head. These vessels had a strap handle and ring base of variable height. Many of the later blackware vessels had panels in pressed relief, a form of decoration that continued through Chimú times; these bore designs such as men holding staves, moons, or cats on a background of raised dots.
The overwhelming majority of Chimú vessels were of black ware. There was a revival of stirrup spouts, either on modeled vessels such as human figures or reed balsas, or on plain ones with or without pressed relief panels, and these normally had a monkey sitting on the stirrup at the base of the spout. Double vessels, often with a bird head to balance the spout and pressed relief panels on the bodies, continued. Many vessels were lentil-shaped. Jugs with strap handles and pressed relief panels sometimes took on a flattened section to become canteens. These are only a few of the forms that have been found, some resembling immediate predecessors, some new, and some, especially the stirrup spout, revivals of earlier types.
Ñançen Pinco is believed to have conquered the coast from the Saña River, just south of Lambayeque, south to Santa. After him came six rulers before Minchançaman, who conquered the remainder of the coast from at least as far north as Piura and possibly to Tumbes, south almost to Lima. His triumph was short-lived since he himself was conquered by the Inca in the early 1460s.
Chan Chan: citadelAdobe citadel at the Chan Chan archaeological site, near Trujillo, Peru.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Chan Chan: reconstructionReconstruction at the Chan Chan archaeological site, near Trujillo, Peru.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
Chan Chan: reconstructed wallsReconstructed adobe walls at the Chan Chan archaeological site, near Trujillo, Peru.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)The Chimú state originated in the Moche Valley, where its capital, Chan Chan, lay. There were other cities at Farfán and Pacatnamú in the Pacasmayo Valley and at Purgatorio and Apurlé in the Leche and Motupe valleys, respectively, which shared some features with Chan Chan. All included large walled compounds. Apart from the cities, there were defensive settlements, such as one in the narrow part of the Moche Valley, up which it straggled for five miles, occupying terraced hillsides and side valleys and commanding three of the main canals. A third type of settlement consisted of scattered compounds in the midst of large irrigated areas, one example of which was found in the Chicama Valley alongside an irrigation canal that took water to Chan Chan. Chan Chan covered an area of about 14 square miles (36 square km), with a central area of about 2.5 square miles containing 10 or more large rectangular enclosures sometimes called ciudadelas (“citadels”). These were surrounded by tapering adobe walls, 10 feet thick at the base and about 30 feet high. They ranged in size from about 400 by 200 yards to 650 by 400 yards.
At least six of these citadels have similar plans, and one has been studied in detail. It has a narrow opening at the north end and is divided into three parts by high walls. The northern part contains a large entry court, flanked by a kitchen area and several smaller courts, leading to a densely built area of small courts, some of which have a U-shaped structure at one end, while others are filled with small rooms. The U-shaped structures, which do not appear to have been roofed, may have been shrines, and the courts that contain them may have had walls covered with mud-plaster reliefs, such as bands of animals, birds, or fish, scrolls, or step frets, arranged in a manner reminiscent of Chimú textiles. The central part has a somewhat smaller entrance court leading to several courts occupied by rooms, perhaps storerooms, although nothing was found in them. Another feature of this area is a great burial platform with rows of chambers arranged in three levels. All these features are connected by narrow and tortuous passages. The southern part is an open area, containing one or more pukíos (rectangular areas where the ground has been lowered to the water table, either to supply water or to grow plants). In the spaces between the enclosures, and elsewhere in the city, are large areas of dwellings, irrigated areas, and cemeteries.
Chan Chan: royal tombRoyal tomb in the Tschudi citadel at Chan Chan archaeological site, near Trujillo, Peru.© Ron Gatepain (A Britannica Publishing Partner)
It is now thought that the ciudadelas may have been the dwellings of the ruling classes and their immediate retainers, and it has even been suggested that they were the palaces of successive rulers, maintained by their descendants in the way that those of deceased Inca were maintained in Cuzco. The number of recognizable ciudadelas agrees with the number (10) of known Chimú rulers. This intriguing suggestion is further supported by the belief that the Inca learned a great deal from the Chimú after they conquered them, for, not content with carrying Minchançaman off to Cuzco, they established a colony of north-coast workmen there, and Topa Inca Yupanqui (Thupa ’Inka Yupanki) appears to have worked out the political organization of the empire at the same time, basing it largely on the Chimú system.
Roads between the valleys were always necessary to coastal states and were vital to the Chimú, and the Inca may have learned something in this connection also. There are almost continuous traces of a road from just north of Lambayeque to the Chao Valley just south of Virú, with remains even farther south in Santa, Nepeña, and Casma. The remains differ in elaboration and tend to be wider and more imposing near the cities; in the deserts between valleys they were tracks marked by posts or bordered by low walls, but in the valleys the simplest type is a leveled surface 15 to 25 feet wide, with walls of stone or adobe about three feet high and with the surface of the road sometimes being raised.
Although the Chimú had a powerful, aggressive, organized state, their dependence on elaborate irrigation systems for the maintenance of concentrated populations rendered them vulnerable to attack, which was one of the main factors that enabled the Inca to take them over comparatively easily. Geoffrey H.S. Bushnell John V. Murra
The Chincha
The growth and expansion of Chimú were paralleled on the southern coast by Chincha, which was a similarly well-organized polity. Comparison between them has been difficult because of the very different evidence available. Whereas Chimú has become familiar through extensive archaeological research, data on the Chincha has come primarily from the study of historical sources.
In the first few years of Spanish rule, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V complained that he had not received any of the newly conquered lands as a personal fief. The conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his brother Gonzalo hurried to assign him three ethnic groups: (1) The Aymara kingdom of the Lupaqa, listed on the Inca quipu at 20,000 households, (2) the tropical island of Puná, in the Gulf of Guayaquil in modern Ecuador, with an unknown aboriginal population, and (3) the coastal Chincha polity, allegedly with 30,000 households. Unfortunately for the Chincha, their population vanished within the first three decades of the Spanish invasion; the royal affiliation and proximity to Lima did not help protect the Chincha.
Belonging to the crown, however, did promote account keeping and administrative reports to the Spanish court. The unusual feature about Chincha was its considerable orientation to the sea. Several thousand households were listed as high-seas fishers and sailors, and thousands more were engaged in long-distance trade with lands to the north. Because the waters off the Chilean and Peruvian coast were cold, there was a long-standing interest in the warm waters off the Ecuadorean coast, more than 1,000 miles away, where the Antarctic current was no longer present. The details of these exchanges are not known, but one feature was paramount in Andean eyes: throughout the central and southern Andes, wherever puna dwellers were the dominant population, there was a demand for the spiny oyster (Spondylus), the shells of which were believed to encourage rainmaking. The one Quechua literary text available lists the spiny oyster as the favourite food of the gods, although it was inedible for humans.
While there has been a long-standing archaeological interest in the shells of this mollusk, the extent and the organization of the shell traffic has not been verified archaeologically. One of the witnesses of the invasion, Pedro Pizarro (a cousin of Francisco), reported being told that the Chincha lord had 100,000 rafts on the “Southern Sea.” The number need not be accurate: even 1,000 oceangoing rafts, with keels and sails, would imply a major economic operation.
Chimú and Chincha have received considerable attention from non-Peruvian scholars; understanding of the contemporaries of these peoples in the highlands, however, has remained sketchy. The oral tradition reported by the early European observers claimed that before the expansion of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca state, there were many polities large and small, all ruled by traditional lords and frequently at war with one another. To what extent the notions of ecological complementarity or the vertical archipelago were attempts to bridge these conflicts or their consequences cannot be stated with any certainty.
The 17th-century Andean writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (Waman Puma) reported the oral tradition that he had learned from his forebears, who were minor ethnic lords in the Huánuco region. In the century before the Inca conquest people had lived in the “epoch of the soldiers.” During this period
they began to fight and there was much war and death…one lord against the other…bloodshed and taking of prisoners. And they also grabbed their wives and sons and took their fields and irrigation waters and pastures. And they were very cruel and stole each other’s property, cloth, gold, copper, even their millstones.…And so they went and settled on the heights where they built walls and houses inside…and wells to draw water.
Poma de Ayala’s description of Late Intermediate settlement patterns on mountaintops, at the very edge of and even beyond puna cultivation, has been confirmed by field research undertaken near Lake Titicaca by the American archaeologist John Hyslop. He found dozens of walled-in enclosures of 50 to 100 acres and larger. During the Late Horizon—which corresponds to the century of Inca rule—these populations were moved to the lakeshore, along the royal road.
The Inca
Forty years had elapsed since Columbus’s landfall when in 1532 fewer than 200 Spaniards brought down the Inca (Inka) state. Ever since then, historians have been pondering the reasons for this sudden collapse. The evidence seems to favour internal subversion. Don Francisco Cusichaq, lord of the Huanca in central Peru, opened the country to alien rule; he wanted to destroy his hereditary enemies, the Inca. The Andean pattern of many dispersed regional polities that frequently were at war with one another—a situation that the Inca had manipulated but had not eliminated—and the diverse archipelago-like string of the communities may also have facilitated the relatively effortless Spanish victory.
By 1532 Tawantinsuyu, the Inca state, had incorporated dozens of coastal and highland ethnic groups stretching from what is now the northern border of Ecuador to Mendoza in west-central Argentina and the Maule River in central Chile—a distance roughly equal to that between New York City and the Panama Canal. By conservative estimates the Inca ruled more than 12,000,000 people, who spoke at least 20 different languages. A century earlier, during the wars of the Late Intermediate, they had controlled little beyond the villages of their own Cuzco Valley. While forming their state they subordinated more than 100 independent ethnic groups; how much of this achievement corresponded to political experience gained during the Middle Horizon cannot be told. It is likely that the memory of that multiethnic expansion was alive in the ruling families of the major polities.
The origins and expansion of the Inca state
Inca origins and early history are largely shrouded in legends that may be more mythical than factual. Their later history, particularly from the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (Pachakuti ’Inka Yupanki; see Table 2) onward, is largely based on fact, even though it presents what the Inca wanted people to know. Whether these historical traditions are true, in the sense that they accurately related what happened, is not so important as the fact that the Inca used them to justify their various imperial conquests.
Inca rulers and royal corporations Inca name Spanish spelling panaca (royal corporation) Manqo Qhapaq Manco Capac Chima Zinchi Roq'a Sinchi Roca Rawra Lloq'e Yupanki Lloque Yupanqui 'Awayni Mayta Qhapaq Mayta Capac 'Uska Mayta Qhapaq Yupanki Capac Yupanqui 'Apu Mayta 'Inka Roq'a 'Inka Inca Roca Wika-k'iraw Yawar Waqaq Yahuar Huacac 'Awqaylli Wiraqocha 'Inka Viracocha Inca Zukzu 'Inka 'Urqon Inca Urcon none Pachakuti 'Inka Yupanki (1438–71) Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui 'Iñaqa Thupa 'Inka Yupanki (1471–93) Topa Inca Yupanqui Qhapaq Wayna Qhapaq (1493–1525) Huayna Capac Tumipampa Washkar 'Inka (1525–32) Huascar Washkar 'Ataw Wallpa 'Inka (1532–33) Atahuallpa none Thupa Wallpa (1533) Topa Huallpa none Manqo 'Inka Yupanki (1533–45) Manco Inca Yupanqui none (?)
The nature of the sources
The Inca kept detailed accounts of their dynastic history, knotted onto the quipu records kept by professional accountants. The major local ethnic lords also kept records. As mentioned above, Don Francisco Cusichaq kept records of Spanish exactions, which were offered to and accepted in evidence by Spanish administrators. Through the study of Cusichaq’s quipu, modern researchers have learned that there was both a quantitative and a historical dimension to Andean records. Cusichaq’s quipu refers to more than 20 separate events—all recorded in perfect historical sequence—but the way in which these events were recorded has not been fathomed. The quantitative record, which was easier to decipher, lists counts of men and women on the first two cords, followed by the number of domestic animals (llamas being separated from alpacas). Cloth, the most valuable commodity according to Andean reckoning, comes first among the goods listed, followed by food and household items. The quipu could incorporate strings for new, Spanish items. Thus, in Cusichaq’s records Spanish sandals are itemized separately from Andean footwear, and eggs and imported hens have their own strings.
Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe: El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno; Inca; quipuBookkeeper (right) rendering accounts to the Inca ruler Topa Inca Yupanqui. The contents of the storehouses (foreground and background) are recorded on the bookkeeper's quipu of knotted strings. Drawing by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala from El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno.Courtesy, Library Services Department, American Museum of Natural History, New York City (Neg. No. 321546)
The Cuzco bookkeeping records were used by the Spanish in the early days of their rule in order to divide the country and its population among the invaders. The accuracy of the information about distant places and peoples available to the Inca rulers astonished the Spanish observers. Some among them transcribed what they were told; these accounts became the source of the fragmentary information available to modern researchers. In 1549 and again in the 1570s systematic efforts were made by the Spanish to investigate the Andean past. Some of the interviewers were excellent ethnographers who noted discrepancies between separate oral traditions and contradictions from one set of claims to another. Just as in Mexico, where there were true ethnographers like Bernardino de Sahagún, so in the Andes a young soldier, Pedro de Cieza de León, was a remarkable interviewer, who constantly checked what he had been told by the members of one royal lineage against alternate versions.
Thus, the present knowledge of Inca society has been derived from a combination of archaeological studies and the written accounts sent to Spain by the early Spanish observers. Some of these accounts reached a wide public: within two years of the fall of the Inca, two quite different versions of what happened at Cajamarca (the place where Pizarro first met and kidnapped the Inca ruler Atahuallpa) were already in print in Europe. One of these was the official version of the Pizarro brothers, while the other criticized their actions. At a time when printing was still a rare skill and censorship was severe, such ample coverage of the invasion is notable.
The first serious study of the Andean peoples was written by Cieza de León, who had reached the Americas as a 14-year-old soldier and had settled in what today is Colombia. A decade or so later he drifted by horse to what is now Peru; he then rode for some 1,300 miles, traveling as far south as the mines at Potosí, in present-day Bolivia. Cieza de León was encouraged by the clergy, many of them partisans and correspondents of the Dominican missionary and historian Bartolomé de Las Casas, to interview both Spanish and Andean participants of the invasion and of the wars that some Andean factions had fought against one another.
The most widely read source during the colonial period was the work of Garcilaso de la Vega, also called El Inca—the son of an Inca royal woman and a Spanish nobleman (whose name the son adopted when he “returned” to his father’s estate in Spain). He lived in Spain nearly 60 years, leading the life of a gentleman, reading, translating love poetry, editing the memoirs of one of the early invaders of Florida, and, finally, writing a vast account of his mother’s ancestors, The Royal Commentaries of the Inca.
Guamán Poma de Ayala (Waman Puma) was one of the few Andean writers whose work is available. He wrote a 1,200-page “letter” to Philip III of Spain, consisting of two books combined into one. The first book was a “new chronicle,” describing Andean achievements and history; the second, much larger part advised the king on how to achieve a “good government.” The second included 400 pages of pen-and-ink drawings, which have remained a major contribution to the modern understanding of Andean society. The manuscript somehow reached the Danish Royal Library in Copenhagen, where it was discovered in 1908 and where it still resides.
Settlement in the Cuzco Valley
Several of the modern Andean peoples trace their ancestries to mythical figures who emerged from holes in the ground. These places of origin, or paqarina, were regarded as shrines, where religious ceremonies had to be performed. The Inca paqarina was located at Paqari-tampu (Paccari Tampu), about 15 miles south of Cuzco. There are three caves at Paqari-tampu, and the founders of the Inca dynasty—Manco Capac (Manqo Qhapaq), his three brothers, and his four sisters—supposedly emerged from the middle cave. They assumed leadership over 10 groups of people, or ayllus, that emerged from the caves on either side and led them on a journey lasting an unknown number of years.
During this period the Inca and their followers moved from village to village in search of enough fertile land to sustain themselves. Manco Capac succeeded in disposing of his three brothers. One of his sisters, Mama Ocllo, bore him a son named Sinchi Roca (Zinchi Roq’a). Eventually, the Inca arrived at the fertile area around Cuzco, where they attacked the local residents and drove them from the land. They then established themselves in Cuzco and gradually began to meddle in the affairs of their neighbours, forcing them to pay tribute in order to retain their freedom.
By this time Manco Capac was quite old and close to death. In order to ensure that all he had accomplished would be preserved for posterity, he named his eldest son, Sinchi Roca, to succeed him to the throne. He then directed his next eldest son to shelter and care for all of his other children and their descendants, who composed the Chima panaca. The traditions say little about Sinchi Roca, the second emperor, but apparently he was a peaceful man who made no military campaigns to add lands to the Inca domain. It is not clear whether or not Sinchi Roca married his sister, as his father had done. It is clear, however, that he did not follow his father’s lead in naming his eldest son as his successor, for the third emperor, Lloque Yupanqui (Lloq’e Yupanki), had an older brother. Lloque Yupanqui, like his father, was not warlike and added no lands to the Inca domain.
The demand for additional lands and, more importantly, the resources they could provide first became apparent during the reign of the fourth emperor, Mayta Capac (Mayta Qhapaq). The reasons for the appearance of this need in the 14th century are undoubtedly complex, and any single-factor explanation is probably insufficient. But one possible explanation may lie in the fact that rainfall began to diminish very slightly about this time throughout the central Andes. In an area like the Cuzco Valley, this would imply that some of the marginal farmlands were either abandoned because they could not be watered adequately or were less productive than they had been earlier. Given this situation, if the Inca attempted to maintain their old standard of living, they might have placed some pressure on their food resources. One way of alleviating the problem would have been to acquire additional land and sources of water in an adjacent part of the valley. This is apparently what Mayta Capac did.
Mayta Capac is described in the chronicles as a large, aggressive youth who began fighting with boys from a neighbouring group when he was very young. Pedro de Cieza de León and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (who also was one of the more reliable Spanish chroniclers) indicate that the quarrel began because the Inca were taking water from this group, although they differ on the details concerning who actually took the water. By the time Mayta Capac became emperor, this quarrel had grown into a full-scale war, which the Inca won. They looted the homes of their enemies, took some of their lands, and probably imposed some sort of tribute payment on them.
The beginnings of external expansion
The fifth emperor, Capac Yupanqui (Qhapaq Yupanki), was appointed ruler by his father before he died. He was apparently not the eldest son but was named emperor because his older brother was considered ugly. Capac Yupanqui was the first Inca ruler to conquer lands outside the Cuzco Valley, although these were only about a dozen miles away. Inca Roca (’Inka Roq’a ’Inka) succeeded his father and subjugated some groups that lived about 12 miles southeast of Cuzco. He is mostly remembered in the chronicles for the fact that he fathered a large number of sons, one of whom, Yahuar Huacac (Yawar Waqaq), was kidnapped by a neighbouring group when he was about eight years old. The boy’s mother, Mama Mikay, was a Huayllaca (Wayllaqa) woman who had been promised to the leader of another group called the Ayarmaca (’Ayarmaka). When the promise was broken and Mama Mikay married Inca Roca, the Ayarmaca went to war with the Huayllaca and were defeating them. As a peace offering, the Huayllaca agreed to deliver Mama Mikay’s son to the Ayarmaca. This tale says a great deal about the way war was waged around the Cuzco Valley at this time; the fact that the Ayarmaca held the boy for several years before returning him to his father suggests that the Inca were no more powerful than several other groups in the area.
Two years before his death, Inca Roca named Yahuar Huacac as the seventh emperor, ensuring a peaceful succession to the throne. Yahuar Huacac was never very healthy and apparently spent most of his time in Cuzco. His brothers Vicaquirao (Wika-k’iraw) and Apo Mayta (’Apu Mayta) were able military leaders and incorporated lands south and east of Cuzco into the Inca domain. Yahuar Huacac’s principal wife was apparently an Ayarmaca, indicating that at that time sister marriage was not the rule (see below Civil war on the eve of the Spanish conquest). She bore him three sons, and he attempted to follow his father’s example by naming her second son as the next emperor; the son was murdered through the intrigues of another of his wives, who wanted her own son named to the throne. The Emperor himself was apparently killed shortly thereafter, and the elders chose Viracocha Inca (Wiraqocha ’Inka) as his successor.
The Inca conquest began during the reign of Viracocha Inca in the early part of the 15th century. Up to this time, neighbouring ethnic groups were conquered and their lands taken, but no garrisons or Inca officials were placed among them. They were left undisturbed until the Inca felt it necessary to attack them again. This pattern of raiding and plundering changed during Viracocha Inca’s reign. He planned to establish permanent rule over these groups and was ably assisted by his uncles, Vicaquirao and Apo Mayta, who developed military tactics that made permanent conquest possible. Their victory over the Ayarmaca kingdom in the southern Cuzco Valley provided a model for many subsequent campaigns. They first conquered lands in the upper part of the Urubamba Valley that lay behind the Ayarmaca territory. They then successfully attacked the Ayarmaca from two directions—one force coming from Cuzco and the other from the Urubamba Valley.
Urubamba River valleyUrubamba River valley, near Cuzco, Peru.© Boggy/Fotolia
This was a relatively small-scale campaign, but it made the Inca a political power in the Urubamba Valley, an important passageway between Cuzco and the Lake Titicaca Basin. As a result of their conquest, the Inca were invited to interfere in a conflict between two Aymara-speaking kingdoms, the Colla and the Lupaca, in the northern part of the Titicaca Basin. The Inca allied themselves with the Lupaca, probably because the Colla were located between themselves and the Lupaca. But before the Inca could attack, the Colla attacked the Lupaca and were defeated. The battle was over by the time the Inca arrived; they joined in a victory celebration with the Lupaca but did not share in the booty.
During the early 15th century a group called the Chanca was emerging as a political power in the area west of the Inca territory. Presumably, they too may have been feeling the effects of diminishing food resources and were trying to maintain their standard of living by acquiring land outside their home territory. They moved from their place of origin in Huancavelica and conquered the Quechua, a large group whose lands lay immediately west of those controlled by the Inca. In about 1438 the Chanca attacked the Inca. One of the major effects of the Chanca invasion was to foment a civil war among the Inca.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui
Internal division and external expansion
For some time there had been palace intrigue in Cuzco over who would succeed Viracocha Inca to the throne. The Emperor chose Inca Urcon (’Inka ’Urqon) as his successor, but the two generals Vicaquirao and Apo Mayta preferred another son, Cusi Inca Yupanqui (Kusi ’Inka Yupanki). As the Chanca approached Cuzco, Viracocha Inca and Inca Urcon withdrew to a fort near Calca, while Cusi Inca Yupanqui, the two generals, and a few nobles remained to defend the city. They defended it successfully, and after their allies joined them they inflicted two heavy defeats on the Chanca. Cusi Inca Yupanqui then attempted to resolve the differences between his faction and that of his father; but the negotiations failed, and he set himself up as emperor, taking the title of Pachacuti (Pachakuti). At this point, there were two Inca states, one in Cuzco, headed by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, and the other in Calca, headed by Viracocha Inca. As the power and prestige of the Cuzco group increased, many people left the Calca faction to join Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui had to deal simultaneously with two enemies—the Chanca and his father’s forces. The Cuzco faction had made some gains during their two encounters with the Chanca; they took some Quechua lands from the Chanca and formed an alliance with the Quechua, who supported them against the Chanca. They then entered into an agreement with the Chanca that permitted either group to make independent military advances or gains as long as the other was not attacked. At this point, the Cuzco faction moved its army eastward to the edge of the tropical rain forest, thereby encircling the lands controlled by the Calca faction. By this maneuver, the Cuzco faction prevented the possibility of attack coming simultaneously from two directions. Viracocha Inca died about this time, leaving Inca Urcon as leader of the Calca faction. The latter was killed shortly thereafter in a skirmish with the Cuzco group. As a result, the differences between the two factions were resolved, and the Inca were reunited under a single leader.
The Inca forces crossed the Quechua territory and attacked the provinces of Vilcas and Soras, southwest of the area controlled by the Chanca. In about 1445, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui sent his brother Capac Yupanqui (Qhapaq Yupanki) to explore the south coast, marking the first time the Inca reached the ocean. Returning to Cuzco, Capac Yupanqui passed through Chanca territory and captured a few of their villages. The Chanca retaliated by outflanking the Inca and conquering the Colla in the Lake Titicaca Basin.
The Chanca’s action increased the tension between the Inca and the Chanca, but no fighting broke out. Instead, they decided to undertake a joint invasion of the area north of Vilcas. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui appointed Capac Yupanqui to lead the Inca contingent, warning him of Chanca treachery and instructing him to go no farther than Yanamayo. As the expedition moved northward, the Chanca distinguished themselves in battle, to the embarrassment of the Inca. When Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui heard of this, he feared that the Chanca contingent might revolt and ordered his brother to kill the Chanca leaders. The Chanca, learning of this command, fled to the tropical rain forest near the headwaters of the Huallaga River before the order could be carried out.
Capac Yupanqui pursued the Chanca well beyond the Yanamayo, the limit set by his brother, before giving up the chase. Seeing that his forces were considerably overextended, he turned northward toward the rich province of Cajamarca, which was an ally of the powerful kingdom of Chimú on the north coast. Capac Yupanqui stormed and captured Cajamarca and left a small garrison there as he set out for Cuzco.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui was furious at this turn of events. His orders had been blatantly disobeyed, and he was apprehensive about his brother’s intentions. Perhaps fearing that Capac Yupanqui would usurp the throne, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui had him killed before he arrived in Cuzco. The Inca still had to contend with the Chanca and with the possibility of attacks from hostile groups in the north, including the kingdom of Chimú, which had set out on a campaign of conquest.
To alleviate this situation, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui organized two expeditions: one to conquer the peoples of the Titicaca Basin and protect their exposed southern flank and the other to subdue the area to the north. According to Sarmiento de Gamboa, the Titicaca campaign was led by two of his older sons. They had subjugated the Colla earlier and now turned their attention to the Lupaca and their allies. When the campaign was over, the Inca controlled all of the territory between Cuzco and the southern end of the lake basin.
The northern expedition was led by another son, Topa Inca Yupanqui (Thupa ’Inka Yupanki), who subjected the territories of the Quechua and the Chanca. Topa Inca Yupanqui marched north through the highlands toward Cajamarca, subduing and pacifying the country as he went. After relieving the garrison at Cajamarca, which was being threatened by the kingdom of Chimú, he conquered as far north as Quito (Ecuador) in an attempt to outflank the Chimú armies. Frustrated during this drive by his ignorance of the geography of the region, he came out of the Ecuadorian mountains near Manta, north of the Gulf of Guayaquil; the local residents told him that he could not proceed southward along the coast because the mountains came down to the sea. So he returned to the highlands and sent a small force along the shores of the Gulf of Guayaquil toward the northern border of Chimú. As a result, the Inca were still able to attack the Chimú armies simultaneously from several different directions. After a brief but bitter battle, the Inca sacked the Chimú capital at Chan Chan and then advanced southward along the coast as far as Pachacamac, bringing the area under Inca control.
Administration of the empire
Topa Inca Yupanqui returned to Cuzco, secure in the knowledge that Inca power could not be challenged. The rapid expansion of the empire, however, created a number of problems concerned with sustaining themselves and governing a large number of diverse ethnic groups. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui and Topa Inca Yupanqui were imaginative and made several important innovations in Inca institutions.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui began rebuilding Cuzco, the political and religious capital of the empire. Considerable effort was put into enlarging Sacsahuamán, the huge fortress built on a hill overlooking the city. At the same time he undertook a vast agricultural project over the entire upper end of the Cuzco Valley; rivers were channeled, the valley floor was leveled, and agricultural terraces were built on the surrounding hillsides. This reclamation project undoubtedly increased the agricultural productivity of the area and involved moving many of the original inhabitants of this part of the valley to other localities for several years while the work was being completed.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui also turned his attention to social problems. He decreed that no ruler could inherit property from his predecessor; instead, the property of a dead ruler was to pass to his other descendants, who could then support themselves from his lands and the labour taxes owed him. Consequently, each new emperor had to acquire land and labour to support his corporation and government. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui thus ensured that the corporations of his eight predecessors had estates in the area around Cuzco so their members could support themselves adequately, attend certain ceremonies, and perform ceremonial obligations. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui and his successors to the Inca throne formed corporations that had lands and estates scattered throughout the empire as well as in the Cuzco Valley itself.
He probably also began the policy of forced resettlement, or mitma, about this time, in order to ensure both loyalty to the state and better utilization of land resources, at least from the perspective of the Inca. This practice involved moving some members of an ethnic group from their home territory to distant lands. When a new area was conquered, loyal settlers were brought in from a province that had been under Inca rule long enough so that its residents knew how the Inca system of government worked. They were replaced in their home territories by recalcitrant groups from the newly conquered province. The policy had three important consequences: first, it broke up the size and power of an ethnic group by dispersing its members throughout the empire; second, it weakened the ability of an ethnic group to be self-sufficient; and, finally, it made it more difficult for the inhabitants of an area to revolt successfully.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui invented a state religion based on the worship of a creator-god called Viracocha, who had been worshiped since pre-Inca times. Priests were appointed, ceremonies were planned, prayers were prepared, and temples were built throughout the empire. He also expounded the view that the Inca had a divine mission to bring this true religion to other peoples, so that the Inca armies conquered in the name of the creator god. His doctrine was a relatively tolerant one. Conquered groups did not have to give up their own religious beliefs; they merely had to worship the Inca god and provide him and his servants with food, land, and labour.
Topa Inca Yupanqui
About 1471, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui abdicated in favour of his son Topa Inca Yupanqui, thereby ensuring the peaceful succession to the throne. Topa Inca Yupanqui was a great conqueror who was to bring most of the Central Andes region under Inca rule. Yet his first military campaign as emperor, an invasion of the tropical rain forest near the Tono River, was not particularly successful. The Inca were always fascinated with the rain forest and its products but never got used to military operations in this type of environment. This campaign did, however, establish trade relations with the area and secured a contingent of archers in return for a few bronze tools. The Emperor soon abandoned the campaign because of a revolt that had broken out in the Titicaca Basin. The rebellion was led by the Colla and Lupaca and was fanned by the rumour that Topa Inca Yupanqui had been killed during his expedition into the jungle.
The Colla’s mountaintop forts around Pucará fell one by one as the Inca attacked them. After subduing the Colla, the Inca moved against the Lupaca, who had retreated to the southwest corner of the Titicaca Basin, where they had allied themselves with another Aymara-speaking group, the Pacasa. The Inca armies were again victorious, and the revolt was ended. Topa Inca Yupanqui then turned southward, conquering all of highland Bolivia, northern Chile, and most of northwestern Argentina. He set the boundary markers of the Inca empire at the Maule River in central Chile.
At this point, the southern coast of Peru still had not been incorporated into the Inca state. The area, however, was now surrounded by the Inca on three sides, and in about 1476 Topa Inca Yupanqui launched a campaign against this region. Each valley, beginning with those in the south, was attacked separately. Most valleys submitted peacefully or put up only minimal resistance; the inhabitants of the Cañete Valley, however, put up a stubborn fight; and it took the Inca nearly three years to subdue them.
During the remainder of his reign, Topa Inca Yupanqui concerned himself with the administration of the empire. He spent much of his time traveling throughout his territories, making assignments of land and establishing local administrations. He introduced a system of classifying the adult male population into units of 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, and 10,000, which formed a basis for labour assignments and military conscription. He also instituted a system of tribute in which each province provided Chosen Women (Aqllakuna) to serve as temple maidens in state shrines or to become the brides of soldiers who had distinguished themselves in combat.
Huayna Capac
Topa Inca Yupanqui’s unexpected death in about 1493 precipitated a struggle for the succession. It appears that Topa Inca Yupanqui had originally favoured the succession of Huayna Capac (Wayna Qhapaq), the youngest son of his principal wife and sister. Shortly before his death, he changed his mind and named as his successor Capac Huari (Qhapaq Wari), the son of another wife. Capac Huari, however, never became emperor. The claims of his mother and her relatives were suppressed by the supporters of Huayna Capac. This group was led by Huaman Achachi (Waman ’Achachi), the child’s uncle and presumably the brother of the Emperor’s principal wife. A regent named Hualpaya (Walpaya) was appointed from this group to tutor Huayna Capac in the ways of government until the child was old enough to rule in his own name. Hualpaya, however, tried to assert the claims of his own son to the throne and, as a result, was killed by Huaman Achachi. Huayna Capac’s reign was mostly peaceful; he devoted much of his time to traveling, administering the empire, and suppressing small-scale revolts. He did extend the empire by conquering Chachapoyas, a mountainous country in northeastern Peru, and later northern Ecuador. After conquering Chachapoyas, he recruited part of his bodyguard from the warlike inhabitants of the area. The conquest of northern Ecuador occupied the last years of his life and took place shortly before the Spaniards arrived. During these campaigns, he pushed the frontiers of the Inca empire to the Ancasmayo River, the present-day boundary between Ecuador and Colombia.
While he was fighting in northern Ecuador, Huayna Capac received word that the Bolivian frontier had been invaded by a Guaraní-speaking group that periodically crossed the Gran Chaco from Argentina to raid Inca frontier settlements for bronze tools and ornaments made of precious metals. They were more of a nuisance than an actual threat to the empire, but Huayna Capac dispatched a general named Yasca (Yaska) to drive them from the area and to build forts along the frontier.
Meanwhile, he undertook another expedition in northern Ecuador to wipe out isolated pockets of resistance. During this campaign, he learned that an epidemic was sweeping Cuzco and the surrounding countryside. He left immediately for Quito, on the highroad to Cuzco, to deal with this crisis and arrived there about the same time the epidemic did. The pestilence had spread rapidly from Bolivia and, judging by its description, was either smallpox or measles, both of which were European diseases introduced into South America by the Spanish settlers at La Plata. The disease was probably communicated to the Andean area by the Guaraní, who had been in contact with the Spanish at La Plata. Whatever the ailment was, Huayna Capac contracted it and died about 1525, without naming a successor in the appropriate manner. This set off another struggle over the throne.
Civil war on the eve of the Spanish conquest
Huayna Capac’s father had begun the custom of marrying a full sister in order to keep the royal bloodline pure and, more importantly, to prevent conflict over succession. According to this custom, one sister became the principal wife of the emperor, and one of their sons became the next ruler. As noted above, this system had failed at Huayna Capac’s succession. Nor did it work at Huayna Capac’s death because his principal wife had been childless. In this situation, the emperor could appoint any one of his sons as his successor, as long as one of them had “divine” approval registered on the lungs of a sacrificed llama. There were several candidates for the throne: Ninan Cuyuchi who was in Tumipampas with his father; Atahuallpa (’Ataw Wallpa), who was also in the north; Huascar (Washkar), who was apparently in Cuzco; Manco Inca (Manqo ’Inka), whose mother belonged to ’Iñaqa (the royal corporation of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui); Topa Huallpa (Thupa Wallpa); and Paullu Topa (Pawllu Thupa).
Huayna Capac, aware of imminent death, asked the priest to perform the divination ceremony to determine whether or not he should name Ninan Cuyuchi as his successor; if the signs were not favourable, then Huascar was to be the next candidate to be tested. The Emperor apparently died before the ceremony was performed. The priest then notified Ninan Cuyuchi that he was to be the next ruler, but the latter had contracted the same disease as his father and died shortly thereafter. The priest then named Huascar as the new emperor; this was highly irregular, because the priest apparently followed the old ruler’s wishes without performing the required ceremony. The other candidates for the throne were not pleased with the situation.
The priest brought Huayna Capac’s body back to Cuzco, while Atahuallpa remained in Quito. Huascar was so furious with the priest for leaving a rival for the throne in the north with a large army that he had him killed. This created animosity against Huascar among the members of the priest’s royal corporation. Huascar then demanded that Atahuallpa return to Cuzco, but the latter ignored him and undertook a campaign to suppress a revolt around the Gulf of Guayaquil. While he was involved in this expedition, Huascar sent an officer to remove Atahuallpa’s wives and insignias. Atahuallpa killed the officer and had a drum made out of him, which he sent to Huascar. This insult completed the breach between the two rivals, and a civil war resulted.
At this point, Huascar controlled the southern part of the empire, while Atahuallpa controlled Ecuador and parts of northern Peru. Atahuallpa won the first battle of the war, fought at Riobamba in Ecuador, and advanced to Tumipampas. There he lost to Huascar’s army and was taken prisoner. He later escaped, rallied his forces, and drove his brother’s army from the Cañari territory around Tumipampas. He then devastated the Cañari lands because he thought they hadsupported his brother’s faction during his imprisonment. Apparently, the Cañari wanted little to do with either Inca faction and offered minimal support to whichever group controlled Tumipampas at the moment. After their lands were destroyed, they wanted nothing at all to do with the Inca, and later they became close allies of the Spaniards.
Atahuallpa’s armies, led by the able generals Quisquis (Kizkiz) and Challcuchima (Challku-chima), marched south and won a series of decisive victories at Cajamarca, Bombon, and Ayacucho. As they moved southward, Huascar formed another army to defend Cuzco from the invaders. His forces were defeated, and he was captured a few miles from Cuzco in April 1532. The generals killed his entire family and fastened them to poles along a highway leading from the capital. They also killed a number of people in Topa Inca Yupanqui’s corporation because they had supported Huascar during the civil war; and they burned the mummy of the deceased ruler, which was venerated by the members of this group. Atahuallpa was in the north, setting up his administration, when he learned of the victory. He ordered Challcuchima to bring Huascar to the north so he could insult him properly before being crowned.
The Spanish conquest
Meanwhile, the Spaniards had landed at Tumbes on the northern coast of Peru early in 1532 and were seeking an interview with Atahuallpa so that they could kidnap him. It is clear that they understood the nature of the Inca civil war and were dealing with emissaries from both factions. Their actions, however, must have seemed puzzling to Atahuallpa. On the one hand, Pizarro and his men were deposing and executing leaders who were loyal to him, and, on the other hand, they were sending messages that recognized him as the legitimate ruler of Tawantinsuyu. As the Spaniards moved toward Cajamarca, he sent them a message indicating that he was now the sole ruler of his father’s domain. Furthermore, he reminded the Spaniards that they were far from their base of supply and in a land controlled by his armies. The Spaniards replied to this veiled threat by indicating that they would come to his aid against any group that opposed his rule. Atahuallpa clearly wanted the Spaniards as allies but continually misinterpreted their intentions and underestimated their abilities—even after he was kidnapped in Cajamarca on November 16, 1532.
Atahuallpa was allowed to meet with his advisers while the Spaniards held him prisoner, and he arranged to have the ransom they demanded paid. An enormous ransom was raised, but Pizarro did not free him because it would have been too dangerous for the Spaniards. While he was in prison, Atahuallpa decided that the Spaniards were indifferent to the idea of having his brother slain and ordered Huascar’s death. The Spaniards, of course, wanted all pretenders to authority removed but later used this act to justify their execution of the Inca ruler. Realizing that Atahuallpa’s death was a mistake because it weakened their position, they approved the coronation of Topa Huallpa, a candidate whom they thought would be acceptable to both Inca factions. But the Spaniards miscalculated. Topa Huallpa had not supported Atahuallpa and, in fact, had been in hiding as long as the latter was alive. He was supported by Huascar’s group and was opposed by Atahuallpa’s following, who believed that the legitimate heir was the deceased ruler’s son in Lima. With this act, the Spaniards suddenly found themselves closely allied with Huascar’s faction and were so viewed by both Inca groups.
Topa Huallpa died within a few months—poisoned, according to Huascar’s supporters. At this point, the Spaniards reaffirmed their alliance with Huascar’s following, placing Huascar’s brother, Manco Inca, on the throne and assisting him in dispersing the remnants of Atahuallpa’s army. The real Spanish conquest of Peru occurred during the next few years, when they prevented Manco Inca from reestablishing control over the coast and the north, much of which was still loyal to Atahuallpa or under no control at all. By 1535 the Inca ruler realized that the Spaniards were more dangerous than any threat posed by the remnants of Atahuallpa’s followers. But it was too late. His attacks on the Spanish settlements were beaten back, and he was eventually driven into a remote mountainous area called Vitcos, where he established an independent Inca state that lasted until 1572.
Inca culture at the time of the conquest
The rapid incorporation of so many mountain and coastal desert polities before 1532 calls for explanation. It is tempting to view such expansion in the context of the instantaneous breakup in 1532, when some of the same forces were likely to have been at work: dispersed territories, interlocked with some belonging to other powers in the region, and multiethnic and polyglot agglomerations in neighbouring valleys. Each political unit—as eventually was the case with the Inca state itself—was likely to share pastures, cultivated terraces, and beach installations; hegemonies shifted according to local and regional circumstances. The Early, Middle, and Late Horizons were temporary concatenations, and none lasted for very long. The Spanish invasion interrupted these alternations: a player had entered the field who ignored the local rules and who did not fathom the true sources of Andean wealth, which was not silver but an intimate familiarity with local conditions and possibilities and the ability to pool vastly different geographic and ecological tiers into single polities.
Social and political structure
According to the incomplete evidence provided by the Spanish eyewitnesses, the Inca themselves considered the term Inca applicable only to the descendants of the 12 individuals who traditionally are said to have ruled from Cuzco. Of the 12, only four or five can be documented to have been actual historical personages. The others may have been products of later efforts to legitimate and enhance the royal genealogy. There is also the possibility that some of the “earlier” names were actually a parallel line of personalities, possibly with different functions that may have been considered “heathen” by the Spanish. This hypothesis cannot be verified with the sources now available.
In addition to the 12 lineages, the ranks of “Inca by decree” or “as a privilege” are also mentioned by some of the Spanish sources. Their origins and functions were just as nebulous as those of the royals: one of the few Andean sources, Poma da Ayala, claims that some of the inhabitants of the Cuzco basin who were conquered early during the expansion of the Late Horizon were “granted” or “promoted to” Inca status. They were “improved,” according to Poma da Ayala, although his own case is weakened by his claim that his ancestors, who lived many hundreds of miles north of Cuzco, had benefited from such social mobility.
The administrative organization of Tawantinsuyu is poorly understood, although its origins are known to lie in the earlier ethnic subdivisions. Claims have been made that authority was left in the hands of traditional lords who simply had to demonstrate their fealty. Other Spanish sources make reference to an administrative reorganization, in which all of the conquered groups were shoehorned into a decimal system. There is some evidence that decimal subdivisions were present in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru; and at the time of the conquest the decimal vocabulary apparently was in the process of being imposed on the rest of the country, presumably to rationalize the multiplicity of local and divided loyalties. The administrative papers available for a part of the Huánuco region allow the identification of a “hundred-households” unit with five actual hamlets, all of which were near each other. Since these records were kept house by house, it has been possible to test the significance of the decimal vocabulary at its lowest level. What is meant when the records speak of “lords of 10,000 households,” however, cannot now be fathomed.
A clearer picture has emerged of the ethnic lords incorporated by the Inca into their realm. Some had ruled only small units—a few hundred households; others, like the Huanca or the Lupaca claimed to have had 20,000 domestic units. There is no record of the size of the coastal Chimú polity, which must have been quite large. The Chincha claimed 30,000 “fires,” and the Chimú may well have been even larger before their defeat by Cuzco.
Usually, two lords ruled each ethnic group—which has been one of the arguments for considering as plausible a dual rule in Cuzco as well. The best evidence of the duties of the ethnic lords has come from the Aymara kingdom of the Lupaca: at one point in Inca history they rose in rebellion against Cuzco rule, and in the decades immediately prior to the arrival of the Europeans they were busy leading “6,000 soldiers” on faraway battlefields in what is now Ecuador. The testimony of the Lupaca, collected in 1567, claims that on such adventures they did not return to their lands for the harvest but devoted most of their energies to war, and in return they were exempted from farming, road building, and other state chores.
There was no tribute system in Inca statecraft, just as there had been no contributions in kind in earlier Andean polities. The peasantry owed only their energy, which was delivered through the well-understood mit’a system. Led by their traditional leaders, the people appeared for their obligations, lineage by lineage. The best quipu record of these obligations has come from a group who lived in the Huánuco area. Just as they had provided energy for their own lords, under Inca rule this group sent dozens of couples to labour on public works or to produce the grain that, as beer, was “fed” to the mummies of deceased Inca kings. Others became soldiers or helped fill the warehouses; some carried loads along the Inca highway system, while still others were soldiers under the command of their traditional lords. Using this quipu, it has been possible to test the claim that there was no tribute system: of its 26 cords only two deal with articles submitted in kind, wild honey and tropical feathers, both of which were lowland commodities that were gathered and not cultivated.
The absence of tribute was closely connected to the absence of markets. Just as all households owed some of their energies to their ethnic lords, to the shrines, and to Cuzco, so too their household needs were satisfied by the claims they could make to the reciprocal services of their kinfolk or their ethnic peers or to the administrative services of their ethnic authorities. It is probable that with the growth of the Inca state over time, this formula was breached, particularly in the case of prisoners of war and other populations moved from their traditional areas for state purposes.
The most elaborate example of the structural changes that emerged from the need to create new state revenues was the expansion and reorganization of corn production for military purposes in the Cochabamba Valley. This region was the largest single corn-producing area in the highlands. One of the later kings removed the native population and set up a large state enterprise (more than 2,000 warehouses), to which some 25 highland groups were sent on rotation, lineage by lineage. Each ethnic group was responsible for particular strips that were traced across the valley by Cuzco surveyors. In 1575 the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo used this Inca precedent to establish the repartimiento system that provided labour for the silver mines at Potosí.
Inca technology and intellectual life
The intellectual tradition of the Inca emerged from their detailed and efficient knowledge and use of an extremely challenging environment. No system of writing, in the European sense, has been discovered, and the question remains as to how long-distance communication was achieved.
Beyond oral transmission, the most promising domain for research is in textiles. In the highlands very few have been preserved because of the humidity, but on the coastal desert many burial cloths from widely different periods have been located and studied. Their artistic qualities have fomented grave robbing on a very large scale; museums throughout the world have dozens if not hundreds of such cloths, each of great beauty and enormous sophistication.
Fibre technology went beyond burial or sacrificial textiles: Viceroy Toledo wrote to Philip II that he was sending four gigantic cloths on which maps of his Andean realm had been painted. While the letter was carefully filed in the Archives of the Indies, at Sevilla (Seville), the maps have never been located. Other uses of textiles included the quipu used for bookkeeping and possibly also for historical recording; suspension bridges, some of which are still maintained on a regular basis by particular villages responsible for reweaving; and calendars and ceremonial accounting.
While in the field, Inca armies were rewarded with corn and cloth. One European observer was told that soldiers would rebel if they did not receive their issues of textiles and corn beer. A major manufacturing centre employing “a thousand” full-time weavers was established on the northeastern shore of Lake Titicaca. The craftspeople there were men, but every administrative centre along the Inca highway is said to have housed a group of secluded women weavers (Chosen Women); one such house, at Huánuco Pampa (administrative centre of the Huánuco region), has been located and excavated. The storehouses, full of thousands of textiles, were one of the wonders frequently mentioned by the early Spaniards in their letters.
As Tawantinsuyu grew and involved peoples of many different environments and cultures, techniques originating in any particular ethnic group were spread across the land. Prior to the Inca expansion, metals—gold, silver, copper, and their alloys—were used mainly for ornaments; and tools were made from wood and stone. Bronze tools—crowbars, chisels, axes, knives, and clubheads, to name only a few—became exceedingly common after the Inca conquest.
The remarkable Inca highway system was also noted by the earliest Spanish eyewitnesses, since these roads were in constant use, even by horses. Research since the 1950s has provided fresh insights into the engineering methods and geographic location of two parallel roads—one in the highlands, the other on the coast—the whole system adding up to at least 15,500 miles. While some of these roads may have been built first during the Middle Horizon and even earlier, it was during Inca times that the roads were maintained and unified into a single political and economic system. Travel units, adjusted to the pace of a loaded llama or human carrier, can still be detected along the Qhapaq Ñan, the main north–south royal road in the highlands. At the end of each day the caravan stopped at a tambo, a way station, which, although smaller than an administrative centre, was complete with warehouses and barracks. The maintenance of the road segment and the filling of storehouses was part of the mit’a responsibilities of neighbouring groups.
Measurement of both distance and surface area was done by units called tupu, since the Andean concern was with units of human energy expended. Somehow, two measurements that belonged to very different European systems of reckoning were part of a single Andean concern. Units of land measurement, called papakancha, also differed: where the land was in continuous cultivation, as in corn country, one unit was used; another unit was in use for highland-tuber cultivation, where fallowing and rotation was the dominant crop pattern. As one “measurer” explained to the viceroy’s envoy, the papakancha was of one size when it was at a protected, lower altitude, but it could be up to seven times that size on the high, cold puna. Thomas C. Patterson John V. Murra
Inca religion
Inca religion—an admixture of complex ceremonies, practices, animistic beliefs, varied forms of belief in objects having magical powers, and nature worship—culminated in the worship of the sun, which was presided over by the priests of the last native pre-Columbian conquerors of the Andean regions of South America. Though there was an Inca state religion of the sun, the substrata religious beliefs and practices of the pre-Inca peoples exerted an influence on the Andean region prior to and after the conquest of most of South America by the Spaniards in the 16th century.
Inca gods
The creator god of the Inca and of pre-Inca peoples was Viracocha, who was also a culture hero. Creator of earth, man, and animals, Viracocha had a long list of titles, including Lord Instructor of the World, the Ancient One, and the Old Man of the Sky. Some have said that he also was the creator of the Tiwanaku civilization, of which the Inca were the cultural heirs. Viracocha went through several transmogrifications (often with grotesque or humorous effects). He made peoples, destroyed them, and re-created them of stone; and when they were re-created, he dispersed humankind in four directions. As a culture hero, he taught people various techniques and skills. He journeyed widely until he came to the shores of Manta (Ecuador), where he set off into the Pacific—some say in a boat made of his cloak, others say he walked on the water. This part of the myth has been seized upon by modern mythmakers, and, as Kon-Tiki, Viracocha was said to have brought Inca culture to Polynesia.
Viracocha was the divine protector of the Inca ruler Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui; he appeared to Pachacuti in a dream when the Inca forces were being besieged by the Chanca. Upon victory, Pachacuti raised a temple to Viracocha in Cuzco. He was represented by a gold figure “about the size of a 10-year-old child.”
Inti, the sun god, was the ranking deity in the Inca pantheon. His warmth embraced the Andean earth and matured crops; and as such he was beloved by farmers. Inti was represented with a human face on a ray-splayed disk. He was considered to be the divine ancestor of the Inca: “my father” was a title given to Inti by one Inca ruler.
Apu Illapu, the rain giver, was an agricultural deity to whom the common man addressed his prayers for rain. Temples to Illapu were usually on high structures; in times of drought, pilgrimages were made to them and prayers were accompanied by sacrifices—often human, if the crisis was sufficient. The people believed that Illapu’s shadow was in the Milky Way, from whence he drew the water that he poured down as rain.
Mama Quilla (Mama-Kilya), wife of the sun god, was the Moon Mother, and the regulator of women’s menstrual cycles. The waxing and waning of the moon was used to calculate monthly cycles, from which the time periods for Inca festivals were set. Silver was considered to be tears of the moon. The stars had minor functions. The constellation of Lyra, which was believed to have the appearance of a llama, was entreated for protection. The constellation Scorpio was believed to have the shape of a cat; the Pleiades were called “little mothers,” and festivals were celebrated on their reappearance in the sky. Earth was called Pachamama (Paca Mama), or Earth Mother. The sea, which was relatively remote to the Inca until after 1450, was called Cochamama (Mama Qoca), the Sea Mother.
Temples and shrines
Temples and shrines housing fetishes of the cult were occupied by priests, their attendants, and the Chosen Women. In general, temples were not intended to shelter the celebrants, since most ceremonies were held outside the temple proper. The ruins of the Temple of Viracocha at San Pedro Cacha (Peru), however, had a ground plan that measured 330 by 87 feet, which indicates that it was designed for use other than the storage of priestly regalia.
The Sun Temple in Cuzco is the best-known of the Inca temples. Another, at Vilcashuman (which was regarded as the geographic centre of the empire), has a large temple still existing. Near Mount Aconcagua in Argentina, at the southern limit of the Inca empire, “there was a temple…an ancient oracle held in high regard where they made their sacrifices,” and on Titicaca Island, one of the largest of several islands in Lake Titicaca, there was a temple of the sun.
As the Inca conquered new territories, temples were erected in the new lands. In Caranqui, Ecuador, one such temple was described by a chronicler as being filled with great vessels of gold and silver. At Latacunga (Llacta cunga) in Ecuador there was a sun temple where sacrifices were made; part of the temple was still visible when the German explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt sketched the ruins in 1801.
The Sun Temple in Cuzco, built with stones “all matched and joined,” had a circumference of more than 1,200 feet. A fragment of the wall still extant is testimony to the accuracy of the chronicler’s description. Within the temple was an image of the sun “of great size,” and in another precinct, the Golden Enclosure (Corincancha), were gold models of cornstalks, llamas, and lumps of earth. Portions of the land, which supported the temples, the priests, and the Chosen Women, were allotted to the sun and administered for the priests.
Along with the shrines and temples, huacas (sacred sites) were widespread. A huaca could be a man-made temple, mountain, hill, or bridge, such as the great huacachaca across the Apurímac River. A huaca also might be a mummy bundle, especially if it was that of a lord-Inca. On high points of passage in the Andes, propitiatory cairns (apacheta, “piles of stones”) were made, to which, in passing, each person would add a small stone and pray that his journey be lightened. The idea of huaca was intimately bound up with religion, combining the magical and the charm-bearing.
The priesthood
Priests resided at all important shrines and temples. A chronicler suggests that a priest’s title was umu, but in usage his title was geared to his functions as diviner of lungs, sorcerer, confessor, and curer. The title of the chief priest in Cuzco, who was of noble lineage, was villac umu. He held his post for life, was married, and competed in authority with the Inca. He had power over all shrines and temples and could appoint and remove priests. Presumably, priests were chosen young, brought up by the more experienced, and acquired with practice the richly developed ceremonialism.
Divination
Divination was the prerequisite to all action. Nothing of importance was undertaken without recourse to divination. It was used to diagnose illness, to predict the outcome of battles, and to ferret out crimes, thus giving it a judiciary function. Divination was also used to determine what sacrifice should be made to what god. Life was believed to be controlled by the all-pervading unseen powers, and to determine these portents the priests had recourse to the supernatural. Oracles were considered to be the most important and direct means of access to the wayward gods. One oracle of a huaca close to the Huaca–Chaca Bridge, across the Apurímac River near Cuzco, was described by a chronicler as a wooden beam as thick as a fat man, with a girdle of gold about it with two large golden breasts like a woman. These and other idols were bloodspattered from sacrifices—animal and human. “Through this large idol,” a chronicler wrote, “the demon of the river used to speak to them.” Another well-known oracle was housed in a temple in the large adobe complex of Pachacamac near Lima.
Divination also was accomplished by watching the meandering of spiders and the arrangement that coca leaves took in a shallow dish. Another method of divination was to drink ayahuasca, a psychedelic brewed from plants that had profound effects on the central nervous system. This was believed to enable one to communicate with the supernatural powers.
Fire also was believed to provide spiritual contact. The flames were blown to red heat through metal tubes, after which a practitioner (yacarca) who had narcotized himself by chewing coca leaves summoned the spirits with fiery conjuration to speak—“which they did,” wrote a chronicler, by “ventriloquism.” Divination by studying the lungs of a sacrificed white llama was considered to be efficacious. The lungs were inflated by blowing into the dissected trachea (there is an Inca ceramic showing this), and the future was foretold by priests who minutely observed the conformance of the veins. On the reading of this augury, political or military action was taken.
Confession was part of the priestly ritual of divination. Should rain not fall or a water conduit break without cause, it was believed that such an occurrence could arise from someone’s failure to observe the strictly observed ceremonies. This was called hocha, a ritual error. The ayllu, a basic social unit identified with communally held land, was wounded by individual misdeeds. Crimes had to be confessed and expiated by penitence so as not to call down the divine wrath.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice, human or animal, was offered on every important occasion; guinea pigs (more properly cui), llamas, certain foods, coca leaves, and chicha (an intoxicant corn beverage) were all used in sacrifices. Many sacrifices were daily occurrences for the ritual of the sun’s appearance. A fire was kindled, and corn was thrown on the coals and toasted. “Eat this, Lord Sun,” was the objuration of officiating priests, “so that you will know that we are your children.” On the first day of every lunar month 100 pure-white llamas were driven into the Great Square, Huayaca Pata in Cuzco; they were moved about to the various images of the gods and then assigned to 30 priestly attendants, each representing a day of the month. The llamas were then sacrificed; chunks of flesh were thrown onto the fire, and the bones were powdered for ritual use. Ponchos of excellent weave or miniature vestments were burned in the offering. The Inca ruler wore his poncho only once: it was ceremoniously sacrificed in fire each day.
Humans also were sacrificed; when the need was extreme, 200 children might be immolated, such as when a new Inca ruler assumed the royal fringe. Defeats, famine, and pestilence all called for human blood. Even a Chosen Woman from the Sun Temple might be taken out for sacrifice. Children, before being sacrificed, were feasted “so that they would not enter the presence of the gods hungry and crying.” It was important in human sacrifice that the sacrificed person be without blemish. Many were chosen from the conquered provinces as part of regular taxation; “blood money” was scarcely a metaphor.
Festivals
The 30-day calendar was religious, and each month had its own festival. The religious calendar is explained in considerable detail by Guamán Poma de Ayala (see Table 3). In his letter to Philip II he offered two different versions, one centring on state ceremonies and sacrifices performed at Cuzco and the other describing the agricultural practices at the local level in the highlands. Quite different calendars prevailed on the irrigated coast, but surviving sources do not record them in any detail.
Months and celebrations of the Inca calendar Gregorian months Andean months approximate translation December Capac Raimi, Capac Quilla the lord festival; the month of rest January Zarap Tuta Cavai Mitan the time to watch the growing corn February Paucar Varai the time to wear loincloths March Pacha Pucuy Quilla the month of the land's maturation April Camai Quilla [Inti Raymi in state calendar] the month of harvest and rest May Zara Muchuy Quilla Aymoray Quilla dry corn to be stored June Papa Allai Mitan Pacha
Haucai Cusqui potato harvest
rest from harvesting July Chacra Conaqui Quilla the month of redistributing lands August Chacra Yapuy Quilla Hailly the month to open lands coming into cultivation with songs of triumph September Zara Tarpuy Quilla Coia Raymi Quilla the month for planting; also, the Festival of the Queen October Chacramanta Pisco Carcoy the time to scare birds out of newly planted fields November Chacra Parcay the time to irrigate fields Victor Wolfgang von Hagen John V. Murra
Citation Information
Article Title: Pre-Columbian civilizations
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 11 February 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/pre-Columbian-civilizations
Access Date: August 25, 2019
Additional Reading
Archaeological and historical studies
Gordon R. Willey, An Introduction to American Archaeology, 2 vol. (1966–71); and Gordon R. Willey and Jeremy A. Sabloff, A History of American Archaeology, 2nd ed. (1980), provide overviews of all of New World prehistory and place the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations into the larger cultural–historical setting. See also Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 1 (1984).
Meso-American civilization
General works
The comprehensive, multivolume series “Handbook of Middle American Indians,” especially vol. 2–3, Gordon R. Willey (ed.), Archaeology of Southern Mesoamerica (1965), and vol. 10–11, Gordon F. Ekholm and Ignacio Bernal (eds.), Archaeology of Northern Mesoamerica (1971), is indispensable. Summaries of more recent developments are found in Jeremy A. Sabloff (ed.), Archaeology (1981), vol. 1 in the series “Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Indians.” Historical sources include Francis Augustus MacNutt (trans. and ed.), Letters of Cortes: The Five Letters of Relation from Fernando Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, 2 vol. (1908, reprinted 1977); and Bernal Díaz Del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, 5 vol., ed. and trans. by Alfred Percival Maudsley (1908–16, reprinted as The Conquest of New Spain, 4 vol., 1967). See also Muriel Porter Weaver, The Aztecs, Maya, and Their Predecessors: Archaeology of Mesoamerica, 2nd ed. (1981); Walter Krickeberg, Altmexikanische Kulturen, new ed. (1975); Jacques Soustelle, The Four Suns: Recollections and Reflections of an Ethnologist in Mexico (1971; originally published in French, 1967), and Arts of Ancient Mexico (1966; originally published in French, 1966); Suzanne Abel-Vidor et al., Between Continents/Between Seas: Precolumbian Art of Costa Rica (1981); Anna Benson Gyles and Chlöe Sayer, Of Gods and Men: Mexico and the Mexican Indian (1980); Michael D. Coe, Mexico, 3rd rev. ed. (1984); and Joyce Kelly, The Complete Visitor’s Guide to Mesoamerican Ruins (1982).
Preclassic and Classic periods
For early prehistory and the beginnings of agriculture, see Christine Niederberger, Zohapilco: Cinco milenios de ocupación humana en un sitio lacustre de la Cuenca de México (1976); and Barbara L. Stark and Barbara Voorhies (eds.), Prehistoric Coastal Adaptations: The Economy and Ecology of Maritime Middle America (1978). General introductions include William T. Sanders and Barbara J. Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization (1968); Richard E.W. Adams, Prehistoric Mesoamerica (1977); Eric R. Wolf, Sons of the Shaking Earth (1959, reprinted 1974); and Mary W. Helms, Middle America: A Culture History of Heartland and Frontiers (1975, reprinted 1982). For a coordination of regional chronologies within the area, see R.E. Taylor and Clement W. Meighan (eds.), Chronologies in New World Archaeology (1978). Books dealing with Olmec civilization include Michael D. Coe and Richard A. Diehl, In the Land of the Olmec, 2 vol. (1980); Michael D. Coe, David Grove, and Elizabeth P. Benson (eds.), The Olmec & Their Neighbors (1981); and Ignacio Bernal, The Olmec World (1969; originally published in Spanish, 1968). For other cultures of the period, see the general works cited above.
Late Classic Period
General books on the Maya include J. Eric S. Thompson, The Rise and Fall of Maya Civilization, 2nd enl. ed. (1966, reprinted 1977); Michael D. Coe, The Maya, 4th rev. ed. (1987); Norman Hammond, Ancient Maya Civilization (1982); and Sylvanus G. Morley and George W. Brainerd, The Ancient Maya, 4th ed., rev. by Robert J. Sharer (1983). The rise and decline of Maya civilization are discussed in Richard E.W. Adams (ed.), The Origins of Maya Civilization (1977); and T. Patrick Culbert (ed.), The Classic Maya Collapse (1973, reprinted 1983). See also John S. Henderson, The World of the Ancient Maya (1981), an ethnohistory. The transition from Maya Classic to Postclassic culture is examined in Jeremy A. Sabloff and E. Wyllis Andrews V (eds.), Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic (1986). A basic work on Maya hieroglyphic writing is J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (1971). For later research in the field, see David Humiston Kelley, Deciphering the Maya Script (1976); Elizabeth P. Benson (ed.), Mesoamerican Writing Systems (1973); and Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art (1986). For the complex subject of ancient Maya religion, J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya History and Religion (1970), is an indispensable introductory guide. Native and early historical sources include Daniel G. Brinton (ed. and trans.), The Maya Chronicles (1882, reprinted 1969), and The Annals of the Cakchiquels (1885, reprinted 1969); Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, trans. from the Spanish work of Adrián Recinos by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley (1950, reprinted 1978); Ralph L. Roys (trans.), The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (1933, reprinted 1967); Diego De Landa, Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, trans. into English and ed. by Alfred M. Tozzer (1941, reprinted 1978); and Munro S. Edmonson (trans. and ed.), The Ancient Future of the Itza: The Book of Chilam Balam of Tizimin (1982). Jacques Soustelle, Mexico, trans. from French (1967), deals with the relation of Maya and other ancient Mesoamerican religions. Economic and demographic features are treated in Peter D. Harrison and B.L. Turner II, Pre-Hispanic Maya Agriculture (1978); and Wendy Ashmore (ed.), Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns (1981). See also Henri Stierlin, Art of the Maya: From the Olmecs to the Toltec-Maya (1981; originally published in French, 1981).
Postclassic Period
Bernardino De Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: Florentine Codex, trans. from Náhuatl and ed. by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 13 vol. in 12 (1950–82), is the first full translation of this 16th-century Spanish writer of Aztec culture and is particularly informative on Aztec religion. J. Eric S. Thompson, Mexico Before Cortez: An Account of the Daily Life, Religion, and Ritual of the Aztecs and Kindred Peoples (1933), is a shorter survey. See also Jacques Soustelle, The Daily Life of the Aztecs: On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (1962, reissued 1970; originally published in French, 1955); Richard A. Diehl, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico (1983); Nigel Davies, The Toltecs, Until the Fall of Tula (1977), and The Toltec Heritage: From the Fall of Tula to the Rise of Tenochtitlán (1980); and Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World (1979), and The Phoenix of the Western World: Quetzalcoatl and the Sky Religion (1982).
Andean civilization
General works
A comprehensive and still useful survey is provided by the articles in The Andean Civilizations, vol. 2 of Julian H. Steward (ed.), Handbook of South American Indians, 7 vol. (1946–59, reprinted 1963). Introductions include John Howland Rowe and Dorothy Menzel (eds.), Peruvian Archaeology: Selected Readings (1967); Luis G. Lumbreras, The People and Cultures of Ancient Peru (1974; originally published in Spanish, 1969); and Richard W. Keatinge (ed.), Peruvian Prehistory (1988). Important research by Andean authors is presented in Ramiro Condarco Morales, El escenario andino y el hombre (1971); and Segundo Moreno Yañez and Udo Oberem, Contribución a la etnohistoria ecuatoriana (1981). See also John A. Mason, The Ancient Civilizations of Peru (1968, reprinted 1979); John V. Murra, Nathan Wachtel, and Jacques Revel (eds.), Anthropological History of Andean Polities (1986; originally published in French in issues 5–6 of Annales, Economies, Societés, Civilizations, vol. 33, 1978); and Shozo Masuda, Izumi Shimada, and Craig Morris (eds.), Andean Ecology and Civilization: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity (1985). For the material culture admired by the Spanish observers from the first days of the invasion, see Christopher B. Donnan (ed.), Early Ceremonial Architecture in the Andes (1985); Heather Lechtman and Ana María Soldi (eds.), La tecnología en el mundo andino: subsistencia y mensuración (1981); and Ann Pollard Rowe (ed.), The Junius B. Bird Conference on Andean Textiles, April 7–8, 1984 (1986).
Pre-Inca periods
Surveys of these civilizations include Wendell C. Bennett and Junius B. Bird, Andean Culture History, 2nd rev. ed. (1960, reissued 1964); Geoffrey H.S. Bushnell, Peru, rev. ed. (1963); Edward P. Lanning, Peru Before the Incas (1967); Donald W. Lathrap, The Upper Amazon (1970); and Jonathan Haas, Shelia Pozorski, and Thomas Pozorski (eds.), The Origins and Development of the Andean State (1987).
The Inca
The works of the chroniclers are available in modern English translations or in modern critical editions: Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas, trans. by Harriet de Onis, ed. by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (1959, reprinted 1967); Garcilaso de la Vega, The Incas: The Royal Commentaries of the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega, 1539–1616, trans. by Maria Jolas from the critical annotated French edition of Alain Gheerbrant (1961, reissued 1971; originally published in French, 1959); and Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, trans. from Quechua by Jorge L. Urioste, ed. by John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, 3 vol. (1980). Comprehensive histories include Alfred Métraux, The History of the Incas (1969; originally published in French, 1963); George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and John D. Wirth (eds.), The Inca and Aztec States, 1400–1800: Anthropology and History (1982); and John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, rev. ed. (1983).
The following works study special aspects of the Inca civilization: R. Tom Zuidema, La civilisation inca au Cuzco (1986), on social life and kinship systems; Franklin Pease (García Yrigoyen), El dios creador andino (1973), on religion; Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky: An Andean Cosmology (1981); Maria Ascher and Robert Ascher, Code of the Quipu: A Study in Media, Mathematics, and Culture (1981); Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political Economy of North-Andean Chiefdoms (1986); Craig Morris and Donald E. Thompson, Huánuco Pampa: An Inca City and Its Hinterland (1985); Sally Falk Moore, Power and Property in Inca Peru (1958, reprinted 1973); John V. Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inka State (1980); John Hyslop, The Inca Road System (1984); and Graziano Gasparini and Luise Margolies, Inca Architecture (1980; originally published in Spanish, 1977).Gordon R. Willey William T. Sanders John V. Murra
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Middle East
historical region, Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Evolution of Middle Eastern civilizations
Elements of civilized culture
Ancient Middle East, history of the region from prehistoric times to the rise of civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and other areas.
Evolution of Middle Eastern civilizations
The high antiquity of civilization in the Middle East is largely due to the existence of convenient land bridges and easy sea lanes passable in summer or winter, in dry or wet seasons. Movement of large numbers of people north of the Caspian Sea was virtually impossible in winter, owing to the severity of the climate; central Eurasia was often too dry in summer. Land passage between Asia and Africa was in early times limited to narrow strips of land in the Isthmus of Suez. Large-scale desert travel was limited to special routes in Iran and in North Africa, both east and west of the Nile Valley.
The ancient Middle East.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Another reason for the early significance of this area in world history is the fact that the water supply and the climate were ideal for the introduction of agriculture. Several species of grain grew wild, and there were marshes and tributary streams that could easily be drained or dammed in order to sow wild wheat and barley. The seed had only to be strewn over a sufficiently moist surface to ensure some kind of crop under normal conditions. It is therefore not surprising that there is evidence of simple agriculture as far back as the 8th or 9th millennium bc, especially in Palestine, where more excavating has been done in early sites than in any other country of the Middle East. Many bone sickle handles and flint sickle edges dating from between c. 9000 and 7000 bc have been found in Palestinian sites.
In Mesopotamia and Iran remains of this period appear in caves on the lower slopes of the Zagros Mountains between western Iran and Iraq. The date of the systematic introduction of irrigation on a large scale in Mesopotamia is somewhat doubtful because most of the early sites of irrigation culture were covered long ago by accumulation of alluvial soil brought down by the spring floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Archaeologists once thought that all irrigation originated in the foothills of the Zagros and that the earliest true farmers lived in the plains of Iran. But recent excavations and surface explorations have proved that irrigation around the upper Tigris and Euphrates, as well as their tributaries, dates from the early 6th millennium bc (e.g., at al-Kawm on the Upper Euphrates). Small-scale irrigation was practiced in Palestine (e.g., at Jericho) in the 7th millennium bc.
In northern and eastern Mesopotamia, main streams were soon partly diverted during moderate river floods into canals running more or less parallel to the rivers, which could thus be used to irrigate an extensive area. Such deflector dam irrigation avoided the self-destructive weaknesses of large storage dams, in particular the danger of depositing great masses of refractory mud in the storage basin behind the dam. In the north and east considerable urban installations developed at sites such as Nineveh no later than the 5th millennium bc, when southern Mesopotamia was still mostly swampland like the early Egyptian delta. The Euphrates had a much smaller flow of water than the nearby Tigris. The latter was much swifter, however, so that it was potentially more important for irrigation, even though much harder to tame.
The Egyptian Nile had a much more predictable water flow than the Mesopotamian rivers because it flowed through hundreds of miles of swamp, where unusually high annual floods spread out, interfering with navigation but averting the danger of the occasional destructive inundations of Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia and Egypt to c. 1600 bc
The oldest known urban and literate culture in the world was developed by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia beginning in the late 4th millennium bc. About 2300 bc a Semitic leader, Sargon I, conquered all of Babylonia and founded the first dynasty of Akkad (Akkadu), which held power for about a century and a half. Sargon and his successors were the first known rulers in southwestern Asia to gain control of the Fertile Crescent as well as of adjacent territories. They sent trading expeditions to central Anatolia and Iran and as far as India and Egypt. After the fall of the dynasty of Akkad there was a Sumerian revival under the 3rd dynasty of Ur (Ur III [21st–20th centuries]), followed by another influx of Semites. These people founded the first dynasty of Babylon (19th–16th centuries), whose most important king was Hammurabi. In the 17th century new ethnic groups appeared in both Babylonia and Syria-Palestine: Kassites from the Zagros Mountains, Hurrians from what is now Armenia, and Indo-Europeans from Central Asia. This period marked the end of the formative phase of Mesopotamian civilization.
Shortly after 3000 bc the numerous small states that had arisen in the Nile Valley during the 4th millennium were united under the 1st dynasty of Egypt. At this time the Egyptians had already developed a system of writing. Between c. 2686 and c. 2160 bc their country was united under a powerful monarchy (the Old Kingdom) served by a complex bureaucracy.
Toward the end of the 3rd millennium there was a period of disunity, followed by reunification under the 12th dynasty (1991–1786).
During these two centuries Egyptian control was established over Nubia, Libya, Palestine, and southern Syria. Soon after 1800 bc the Egyptian Empire fell apart, and c. 1700 Egypt was overwhelmed by the Asian “Hyksos,” who ruled the country for a century and a half.
New states and peoples
Before the close of the 16th century bc the native 18th dynasty rose in Egypt; it expelled the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom. The New Kingdom rulers moved back into Syria-Palestine and came into conflict first with the Hurrian state of Mitanni and later with the Anatolian Hittites, who were expanding into Syria from the north in the 14th century bc. The Amarna Letters (diplomatic correspondence written in Babylonian script and language and discovered in Egypt by archaeologists) are an important source of information on this period. In Mesopotamia the dominant powers were Kassite Babylonia and Assyria (which emerged from subjection to Mitanni in the early 14th century bc). Relations between states were governed by elaborate treaties, which were constantly being broken. After the fall of Mitanni (c. 1350) the Hittites and Babylonians both directed their hostility against Assyria. Kassite Babylonia was subjugated by Assyria c. 1230. This, followed by the fall of the Hittite Empire (c. 1200), ended what has been called the first “International Age” in the civilized world.
The latter part of the 13th century bc saw the irruption of new peoples into the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Fertile Crescent; their appearance coincided with the Trojan War, the collapse of the Hittite Empire, and the destruction of many coastal cities of Greece, Cyprus, and Syria-Palestine. Best known of the new settlers from the west are the Phrygians, who occupied most of the old Hittite heartland, and the Philistines, who moved into Palestine.
At the same time, in Transjordan and western Palestine, the Hebrews founded a tribal confederation that was changed into a monarchy by Saul and David (c. 1020–960 bc).
In the east the Iranian tribes, led by the Medes, were pouring into Iran from Turkistan. From the south and west came the Semitic Aramaeans. The Aramaeans and Medes were to transform the ancient Middle East.
The Assyrian state suffered an eclipse in the 11th century bc, when the Aramaeans and related tribes occupied most of its territory. It was not until the late 10th century that the Assyrians began to recover, but by 850 they had conquered much of western Media and southern Armenia as well as Babylonia and Syria. In the following centuries, until just before 630, the empire was greatly expanded. It was also highly organized administratively; its language became Aramaic.
The Canaanite Phoenicians on the Syrian coast re-established their trading communities after the Philistine and Aramaean invasions; in the 10th and 9th centuries they moved out into the Mediterranean, establishing colonies in North Africa and as far west as Spain. Their influence in the western Mediterranean declined after the 6th century. Their Carthaginian colony then took over Phoenician trade in the western and central Mediterranean.
Farther east the Medes and Chaldeans destroyed the Assyrian Empire at the end of the 7th century. The Chaldean dynasty in Babylonia carried on Assyrian traditions of administration and encouraged commerce; under Nebuchadrezzar II (c. 605–c. 561 bc) their Neo-Babylonian Empire became the most powerful political entity of its time. Its rule extended from the Taurus Mountains in Anatolia to eastern Arabia and deep into southern Iran. This short-lived state made a tremendous impression on contemporaries, especially on the Jews, whose state was destroyed and who were carried into the Babylonian Captivity, and on the Greeks, to whom the glory of Babylon became legendary.
The Achaemenian Empire and its successors
In the 6th century the Iranian Persians under Cyrus the Great conquered their Median cousins and established the Achaemenian state (549). This was followed by the conquest of Lydia (546) and the Babylonian Empire (539). Aramaic became the official language of the Persian Empire, and its official religion was Zoroastrianism. Cyrus’ enlightened policy put an end to the Assyro-Babylonian practice of deporting conquered peoples and trying to destroy all local nationalisms.
At its height the Achaemenian Empire ruled the whole of the Middle East; Greek resistance prevented it from expanding successfully into Europe.
In 334 bc Alexander of Macedon invaded Anatolia and nine years later completed the conquest of the Persian realm. His vast empire was broken up into Macedonian “successor states” after his death. The Seleucid kings of Syria controlled most of Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. About 250 bc the still seminomadic Parthians emerged from a small area southeast of the Caspian Sea. Establishing control over Iran, they declared their independence of the Seleucid Empire and in the 2nd century bc expanded westward into Mesopotamia. In the 3rd century ad the semi-Hellenized Parthians were replaced by the Persian Sāsānians. The Sāsānians ruled Iran from ad 224 to 642; they extended its boundaries, reinvigorated its administration and cultural life, and challenged Roman power in the Middle East. In 636 the Sāsānian Empire was conquered by the Muslim Arabs, bringing to an end the last phase of ancient Middle Eastern civilization.
Pre-Islāmic Arabia.
Arabia was drawn into the orbit of western Asiatic civilization toward the end of the 3rd millennium bc; caravan trade between south Arabia and the Fertile Crescent began about the middle of the 2nd millennium bc. The domestication of the camel around the 12th century bc made desert travel easier and gave rise to a flourishing society in South Arabia, centred around the state of Saba (Sheba). In eastern Arabia the island of Dilmun (Bahrain) had become a thriving entrepôt between Mesopotamia, South Arabia, and India as early as the 24th century bc.
The discovery by the Mediterranean peoples of the monsoon winds in the Indian Ocean made possible flourishing Roman and Byzantine seaborne trade between the northern Red Sea ports and South Arabia, extending to India and beyond.
In the 5th and 6th centuries ad, successive invasions of the Christian Ethiopians and the counterintervention of the Sāsānian kings disrupted the states of South Arabia. The resulting economic decline made the rapid Muslim conquest of the area an easy task in the 7th century.
Elements of civilized culture
Religion
Middle Eastern religious thought had a strong influence on the ancient Greeks. The cosmogonies of Egypt, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Anatolia were transmitted in part to the West and formed the basis of much of the cosmogonies of Hesiod and the Orphics before 600 bc, as well as the background for the cosmogonies of Thales and Anaximander in the 6th century bc. There is some influence from the Middle East in Pythagorean and Platonic thinking, but it is often hard to define and still harder to prove in detail. From the early 3rd century bc on, the Middle East began to influence Greek thought increasingly. Babylonian astrology influenced Stoic philosophy, and some Jewish influence on Stoic ethics is likely as well.
Late Egyptian religious speculations were transmitted to the Greeks, especially through the “Physiologists” and Hermetic writers who flourished in Hellenistic Egypt beginning in the 2nd century bc. Astrology and alchemy were transmitted to our time in substantially the forms they received in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.
With the partial Hellenization of Judaism and its Christian offshoot in the 1st century ad, Jewish influence on the West rapidly became dominant. Most of it came through the Pharisees, but such Jewish sects as the Essenes and Baptists were directly involved.
Even such a heterodox Jewish sect as the Samaritans exerted disproportionately great influence. In the first years of the nascent Christian Church a Samaritan diviner named Simon, later called “Magus,” founded a new faith known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics spread rapidly over both the Roman and Iranian worlds, and by the end of the 3rd century ad they had subdivided into a multitude of different sects that covered a wide spectrum of possible combinations between Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Greco-Roman paganism.
In four centuries Christianity conquered the entire Roman Empire and many outlying regions, thanks to the intensity of its faith and the tenacity with which Christians held to their views, following Jewish models, through the bitterest persecutions.
In the East, Zoroastrianism maintained its hold over the Iranians and neighbouring peoples until the Islāmic conquest, when it was replaced by Islām, itself an offshoot of the monotheistic Judeo-Christian stem.
With the Hebrew Bible (which became the Christian Old Testament) almost the whole of traditional Israelite and early Jewish religion passed into Christianity, which was to a great extent an extension of Judaism. What was lost by the surrender of a large part of Jewish ritual law, with its stress on purity, was compensated by the triumph of monotheism over Greco-Roman polytheism and the transformation of ethical and spiritual ideas in the Greco-Roman world. Judaism itself survived to coexist with Christianity and Islām through all the intervening centuries to our own day.
Science and law
During the 3,000 years of urbanized life in Mesopotamia and Egypt tremendous strides were made in various branches of science and technology. The greatest advances were made in Mesopotamia—very possibly because of its constant shift of population and openness to foreign influence, in contrast to the relative isolation of Egypt and the consequent stability of its population. The Egyptians excelled in such applied sciences as medicine, engineering, and surveying; in Mesopotamia greater progress was made in astronomy and mathematics. The development of astronomy seems to have been greatly accelerated by that of astrology, which took the lead among the quasi-sciences involved in divination. The Egyptians remained far behind the Babylonians in developing astronomy, while Babylonian medicine, because of its chiefly magical character, was less advanced than that of Egypt. In engineering and architecture Egyptians took an early lead, owing largely to the stress they laid on the construction of such elaborate monuments as vast pyramids and temples of granite and sandstone. On the other hand, the Babylonians led in the development of such practical arts as irrigation.
Both sciences and pseudosciences spread from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Phoenicia and Anatolia. The Phoenicians in particular transmitted much of this knowledge to the various lands of the Mediterranean, especially to the Greeks. The direction taken by these influences can be followed from Egypt to Syria, Phoenicia, and Cyprus, thanks to a combination of excavated art forms that prove the direction of movement, as well as to Greek tradition, which lays great stress on what the early Greek philosophers learned from Egypt. Mesopotamian influence can be traced especially through the partial borrowing of Babylonian science and divination by the Hittites and later by the transmission of information through Phoenicia. The Egyptians and Mesopotamians wrote no theoretical treatises; information had to be transmitted piecemeal through personal contacts.
The westward transmission of Babylonian mathematics was associated with that of law. All early Babylonian mathematics was transmitted in case form, introduced by a condition followed by its solution. This model appears first in late Sumerian law: from law it was extended to scientific problems, and the form remained the same until well into the 1st millennium bc. This was true also of such derived systems as Hittite law and the so-called covenant law of Israel, as well as the earliest Greek codes (Draco and Gortyn), all of which are formulated similarly: condition (protasis), secondary condition or conditions, and conclusion (apodosis). The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi provides an example: “If a man accuses another man and brings a charge of murder against him but does not prove it, the accuser shall be executed.”
With the spread of case law in such conditional formulation, it was eventually discovered that formulation as generalized propositions or prohibitions was a simpler and more logical means of setting up a coherent code of laws than the case-law formulation (e.g., in the Hebrew Decalogue). The next step was the formulation of generalized geometrical propositions. This was first done by the Ionian Greek Thales (about 600 bc), whose listing of mathematical propositions in this generalized form instead of as conditional sentences was quite naturally described later as the “discovery” of mathematical theorems. With Thales logical reasoning made a giant step forward from the age of empirical modes of thought.
The Judeo-Christian concept of ethics and morals in law often prevailed in the Roman law of Christian times. Roman forms of law were ultimately adopted in almost the entire Western world, and through their universal sway many biblical approaches to legal problems became dominant.
The alphabet
Of all the accomplishments of the ancient Middle East, the invention of the alphabet is probably the greatest. While pre-alphabetic systems of writing in the Old World became steadily more phonetic, they were still exceedingly cumbersome, and the syllabic systems that gradually replaced them remained complex and difficult. In the early Hyksos period (17th century bc) the Northwestern Semites living in Egypt adapted hieroglyphic characters—in at least two slightly differing forms of letters—to their own purposes. Thus was developed the earliest known purely consonantal alphabet, imitated in northern Syria, with the addition of two letters to designate vowels used with the glottal catch.
This alphabet spread rapidly and was in quite common use among the Northwestern Semites (Canaanites, Hebrews, Aramaeans, and especially the Phoenicians) soon after its invention. By the 9th century bc the Phoenicians were using it in the western Mediterranean, and the Greeks and Phrygians adopted it in the 8th. The alphabet contributed vastly to the Greek cultural and literary revolution in the immediately following period. From the Greeks it was transmitted to other Western peoples. Since language must always remain the chief mode of communication for Homo sapiens, its union with hearing and vision in a uniquely simple phonetic structure has probably revolutionized civilization more than any other invention in history. William Foxwell Albright
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Middle East
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 30 July 2014
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Middle-East
Access Date: August 22, 2019
Additional Reading
Works treating the rise of civilization in the Middle East specifically include Walther Hinz, The Lost World of Elam: Re-Creation of a Vanished Civilization (1972; originally published in German, 1964), an account of art, religion, and social mores in the Elamite empire; Chester G. Starr, Early Man: Prehistory and the Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (1973), a popular overview of the development of literacy, urban living, art, literature, and religion; Charles L. Redman, The Rise of Civilization: From Early Farmers to Urban Society in the Ancient Near East (1978), on agricultural development, urbanization, and cultural change from 10,000 to 2000 bc; Jack Finegan, Archaeological History of the Ancient Middle East (1979, reissued 1986), a reference work covering history, mythology, and art between 10,000 and 330 bc; and Donald O. Henry, From Foraging to Agriculture (1989), a discussion of the origins of agriculture in the Middle East and surrounding area.
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
Ancient Iran
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Elamites, Medians, and Achaemenids
The Hellenistic and Parthian periods
The Sāsānian period
Persian dynasties
Ancient Iran, also known as Persia, historic region of southwestern Asia that is only roughly coterminous with modern Iran. The term Persia was used for centuries, chiefly in the West, to designate those regions where Persian language and culture predominated, but it more correctly refers to a region of southern Iran formerly known as Persis, alternatively as Pārs or Parsa, modern Fārs. Parsa was the name of an Indo-European nomadic people who migrated into the region about 1000 bc. The first mention of Parsa occurs in the annals of Shalmanesar II, an Assyrian king, in 844 bc. During the rule of the Persian Achaemenian dynasty (559–330 bc), the ancient Greeks first encountered the inhabitants of Persis on the Iranian plateau, when the Achaemenids—natives of Persis—were expanding their political sphere. The Achaemenids were the dominant dynasty during Greek history until the time of Alexander the Great, and the use of the name Persia was gradually extended by the Greeks and other peoples to apply to the whole Iranian plateau. This tendency was reinforced with the rise of the Sāsānian dynasty, also native to Persis, whose culture dominated the Iranian plateau until the 7th century ad. The people of this area have traditionally referred to the region as Iran, “Land of the Aryans,” and in 1935 the government of Iran requested that the name Iran be used in lieu of Persia. The two terms, however, are often used interchangeably when referring to periods preceding the 20th century.
This article covers the history of Iran and the Iranian peoples from the prehistoric period up to the Arab conquest in the 7th century ad. For the history of the succeeding periods, see the article Iran. For a discussion of the religions of ancient Iran, see Iranian religion. For a discussion of visual arts from the prehistoric period through the Sāsānian period, see art and architecture, Iranian. For a detailed account of Mesopotamian history through the Sāsānian period, see Mesopotamia, history of.
The Elamites, Medians, and Achaemenids
The early history of Iran may be divided into three phases: (1) the prehistoric period, beginning with the earliest evidence of humans on the Iranian plateau (c. 100,000 bc) and ending roughly at the start of the 1st millennium bc, (2) the protohistoric period, covering approximately the first half of the 1st millennium bc, and (3) the period of the Achaemenian dynasty (6th to 4th century bc), when Iran entered the full light of written history. The civilization of Elam, centred off the plateau in lowland Khūzestān, is an exception, for written history began there as early as it did in neighbouring Mesopotamia (c. 3000 bc).
The sources for the prehistoric period are entirely archaeological. Early excavation in Iran was limited to a few sites. In the 1930s archaeological exploration increased, but work was abruptly halted by the outbreak of World War II. After the war ended, interest in Iranian archaeology revived quickly, and, from 1950 until archaeological study was dramatically curtailed after 1979, numerous excavations revolutionized the study of prehistoric Iran.
For the protohistoric period the historian is still forced to rely primarily on archaeological evidence, but much information comes from written sources as well. None of these sources, however, is both local and contemporary in relation to the events described. Some sources are contemporary but belong to neighbouring civilizations that were only tangentially involved in events in the Iranian plateau—for example, the Assyrian and Babylonian cuneiform records from lowland Mesopotamia. Some are local but not contemporary, such as the traditional Iranian legends and tales that supposedly speak of events in the early 1st millennium bc. And some are neither contemporary nor local but are nevertheless valuable in reconstructing events in the protohistoric period (e.g., the 5th-century-bc Greek historian Herodotus).
For the study of the centuries of the Achaemenian dynasty, there is sufficient documentary material so that this period is the earliest for which archaeology is not the primary source of data. Contributing to the understanding of the period are, among other sources, economic texts from Mesopotamia, Elam, and Iran; historical inscriptions such as that of Darius I (the Great) at Behistun (modern Bīsotūn); contemporary and later classical authors; and later Iranian legends and literature.
The prehistoric period
The Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age)
Enigmatic evidence of human presence on the Iranian plateau as early as Lower Paleolithic times comes from a surface find in the Bākhtarān valley. The first well-documented evidence of human habitation is in deposits from several excavated cave and rock-shelter sites, located mainly in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran and dated to Middle Paleolithic or Mousterian times (c. 100,000 bc). There is every reason to assume, however, that future excavations will reveal Lower Paleolithic habitation in Iran. The Mousterian flint tool industry found there is generally characterized by an absence of the Levalloisian technique of chipping flint and thus differs from the well-defined Middle Paleolithic industries known elsewhere in the Middle East. The economic and social level associated with this industry is that of fairly small, peripatetic hunting and gathering groups spread out over a thinly settled landscape.
Locally, the Mousterian is followed by an Upper Paleolithic flint industry called the Baradostian. Radiocarbon dates suggest that this is one of the earliest Upper Paleolithic complexes; it may have begun as early as 36,000 bc. Its relationship to neighbouring industries, however, remains unclear. Possibly, after some cultural and typological discontinuity, perhaps caused by the maximum cold of the last phase of the Würm glaciation, the Baradostian was replaced by a local Upper Paleolithic industry called the Zarzian. This tool tradition, probably dating to the period 12,000 to 10,000 bc, marks the end of the Iranian Paleolithic sequence.
The Neolithic Period (New Stone Age)
Evidence indicates that the Middle East in general was one of the earliest areas in the Old World to experience what the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe called the Neolithic revolution. That revolution witnessed the development of settled village agricultural life based firmly on the domestication of plants and animals. Iran has yielded much evidence on the history of these important developments. From the early Neolithic Period (sometimes called the Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age) comes evidence of significant shifts in tool manufacture, settlement patterns, and subsistence methods, including the fumbling beginnings of domestication of both plants and animals, at such western Iranian sites as Āsīāb, Gūrān, Ganj Dareh (Ganj Darreh), and Ali Kosh. Similar developments in the Zagros Mountains, on the Iraqi side of the modern border, are also traceable at sites such as Karīm Shahīr and Zawi Chemi–Shanidar. This phase of early experimentation with sedentary life and domestication was soon followed by a period of fully developed village farming as defined at important Zagros sites such as Jarmo, Sarāb, upper Ali Kosh, and upper Gūrān. All these sites date wholly or in part to the 8th and 7th millennia bc.
By approximately 6000 bc these patterns of village farming were widely spread over much of the Iranian plateau and in lowland Khūzestān. Tepe Sabz in Khūzestān, Hajji Firuz in Azerbaijan, Godin Tepe VII in northeastern Lorestān, Tepe Sialk I on the rim of the central salt desert, and Tepe Yahya VI C–E in the southeast are all sites that have yielded evidence of fairly sophisticated patterns of agricultural life (Roman numerals identify the level of excavation). Though distinctly different, all show general cultural connections with the beginnings of settled village life in neighbouring areas such as Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Central Asia, and Mesopotamia.
The 5th to mid-3rd millennia
Rather less is known of the cultures in this time range in Iran than of contemporary cultures elsewhere in the ancient Middle East. Research has tended to concentrate on the Neolithic and protohistoric periods, and the scattered evidence for important cultural and artistic developments in the Chalcolithic Period (Copper Age) and Early Bronze Age resists coherent summary. It is clear that trends that began in the late Neolithic Period continued in the millennia that followed and that the rugged, broken landscape of the Iranian plateau forced people into a variety of relatively isolated cultures. In no instance, with the important exception of Elam (see The Elamites, below), did Iran participate in the developments that led to fully urban civilization in lowland Mesopotamia to the west or in the Indus valley to the east. Throughout prehistory the Iranian plateau remained at the economic and cultural level of village life achieved in the Neolithic Period. The separate cultural areas on the plateau are as yet barely understood by the modern archaeologist in any terms other than through the painted pottery assemblages found at several sites throughout Iran. Though they developed in comparative isolation, each of these areas does yield some evidence of cultural contact with its immediate neighbours and, in some striking cases, withdevelopments in the centres of higher civilization in Mesopotamia. Trade would appear to be the principal mechanism by which such contacts were maintained, and often Elam appears to have acted as an intermediary between Sumer and Babylon on the one hand and the plateau cultures on the other. Trade across the northern part of the plateau, through the sites of Tepe Hissar and Sialk, most probably involved transshipping semiprecious stones such as lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to Mesopotamia. The appearance of proto-Elamite tablets in Sialk IV may bear witness to such trade. So also may the appearance of similar proto-Elamite tablets at Tepe Yahya south of Kermān and in the great central desert provide evidence of trade connections between Mesopotamia and the east—in this case a trade that may have centred on specific items such as steatite and copper. Parsa perhaps also participated in such trade networks, as is suggested by the appearance there, alongside strictly local ceramics, of wares that have clear Mesopotamian affinities. In the west-central Zagros, outside influences from both the north and the west can be traced in the ceramic record; such is also the case for local cultures in Azerbaijan to the northwest. In general, however, these millennia represent a major dark age in Iranian prehistory and warrant considerably more attention than they have received.
The late 3rd and 2nd millennia
The beginning of this period is generally characterized by an even more marked isolation of the plateau than earlier, while the latter half of the period is one of major new disruptions, heretofore unique in Iranian history, that laid the groundwork for developments in the protohistoric period. In northwestern and central western Iran, local cultures, as yet barely defined beyond their ceramic parameters, developed in relative isolation from events elsewhere. All occupation had ceased at Tepe Sialk, but the painted pottery cultures characteristic of earlier Hissar and of the sites in the Gorgān lowland in the northeast continued. Little Mesopotamian influence is evident, though some contacts between Elam and the plateau remained. Beginning perhaps as early as 2400 bc but more probably somewhat later, a radical transformation occurred in the culture of the northeast: earlier painted potteries were entirely replaced by a distinctive gray or gray-black ceramic associated with a variety of other artifacts, primarily weapons and ornaments in copper or bronze, which were also unique. Whether this cultural change represents a strictly local development or testifies to an important intrusion of new peoples into the area is still under debate. In any case, none of these developments can be traced to Mesopotamia or to other areas to the west, regions which had previously been the sources of outside influences on the Iranian plateau. Somewhat later the local cultures of central and northwestern Iran were apparently influenced by developments in northern Mesopotamia and Assyria, along patterns of contact that had been well established in earlier periods. Yet this contact, as it is observed at Godin III, Hasanlu VI, and Dinkha Tepe, did not cause any major dislocation of local cultural patterns. In the second half of the 2nd millennium, however, western Iran—at first perhaps gradually and then with striking suddenness—came under the influence of the gray and gray-black ware cultures that had developed earlier in the northeast. There the impact of these influences was such as to definitely suggest a major cultural dislocation and the introduction of a whole new culture—and probably a new people—into the Zagros. It was this development that marked the end of the Bronze Age in western Iran and ushered in the early protohistoric period.
The Elamites
Whereas the Iranian plateau did not experience the rise of urban, literate civilization in the late 4th and early 3rd millennia on the Mesopotamian pattern, lowland Khūzestān did. There Elamite civilization was centred. Geographically, Elam included more than Khūzestān; it was a combination of the lowlands and the immediate highland areas to the north and east. Elamite strength was based on an ability to hold these various areas together under a coordinated government that permitted the maximum interchange of the natural resources unique to each region. Traditionally this was done through a federated governmental structure.
Closely related to that form of government was the Elamite system of inheritance and power distribution. The normal pattern of government was that of an overlord ruling over vassal princes. In earliest times the overlord lived in Susa, which functioned as a federal capital. With him ruled his brother closest in age, the viceroy, who usually had his seat of government in the native city of the currently ruling dynasty. This viceroy was heir presumptive to the overlord. Yet a third official, the regent or prince of Susa (the district), shared power with the overlord and the viceroy. He was usually the overlord’s son or, if no son was available, his nephew. On the death of the overlord, the viceroy became overlord. The prince of Susa remained in office, and the brother of the old viceroy nearest to him in age became the new viceroy. Only if all brothers were dead was the prince of Susa promoted to viceroy, thus enabling the overlord to name his own son (or nephew) as the new prince of Susa. Such a complicated system of governmental checks, balances, and power inheritance often broke down, despite bilateral descent and levirate marriage (the compulsory marriage of a widow to her deceased husband’s brother). What is remarkable is how often the system did work; it was only in the Middle and Neo-Elamite periods that sons more often succeeded fathers to power.
Elamite history can be divided into three main phases: the Old, Middle, and Late, or Neo-Elamite, periods. In all periods Elam was closely involved with Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria, sometimes through peaceful trade but more often through war. In like manner, Elam was often a participant in events on the Iranian plateau. Both involvements were related to the combined need of all the lowland civilizations to control the warlike peoples to the east and to exploit the economic resources of the plateau.
The Old Elamite period
The earliest kings in the Old Elamite period may date to approximately 2700 bc. Already conflict with Mesopotamia, in this case apparently with the city of Ur, was characteristic of Elamite history. These early rulers were succeeded by the Awan (Shūstar) dynasty. The 11th king of this line entered into treaty relations with the great Naram-Sin of Akkad (reigned c. 254–c. 2218 bc). Yet a new ruling house soon appeared, the Simash dynasty (Simash may have been in the mountains of southern Lorestān). The outstanding event of this period was the virtual conquest of Elam by Shulgi of the 3rd dynasty of Ur (c. 2094–c. 2047 bc). Eventually the Elamites rose in rebellion and overthrew the 3rd Ur dynasty, an event long remembered in Mesopotamian dirges and omen texts. About the mid 19th century bc, power in Elam passed to a new dynasty, that of Eparti. The third king of this line, Shirukdukh, was active in various military coalitions against the rising power of Babylon, but Hammurabi was not to be denied, and Elam was crushed in 1764 bc. The Old Babylon kingdom, however, fell into rapid decline following the death of Hammurabi, and it was not long before the Elamites were able to gain revenge. Kutir-Nahhunte I attacked Samsuiluna (c. 1749–c. 1712 bc), Hammurabi’s son, and dealt so serious a defeat to the Babylonians that the event was remembered more than 1,000 years later in an inscription of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. It may be assumed that with this stroke Elam once again gained independence. The end of the Eparti dynasty, which occurred possibly in the late 16th century bc, is buried in silence.
The Middle Elamite period
After two centuries for which sources reveal nothing, the Middle Elamite period opened with the rise to power of the Anzanite dynasty, whose homeland probably lay in the mountains northeast of modern Khūzestān. Political expansion under Khumbannumena (c. 1285–c. 1266 bc), the fourth king of this line, proceeded apace, and his successes were commemorated by his assumption of the title “Expander of the Empire.” He was succeeded by his son, Untash-Gal (Untash [d] Gal, or Untash-Huban), a contemporary of Shalmaneser I of Assyria (c. 1274–c. 1245 bc) and the founder of the city of Dūr Untash (modern Choghā Zanbīl). In the years immediately following Untash-Gal’s reign, Elam increasingly found itself in real or potential conflict with the rising power of Assyria. Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria campaigned in the mountains north of Elam in the latter part of the 13th century bc. The Elamites under Kidin-Khutran, the second king after Untash-Gal, countered with a successful and devastating raid on Babylonia. In the end, however, Assyrian power seems to have been too great. Tukulti-Ninurta managed to expand, for a brief time, Assyrian control well to the south in Mesopotamia. Kidin-Khutran faded into obscurity, and the Anzanite dynasty came to an end.
After a short period of dynastic troubles, the second half of the Middle Elamite period opened with the reign of Shutruk-Nahhunte I (c. 1160 bc). Two equally powerful and two rather less impressive kings followed this founder of a new dynasty, whose home was probably Susa, and in this period Elam became one of the great military powers of the Middle East. Tukulti-Ninurta died about 1208 bc, and Assyria fell into a period of internal weakness and dynastic conflict. Elam was quick to take advantage of this situation by campaigning extensively in the Diyālā River area and into the very heart of Mesopotamia. Shutruk-Nahhunte I captured Babylon and carried off to Susa the stela on which was inscribed the famous law code of Hammurabi. Shilkhak-In-Shushinak, brother and successor of Shutruk-Nahhunte’s eldest son, Kutir-Nahhunte, still anxious to take advantage of Assyrian weakness, campaigned as far north as the area of modern Kirkūk. In Babylonia, however, the 2nd dynasty of Isin led a native revolt against such control as the Elamites had been able to exercise there, and Elamite power in central Mesopotamia was eventually broken. The Elamite military empire began to shrink rapidly. Nebuchadrezzar I of Babylon (c. 1119–c. 1098 bc) attacked Elam and was just barely thwarted. A second Babylonian attack succeeded, however, and the whole of Elam was apparently overrun, ending the Middle Elamite period.
It is noteworthy that during the Middle Elamite period the old system of succession to, and distribution of, power appears to have broken down. Increasingly, son succeeded father, and less is heard of divided authority within a federated system. This probably reflects an effort to increase the central authority at Susa in order to conduct effective military campaigns abroad and to hold Elamite foreign conquests. The old system of regionalism balanced with federalism must have suffered, and the fraternal, sectional strife that so weakened Elam in the Neo-Elamite period may have had its roots in the centrifugal developments of the 13th and 12th centuries bc.
The Neo-Elamite period
A long period of darkness separates the Middle and Neo-Elamite periods. In 742 bc a certain Huban-Nugash is mentioned as king in Elam. The land appears to have been divided into separate principalities, with the central power fairly weak. During the next century the Elamites constantly attempted to interfere in Mesopotamian affairs, usually in alliance with Babylon, against the constant pressure of Neo-Assyrian expansion. At times they were successful with this policy, both militarily and diplomatically, but on the whole they were forced to give way to increasing Assyrian power. Local Elamite dynastic troubles were from time to time compounded by both Assyrian and Babylonian interference. Meanwhile the Assyrian army whittled away at Elamite power and influence in Luristan. In time these internal and external pressures produced a near total collapse of any meaningful central authority in Elam. In an effort to clean up a political and diplomatic mess that had become a chronic headache for the Assyrians, Ashurbanipal’s armies mounted a series of campaigns between 692 and 639 bc that utterly destroyed Susa, pulling down buildings, looting, and sowing the land of Elam with salt.
The protohistoric period and the kingdom of the Medes
The beginning of the Iron Age is marked by major dislocations of cultural and historical patterns in western Iran (almost nothing is known of the eastern half of the plateau in the Iron Age). The Iron Age itself is divided into three periods: Iron Age I (c. 1300–c. 1000 bc), Iron Age II (c. 1000–c. 800/750 bc), and Iron Age III (c. 750–c. 550 bc). The latter is the archaeological equivalent of what historically can be called the Median period.
The coming of the Iranians
Though isolated groups of speakers of Indo-European languages had appeared and disappeared in western Iran in the 2nd millennium bc, it was during the Iron Age that the Indo-European Iranians rose to be the dominant force on the plateau. By the mid-9th century bc two major groups of Iranians appeared in cuneiform sources: the Medes and the Persians. Of the two the Medes were the more widespread and, from an Assyrian point of view, the more important group. When Assyrian armies raided as far east as modern Hamadān, they found only Medes. In the more western Zagros they encountered Medes mixed with non-Iranian indigenous peoples. Early in the 1st millennium Iranian Medes already controlled almost all of the eastern Zagros and were infiltrating, if not actually pushing steadily into, the western Zagros, in some areas right up to the edge of the plateau and to the borders of lowland Mesopotamia. Persians also appear in roughly the same areas, though their exact location remains controversial. At times they seem to have settled in the north near Lake Urmia, at times in the central western Zagros near modern Kermānshāh, later certainly in the southwestern Zagros somewhere near the borders of Elam, and eventually, of course, in the region of Fārs. It has been argued that these various locations represent a nomadic tribe on the move; more likely they represent more than one group of Persians. What is reasonably clear from the cuneiform sources is that these Medes and Persians (and no doubt other Iranian peoples not identified by name) were moving into western Iran from the east. They probably followed routes along the southern face of the Elburz Mountains and, as they entered the Zagros, spread out to the northwest and southeast following the natural topography of the mountains. Where they could, they infiltrated farther west—for example, along the major pass across the mountains from Hamadān to Kermānshāh. In doing so, they met resistance from the local settled populations, who often appealed to Urartu, Assyria, and Elam for assistance in holding back the newcomers. Such appeals were, of course, most welcome to these great powers, who were willing to take advantage of the situation both to advance their interests at each other’s expense and to control the Iranian threat to themselves.
It has been suggested that the introduction of gray and gray-black pottery into western Iran from the northeast, which signals the start of the Iron Age, is the archaeological manifestation of this pattern of a gradual movement of Iranians from east to west. The case is by no means proved, but it is a reasonable reading of the combined evidence. If it is so, then the earliest Iranians in the Zagros Mountains can be dated to Iron Age I times, about 1300 bc. Archaeologically, the culture of Iron Age II times can be seen as having evolved out of that of the Iron Age I period, and, though the development is less clear, the same can be said of the relationship between the cultures of Iron Age II and III. The spread of the Iron Age I and II cultures in the Zagros is restricted and would appear to correspond fairly well with the distribution of Iranians known from the written documents. The distribution of the Iron Age III culture, on the other hand, is, at least by the 7th century bc, much more widespread and covers almost the whole of the Zagros. Thus, the argument that links these archaeological patterns with the Iranian migration into the area associates the Iron Age I and II cultures with the early penetration of the Iranians into the more eastern Zagros and with their infiltration westward along the major routes crosscutting the main mountain alignments. Those areas where traces of the Iron Age I and II cultures do not appear were the regions still under the control of non-Iranian indigenous groups supported by Urartu, Assyria, and Elam. The widespread Iron Age III culture is then associated with the rise to power of the Median kingdom in the 7th and early 6th centuries bc and the Iranianization of the whole of the Zagros Mountains.
The kingdom of the Medes
Traditionally, the creator of the Median kingdom was one Deioces, who, according to Herodotus, reigned from 728 to 675 bc and founded the Median capital Ecbatana (modern Hamadān). Attempts have been made to associate Dāiukku, a local Zagros king mentioned in a cuneiform text as one of the captives deported to Assyria by Sargon II in 714 bc, with the Deioces of Herodotus, but such an association is highly unlikely. To judge from the Assyrian sources, no Median kingdom such as Herodotus describes for the reign of Deioces existed in the early 7th century bc; at best, he is reporting a Median legend of the founding of their kingdom.
According to Herodotus, Deioces was succeeded by his son Phraortes (reigned 675–653 bc), who subjugated the Persians and lost his life in a premature attack against the Assyrians. Some of this tale may be true. Assyrian texts speak of a Kashtariti as the leader of a conglomerate group of Medes, Scythians, Mannaeans, and miscellaneous other local Zagros peoples that seriously threatened the peace of Assyria’s eastern borderlands during the reign of Esarhaddon (680–669 bc). It is possible that Phraortes is this Kashtariti, though the suggestion cannot be proved either historically or linguistically. That a Median king in this period exerted political and military control over the Persians is entirely reasonable, though it cannot be proved.
Beginning as early as the 9th century bc and with increasing impact in the late 8th and early 7th centuries, groups of nomadic warriors entered western Iran, probably from across the Caucasus. Dominant among these groups were the Scythians, and their entrance into the affairs of the western plateau during the 7th century may perhaps mark one of the turning points in Iron Age history. Herodotus speaks in some detail of a period of Scythian domination, the so-called Scythian interregnum in Median dynasty history. His dating of this event remains uncertain, but traditionally it is seen as falling between the reigns of Phraortes and Cyaxares and covering the years 653 to 625 bc. Whether such an interregnum ever actually occurred and, if it did, whether it should not be dated later than this are open questions. What is clear is that by the mid 7th century bc there were a great many Scythians in western Iran, that they—along with the Medes and other groups—posed a serious threat to Assyria, and that their appearance threw previous power alignments quite out of balance.
Herodotus reports how, under Cyaxares of Media (625–585 bc), the Scythians were overthrown when their kings were induced at a supper party to get so drunk that they were then easily slain. It is more likely that about this time either the Scythians withdrew voluntarily from western Iran and went off to plunder elsewhere or they were simply absorbed into a rapidly developing confederation under Median hegemony. Cyaxares is a fully historical figure who appears in the cuneiform sources as Uvakhshatra. Herodotus speaks of how Cyaxares reorganized the Median army into units built around specialized armaments: spearmen, archers, and cavalry. The unified and reorganized Medes were a match for the Assyrians. They attacked one of the important Assyrian border cities, Arrapkha, in 615 bc, surrounded Nineveh in 614 but were unable to capture it, and instead successfully stormed the Assyrian religious capital, Ashur. An alliance between Babylon and the Medes was sealed by the betrothal of Cyaxares’ granddaughter to Babylonian King Nabopolassar’s son, Nebuchadrezzar II (605–562 bc). In 612 the attack on Nineveh was renewed, and the city fell in late August (the Babylonians arrived rather too late to participate fully in the battle). The Babylonians and the Medes together pursued the fleeing Assyrians westward into Syria. Assyrian appeals to Egypt for help came to naught, and the last Assyrian ruler, Ashur-uballiṭ II, disappeared from history in 609.
The problem, of course, was how to divide the spoils among the victors. The cuneiform sources are comparatively silent, but it would seem that the Babylonians fell heir to all of the Assyrian holdings within the Fertile Crescent, while their allies took over all of the highland areas. The Medes gained control over the lands in eastern Anatolia that had once been part of Urartu and eventually became embroiled in war with the Lydians, the dominant political power in western Asia Minor. In 585 bc, probably through the mediation of the Babylonians, peace was established between Media and Lydia, and the Halys (Kızıl) River was fixed as the boundary between the two kingdoms. Thus a new balance of power was established in the Middle East among Medes, Lydians, Babylonians, and, far to the south, Egyptians. At his death Cyaxares controlled vast territories: all of Anatolia to the Halys; the whole of western Iran eastward, perhaps as far as the area of modern Tehrān; and all of southwestern Iran, including Fārs. Whether it is appropriate to call these holdings a kingdom is debatable; one suspects that authority over the various peoples, Iranian and non-Iranian, who occupied these territories was exerted in the form of a confederation such as is implied by the ancient Iranian royal title, king of kings.
Astyages followed his father, Cyaxares, on the Median throne (585–550 bc). Comparatively little is known of his reign. All was not well with the alliance with Babylon, and there is some evidence to suggest that Babylonia may have feared Median power. The latter, however, was soon in no position to threaten others, for Astyages was himself under attack. Indeed, Astyages and the Medians were soon overthrown by the rise to power in the Iranian world of Cyrus II (the Great) of Persia.
The rise of the Persians under Cyrus II
The ruling dynasty of the Persians that was settled in Fārs in southwestern Iran (possibly the Parsumash of the later Assyrian records) traced its ancestry back to an eponymous ancestor, Hāxamanish, or Achaemenes. There is no historical evidence of such a king’s existence. Traditionally, three rulers fell between Achaemenes and Cyrus II: Teispes, Cyrus I, and Cambyses I. Teispes, freed of Median domination during the so-called Scythian interregnum, is thought to have expanded his kingdom and to have divided it on his death between his two sons, Cyrus I and Ariaramnes. Cyrus I may have been the king of Persia who appears in the records of Ashurbanipal swearing allegiance to Assyria after the devastation of Elam in the campaigns of 642–639 bc, though there are chronological problems involved with this equation. When Median control over the Persians was supposedly reasserted under Cyaxares, Cambyses I is thought to have been given a reunited Persia to administer as a Median vassal. His son, Cyrus II, married the daughter of Astyages and in 559 inherited his father’s position within the Median confederation.
Cyrus II certainly warranted his later title, Cyrus the Great. He must have been a remarkable personality, and certainly he was a remarkable king. He united under his authority several Persian and Iranian groups who apparently had not been under his father’s control. He then initiated diplomatic exchanges with Nabonidus of Babylon (556–539 bc), which justifiably worried Astyages. Eventually he openly rebelled against the Medes, who were beaten in battle when considerable numbers of Median troops deserted to the Persian standard. Thus in 550 the Median empire became the first Persian empire, and the Achaemenian kings appeared on the international scene with a suddenness that must have frightened many.
Cyrus immediately set out to expand his conquests. After apparently convincing the Babylonians that they had nothing to fear from Persia, he turned against the Lydians under the rule of the fabulously wealthy Croesus. Lydian appeals to Babylon were to no avail. He then took Cilicia, thus cutting the routes over which any help might have reached the Lydians. Croesus attacked, and an indecisive battle was fought in 547 bc on the Halys River. Since it was late in the campaigning season, the Lydians thought the war was over for that year, returned to their capital at Sardis, and dispersed the national levy. Cyrus, however, kept coming. He caught and besieged the Lydians in the citadel at Sardis and captured Croesus in 546. Of the Greek city-states along the western coast of Asia Minor, heretofore under Lydian control, only Miletus surrendered without a fight. The others were systematically reduced by the Persian armies led by subordinate generals. Cyrus himself was apparently busy elsewhere, possibly in the east, for little is known of his activities between the capture of Sardis and the beginning of the Babylonian campaign in 540.
Nowhere did Cyrus display his political and military genius better than in the conquest of Babylon. The campaign actually began when he lulled the Babylonians into inactivity during his war with Lydia, which, since it was carried to a successful conclusion, deprived the Babylonians of a potential ally when their turn came. Then he took full advantage of internal disaffection and discontent within Babylon. Nabonidus was not a popular king: he had paid too little attention to home affairs and had alienated the native Babylonian priesthood. The writer of Deutero-Isaiah, speaking for many of the captive Jews in Babylon, undoubtedly represented the hopes of many of Nabonidus’s subjects that Cyrus was a potential deliverer. With the stage thus set, the military campaign against Babylon came almost as an anticlimax. The fall of the greatest city in the Middle East was swift; Cyrus marched into town in the late summer of 539 bc, seized the hands of the statue of the city god Marduk as a signal of his willingness to rule as a Babylonian and not as a foreign conqueror, and was hailed by many as the legitimate successor to the throne. In one stride Cyrus carried Persian power to the borders of Egypt, for with Babylon came all that it had seized from the Assyrians and gained in the sequel.
Little is known of the remainder of Cyrus’s reign. The rapidity with which his son and successor, Cambyses II, initiated a successful campaign against Egypt suggests that preparations for such an attack were well advanced under Cyrus. But the founder of Persian power was forced to turn east late in his reign to protect that frontier against warlike tribes who were themselves in part Iranians and who threatened the plateau in the same manner as had the Medes and the Persians more than a millennium earlier. One of the recurrent themes of Iranian history is the threat of peoples from the east. How much Cyrus conquered in the east is uncertain. What is clear is that he lost his life in 529 bc, fighting somewhere in the region of the Oxus (Amu Darya) and Jaxartes (Syr Darya) rivers.
The Achaemenian dynasty
Cambyses
On the death of Cyrus the Great, the empire passed to his son, Cambyses II (reigned 529–522 bc). There may have been some degree of unrest throughout the empire at the time of Cyrus’s death, for Cambyses apparently felt it necessary to secretly kill his brother, Bardiya (Smerdis), in order to protect his rear while leading the campaign against Egypt in 525. The pharaoh Ahmose II of the 26th dynasty sought to shore up his defenses by hiring Greek mercenaries but was betrayed by the Greeks. Cambyses successfully managed to cross the hostile Sinai Desert, traditionally Egypt’s first and strongest line of defense, and brought the Egyptians under Psamtik III, son and successor of Ahmose, to battle at Pelusium. The Egyptians lost and retired to Memphis, which subsequently fell to the Persians. Three subsidiary campaigns were then mounted, all of which are reported as failures: one against Carthage, though the Phoenician sailors, who were the backbone of the Persian navy, declined to sail against their own colony; one against the oasis of Amon (in the Egyptian desert west of the Nile), which, according to Herodotus, was defeated by a massive sandstorm; and one led by Cambyses himself to Nubia. This latter effort was partly successful, but the army suffered badly from a lack of proper provisions on the return march. Egypt was then garrisoned at three major points: Daphnae in the east delta, Memphis, and Elephantine, where Jewish mercenaries formed the main body of troops.
The Achaemenian Empire in the 6th and 5th centuries bc.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
In 522 bc news reached Cambyses of a revolt in Iran led by an impostor claiming to be Bardiya, Cambyses’ brother. Several provinces of the empire accepted the new ruler, who bribed his subjects by remitting taxes for three years. Cambyses died—possibly by his own hand but more probably from infection following an accidental sword wound—as he hastened home to regain control. Darius, a leading general in Cambyses’ army and one of the princes of the Achaemenid family, raced homeward with the troops in order to crush the rebellion in a manner profitable to himself.
Cambyses has been rather mistreated in the sources, partly because of the prejudices of Herodotus’s Egyptian informers and partly because of the propagandist motives of Darius I. Cambyses is reported to have ruled the Egyptians harshly and to have desecrated their religious ceremonies and shrines. His military campaigns out of Egypt were all reported as failures. He was accused of suicide in the face of revolt at home. It was even suggested that he was mad. There is, however, little solid contemporary evidence to support these charges.
Darius I
Darius I, called the Great, tells in detail the story of the overthrow of the false Bardiya and of the first year of his own rule in his famous royal inscription cut on a rock face at the base of Mount Bīsotūn, a few miles east of modern Kermānshāh. Some historians consider Darius’s account to be mere propaganda and argue instead that Bardiya was not an imposter. According to Darius, six leading Achaemenian nobles assisted in slaying the imposter and together proclaimed Darius the rightful heir of Cambyses. Darius was a member of the Achaemenian royal house. His great-grandfather was Ariaramnes, son of Teispes, who had shared power in Persia with his brother Cyrus I. Ariaramnes’ son, Arsames, and his grandson, Hystaspes (Darius’s father), had not been kings in Persia, as unified royal power had been placed in the hands of Cambyses I by Cyaxares. Neither is named a king in Darius’s own inscriptions. Hystaspes was, however, an important royal prince and apparently the governor of Persis. Darius himself was in the mold of Cyrus the Great—a powerful personality and a dynamic ruler.
It took more than a year (522–521 bc) of hard fighting to put down the revolts associated with Bardiya’s claim to the throne and Darius’s succession to power. Almost every province of the empire was involved in the conflict, including Persia and, most particularly, Media. A balanced policy of clemency backed by the swift and thorough punishment of any captured rebel leader, in combination with a well-coordinated and carefully timed distribution of loyal forces, eventually brought peace to the empire and undisputed power to Darius. He then turned his attention to the organization and consolidation of his inheritance, and it was for this role—that of lawgiver and organizer—that he himself, to judge from his inscriptions, most wished to be remembered.
Such activities, however, did not prevent Darius from following an active expansionist policy. Campaigns to the east confirmed gains probably made by Cyrus the Great and added large sections of the northern Indian subcontinent to the list of Persian-controlled provinces. Expansion in the west began about 516 bc when Darius moved against the Hellespont as a first step toward an attack on the Scythians along the western and northern shores of the Black Sea. The real strategic purpose behind this move probably was to disrupt and, if possible, interrupt Greek trade with the Black Sea area, which supplied much grain to Greece. Crossing into Europe for the first time, Darius campaigned with comparatively little success to the north of the Danube River. He retreated in good order, however, with only limited losses, and a bridgehead across the Hellespont was established.
Perhaps partly in response to these developments or perhaps for more purely internal reasons, the Ionian Greek cities on the west coast of Asia Minor revolted against Persian rule in 500 bc. The Persians were apparently taken by surprise, and at first the rebellion prospered. The Ionians received some limited assistance from the Athenians and in 498 felt strong enough to make another offensive. With one hand Darius negotiated; with the other he assembled a counterattack. The first Persian military efforts proved only partially successful, however, and the Ionians enjoyed another respite in the years 496–495. A renewed Persian offensive in 494 was successful. The Greek fleet was badly beaten off Miletus, and the Persian land army began a systematic reduction of the rebel cities. About 492 Mardonius, a son-in-law of Darius, was made special commissioner to Ionia. He suppressed local tyrants and returned democratic government to many cities. In time the wounds caused by the revolt and its suppression healed, and by 481 Xerxes was able to levy troops in this region with little trouble.
By 492 bc Mardonius had also recovered Persian Thrace and Macedonia, first gained in the campaign against the Scythians and lost during the Ionian revolt. There followed the Persian invasion of Greece that led to Darius’s defeat at the Battle of Marathon late in the summer of 490 bc. The great king was forced to retreat and to face the fact that the Greek problem, which had probably seemed to the Persians a minor issue on the western extremity of the empire, would require a more concerted and massive effort. Thus began preparations for an invasion of Greece on a grand, coordinated scale. These plans were interrupted in 486 by two events: a serious revolt in Egypt, and the death of Darius.
Xerxes I
Xerxes (reigned 486–465 bc), Darius’s eldest son by Queen Atossa, was born after his father had come to the throne; he had been designated official heir perhaps as early as 498, and while crown prince he had ruled as the king’s governor in Babylon. The new king quickly suppressed the revolt in Egypt in a single campaign in 484. Xerxes then broke with the policy followed by Cyrus and Darius of ruling foreign lands with a fairly light hand, and, in a manner compatible with local traditions, he ruthlessly ignored Egyptian forms of rule and imposed his will on the rebellious province in a thoroughly Persian style. Plans for the invasion of Greece begun under Darius were then still further delayed by a major revolt in Babylonia about 482 bc, which also was suppressed with a heavy hand.
Xerxes then turned his attention westward to Greece. He wintered in Sardis in 481–480 and thence led a combined land and sea invasion of Greece. Northern Greece fell to the invaders in the summer of 480, the Greek stand at Thermopylae in August of 480 came to naught, and the Persian land forces marched on Athens, taking and burning the Acropolis. But the Persian fleet lost the Battle of Salamis, and the impetus of the invasion was blunted. Xerxes, who had by then been away from Asia rather long for a king with such widespread responsibilities, returned home and left Mardonius in charge of further operations. The real end of the invasion came with the Battle of Plataea, the fall of Thebes (a stronghold of pro-Persian forces), and the Persian naval loss at Mycale in 479. Of the three, the Persian loss at Plataea was perhaps the most decisive. Up until Mardonius was killed, the issue of the battle was probably still in doubt, but, once leaderless, the less organized and less disciplined Persian forces collapsed. Time and again in later years this was to be the pattern in such encounters, for the Persians never solved the military problem posed by the disciplined Greek hoplites.
The formation of the Delian League, the rise of Athenian imperialism, troubles on the west coast of Asia Minor, and the end of Persian military ambitions in the Aegean followed rapidly in the decade after Plataea. Xerxes probably lost interest in the proceedings and sank deeper and deeper into the comforts of life in his capital cities of Susa, Ecbatana, and Persepolis. Harem intrigues, which were steadily to sap the strength and vitality of the Achaemenian Empire, led to the king’s assassination in 465 bc.
Artaxerxes I to Darius III
The death of Xerxes was a major turning point in Achaemenian history. Occasional flashes of vigour and intelligence by some of Xerxes’ successors were too infrequent to prevent eventual collapse but did allow the empire to die gradually. It is a tribute to Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius that the empire they constructed was as resilient as it proved to be after Xerxes.
The three kings that followed Xerxes on the throne—Artaxerxes I (reigned 465–425 bc), Xerxes II (425–424), and Darius II Ochus (423–404)—were all comparatively weak as individuals and as kings, and such successes as the empire enjoyed during their reigns were mainly the result of the efforts of subordinates or of the troubles faced by their adversaries. Artaxerxes I faced several rebellions, the most important of which was that of Egypt in 459, not fully suppressed until 454. An advantageous peace (the Peace of Callias) with Athens was signed in 448 bc, whereby the Persians agreed to stay out of the Aegean and the Athenians agreed to leave Asia Minor to the Achaemenids. Athens broke the peace in 439 in an attack on Samos, and in its aftermath the Persians made some military gains in the west. Xerxes II ruled only about 45 days and was killed while in a drunken stupor by the son of one of his father’s concubines. The assassin was himself killed by Darius II, who rose to the throne through palace intrigue. Several revolts marred his reign, including one in Media, which was rather close to home.
The major event of these three reigns was the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens, which was fought, with occasional pauses, over the latter decades of the 5th century bc. The situation was ripe for exploitation by the famous “Persian archers,” the gold coins of the Achaemenids that depicted an archer on their obverse and that were used with considerable skill by the Persians in bribing first one Greek state and then another. Initially the Persians encouraged Athens against Sparta and from this gained the Peace of Callias. Then, after the disastrous Athenian campaign against Sicily in 413, the Persians intervened on Sparta’s side. By the treaty of Miletus in 412, the Persians recovered complete freedom in western Asia Minor in return for agreeing to pay for seamen to man the Peloponnesian fleet. Persian gold and Spartan soldiers brought about the fall of Athens in 404 bc. Despite the fact that the Persians played the two sides against each other to their own advantage, they should have done better. One observes a certain lack of control from Susa by the king in these proceedings, and the two principal governors in Asia Minor who were involved, Tissaphernes of Sardis and Pharnabazus of Hellespontine Phrygia, seemed to have permitted a personal power rivalry to stand in the way of a really coordinated Persian intervention in the Greek war. When Egypt revolted in 405 bc, Persia was unable to do much about it, and from that point forward Egypt remained essentially an independent state.
Artaxerxes II came to the throne in 404 and reigned until 359 bc. The main events of his long rule were the war with Sparta that ended with a peace favourable to the Persians; the revolt and loss to the empire of Egypt; the rebellion of Cyrus the Younger, brother of the king; and the uprising known as the revolt of the satraps.
Sparta, triumphant over Athens, built a small empire of its own and was soon involved in a war against the Persians, the principal issue again being the Greek cities of Asia Minor. While Sparta played one Persian governor in Anatolia against the other, the Persians spent gold in Greece to raise rebellion on Sparta’s home ground. The Persians rebuilt their fleet and placed a competent Athenian admiral, Conon, in command. The contest continued from 400 to 387, with Sparta forced to act on an ever-shrinking front. A revitalized Athens, supported by Persia, created a balance of power in Greece, and eventually Artaxerxes was able to step in, at the Greeks’ request, and dictate the so-called King’s Peace of 387–386 bc. Once again the Greeks gave up any claim to Asia Minor and further agreed to maintain the status quo in Greece itself.
Cyrus the Younger, though caught in an assassination attempt at the time of Artaxerxes’ coronation, was nevertheless forgiven and was returned to the command of a province in Asia Minor. But he revolted again in 401 bc and, supported by 10,000 Greek mercenaries, marched eastward to contest the throne. He was defeated and killed at the Battle of Cunaxa in Mesopotamia that summer. The Greek mercenaries, however, were not broken and, though harried, left the field in good order and began their famous march, recorded in the Anabasis of Xenophon, north to the Black Sea and home. Probably no other event in late Achaemenian history revealed more clearly to the Greeks the essential internal weakness of the Achaemenian Empire than the escape of so large a body of men from the very heart of the Persian domain.
Since 379 bc Artaxerxes had been gathering Greek mercenaries in order to mount a campaign against Egypt. An attack in 373 failed against the native Egyptian 30th dynasty. On the heels of this failure came the revolt of the satraps, or provincial governors. Several satraps rose against the central power, and one, Aroandas (Orontes), a satrap of Armenia, went so far as to stamp his own gold coinage as a direct challenge to Artaxerxes. The general plan of the rebels appears to have been for a combined attack. The rebel satraps were to coordinate their march eastward through Syria with an Egyptian attack, under the king Tachos, and support by Greek mercenaries. The Egyptian attack was called off because of a revolt in Egypt by Tachos’s brother, and Artaxerxes managed to defeat the satraps who were left alone to face the king’s wrath. Several of the satraps, including Aroandas, were actually forgiven and returned to their governorships. In general the impression is that, in the end, rather than fight the central authority, the satraps were willing to return to their own provinces and plunder there in the name of Artaxerxes. Perhaps they saw that they actually had more authority and more control over real events in their own provincial territories than Artaxerxes had in his empire.
Plot and counterplot, harem intrigue, and murder brought Artaxerxes III to the throne in 359 bc. He promptly exterminated many of his relatives who might have challenged his rule—all to no avail, for revolts continued to rock the empire. A fresh attempt to win back Egypt was repulsed in 351. This setback encouraged revolt in Sidon and eventually in all of Palestine and Phoenicia. Parts of Cilicia joined the rebellion, but the revolt there was crushed in 345, the same year it had begun. Peace was achieved only temporarily; mercenaries from Thebes and the Argives, as well as from the Greek cities of Asia Minor, gathered for a new attempt on Egypt. Led by Artaxerxes III himself, it succeeded in 343 bc. But the local Egyptian dynasty fled south to Nubia, where it maintained an independent kingdom that kept alive the hopes of a dynastic revival. Persia then misplayed its hand in Greece by refusing aid to Athens against the rising power of Philip II of Macedon. In 339 bc Persian troops were fighting alone in Thrace against the Macedonians, and in the following year, at the Battle of Chaeronea, Philip extended his hegemony over all of Greece—a united Greece that was to prove impervious to Persian gold.
Artaxerxes was poisoned by his physician at the order of the eunuch Bagoas. The latter made Artaxerxes’ youngest son, Arses, king (338–336 bc) in hopes of being the power behind the throne, but Arses did not bend easily to Bagoas’s will. He attempted to poison the kingmaker but was himself killed in retaliation. Bagoas then engineered the accession of Darius III, a 45-year-old former satrap of Armenia. So many members of the royal house had been murdered in the court intrigue that Darius probably held the closest blood claim to the throne by virtue of being the grandnephew of Artaxerxes II. Darius was able to put down yet another rebellion in Egypt under Khababash in 337–336 bc, but the beginning of the end of the Achaemenian Empire came soon afterward, in May 334, when he lost the Battle of Granicus to Alexander the Great. Persepolis fell to the invader in April 330, and Darius, the last Achaemenid, was murdered in the summer of the same year while fleeing the conqueror. His unfinished tomb at Persepolis bears witness to his lack of preparation.
Alexander did not win his victories easily, however, and the catalog of troubles that marked the latter part of the Achaemenian Empire—rebellions, murders, weak kings trapped in the harems, missed chances, and foolish policies—cannot be the whole story. The sources, mostly Greek, are often prejudiced against the Persians and tend to view events from but a single point of view. No government could have lasted so long, found its way somehow through so many difficulties, and in the end actually have fought so hard against the conqueror without having much virtue with which to balance its vices.
Achaemenian society and culture
The culture that developed under the Achaemenids was in reality the collective societies and cultures of the many subject peoples of the empire. From this mosaic it is sometimes difficult to sort out that which is distinctively Persian or distinctively a development of the Achaemenian period and therefore perhaps an early Iranian contribution to general Middle Eastern society and culture.
Language
The languages of the empire were as varied as its peoples. The Persians, at least originally, spoke Old Persian, a southwestern dialect of Iranian (Median was a northwestern Iranian dialect), and were a nonliterate society. Their language was first written when Darius commanded that a script suitable for this purpose be invented so that he might inscribe the record of his rise to power at Bīsotūn (the inscriptions in Old Persian attributed to earlier kings were likely written during the reign of Darius or are later historical forgeries). That few could read Old Persian might be the reason why Darius at Bīsotūn established the tradition that royal inscriptions should be trilingual in Old Persian, Babylonian, and Elamite. Old Persian was never a working written language of the empire. Elamite, written on clay tablets, appears to have been the language of many of the administrators in Persis and, it may be assumed, in Elam. Archives of administrative documents in Elamite have been found at Persepolis. Aramaic, however, was the language of much of the empire and was probably the language most used in the imperial bureaucracy. The beginnings of the strong influence of Aramaic on Persian, which is so evident in the Middle Persian of Sāsānian times, can already be seen in the Old Persian royal inscriptions of late Achaemenian times. (See also Iranian languages.)
Social organization
Little is known of Iranian social organization in the period. In general, it was based on feudal lines that were drawn in part by economic and social functions. Traditional Indo-Iranian society consisted of three classes: the warriors or aristocracy, the priests, and the farmers or herdsmen. Crosscutting these divisions was a tribal structure based on patrilineal descent. The title king of kings, used even in the 20th century by the shahs of Iran, implies that the central authority exercised power through a pyramidal structure that was controlled at levels below the supreme authority by individuals who were themselves, in a certain sense, kings. Traditionally, the king was elected from a particular family by the warrior class; he was sacred, and a certain royal charisma attached to his person.
Such a method of organizing and controlling society undoubtedly changed under the influences and demands of imperial power and underwent much modification as Iranians increasingly borrowed social and political ideas from the peoples they ruled. Even in later times, nevertheless, there is evidence that the original Iranian concepts of kingship and social organization were still honoured and remained the ideals of Persian culture.
Religion
Iranian religion in the pre-Achaemenian and Achaemenian periods is a subject on which there is little scholarly agreement. When the Iranians first entered the dim light of the protohistoric period, they were certainly polytheists whose religious beliefs and practices closely paralleled other Indo-Iranian and Indo-European groups at the same stage in history. Their gods were associated with natural phenomena, with social, military, and economic functions, and with abstract concepts such as justice and truth. Their religious practices included, among others, animal sacrifice, a reverence for fire, and the drinking of the juice of the haoma plant, a natural intoxicant.
Probably about 600 bc there arose in the northeast of the plateau the great Iranian religious prophet and teacher Zoroaster (Zarathushtra). The history of the religion that he founded is even more complicated and controversial than the history of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion. Yet certain features of his religious reform stand out. He was an ethical prophet of the highest rank, stressing constantly the need to act righteously and to speak the truth and abhor the lie. In his teaching, the lie was almost personified as the Druj, chief in the kingdom of the demons, to which he relegated many of the earlier Indo-Iranian deities. His god was Ahura Mazdā, who, it seems likely, was a creation, in name and attributes, of Zoroaster. Though in a certain sense technically monotheistic, early Zoroastrianism viewed the world in strongly dualistic terms, for Ahura Mazdā and the “Lie” were deeply involved in a struggle for the human soul. Zoroaster, as might be expected, attempted to reform earlier Iranian religious practices and beliefs. He first rejected and then perhaps allowed in a modified form the practice of the haoma cult, clearly condemned the practice of animal sacrifice, and elevated to central importance in the ritual a reverence for fire. Fire worship, however, is a misnomer, because the Zoroastrians have never worshiped fire but rather have revered it as the symbol par excellence of truth.
The crucial question is: Were the Achaemenids Zoroastrians or at least followers of the prophet in the terms in which they understood his message? Possibly Cyrus the Great was, probably Darius I was, and almost certainly Xerxes I and his successors were. Such a simple answer to the question is possible, however, only if it is understood that Zoroastrianism as a religion had already undergone considerable development and modification since Zoroaster’s lifetime, influenced by the beliefs and practices and by the religions of those people of the Middle East with whom the expanding Iranians had intimate contact.
The god of the Achaemenian kings was the great Ahura Mazdā, from whom they understood they had received their empire and with whose aid they accomplished all deeds. Xerxes and his successors mention other deities by name, but Ahura Mazdā remains supreme. Darius names only Ahura Mazdā in his inscriptions. More significant, however, is Darius’s tone, which is entirely compatible with the moral tone of Zoroaster and, in some instances, even compatible with details of Zoroaster’s theology. During the reigns of Darius and Xerxes, the archaeological record reveals that religious rituals were in force that were also compatible with an evolved and evolving Zoroastrianism. The haoma cult was practiced at Persepolis, but animal sacrifice is not attested. More important, fire clearly played a central role in Achaemenian religion.
There may have been religious overtones in the quarrel between Cambyses and Darius on the one hand and the false Bardiya—a magus, or Median priest—on the other. Certainly there were religious as well as political motivations behind Xerxes’ suppression of the daeva (deva) worshipers and the destruction of their temple. It is possible that there was some conflict among the royal Achaemenids, who were followers of one form of Zoroastrianism, the supporters of a different version of Zoroastrianism as practiced by other Iranians, believers in older forms of Iranian religion, and believers in foreign religions, which in the light of Zoroaster’s teachings were reprehensible. Compromises and syncretism, however, probably could not be prevented. Though the Zoroastrian calendar was adopted as the official calendar of the empire in the reign of Artaxerxes I, by the time of Artaxerxes II the ancient Iranian god Mithra and the goddess Anāhitā (Anahīti) had been accepted in the royal religion alongside Ahura Mazdā.
Thus, in a sense, the Achaemenian kings were Zoroastrians, but Zoroastrianism itself was probably no longer exactly the religion Zoroaster had attempted to establish. What the religion of the people beyond court circles may have been is almost impossible to say. One suspects that a variety of ancient Iranian cults and beliefs were prevalent. The magi, the traditional priests of the Medes, may have wielded more influence in the countryside than they did at court, and popular beliefs and practices may have been more deeply influenced by contact with other peoples and other religions. Later classical Zoroastrianism, as known in the Sāsānian period, was an amalgam of such popular cults, of the religion of the Achaemenian court, and of the teachings of the prophet in their purer form. (See also Zoroastrianism.)
Art
Achaemenian art, like Achaemenian religion, was a blend of many elements. In describing, with justifiable pride, the construction of his palace at Susa, Darius says,
Armenian tribute bearer carrying a jar decorated with winged griffins, detail of relief sculpture on the stairway leading to the Apadana of Darius at Persepolis, Iran, Achaemenian period, late 5th century bc.Michael Roaf
The cedar timber—a mountain by name Lebanon—from there it was brought…the yakā-timber was brought from Gandara and from Carmania. The gold was brought from Sardis and from Bactria…the precious stone lapis-lazuli and carnelian…was brought from Sogdiana. The…turquoise from Chorasmia…. The silver and ebony…from Egypt…the ornamentation from Ionia…the ivory…from Ethiopia and from Sind and from Arachosia…. The stone-cutters who wrought the stone, those were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths…were Medes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the wood, those were Sardians and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick, those were Babylonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Medes and Egyptians.
This was an imperial art on a scale the world had not seen before. Materials and artists were drawn from all the lands ruled by the great king, and thus tastes, styles, and motifs became mixed together in an eclectic art and architecture that in itself mirrored the empire and the Persians’ understanding of how that empire ought to function. Yet the whole was entirely Persian. Just as the Achaemenids were tolerant in matters of local government and custom as long as Persians controlled the general policy and administration of the empire, so also were they tolerant in art so long as the finished and total effect was Persian. At Pasargadae, the capital of Cyrus the Great and Cambyses in the Persian homeland (Fārs), and at Persepolis, the neighbouring city founded by Darius the Great and used by all his successors, one can trace to a foreign origin almost all the details in the construction and embellishment of the architecture and the sculptured reliefs, but the conception, planning, and overall finished product are distinctly Persian and could not have been created by any of the foreign groups who supplied the king of kings with artistic talent. This was true also of the decorative arts, at which the Persians excelled: fine metal tableware, jewelry, seal cutting, weaponry and its decoration, and pottery.
It has been suggested that the Persians called on the subject peoples for artists because they were themselves crude barbarians with little taste and needed quickly to create an imperial art to match their sudden rise to political power. Yet excavations at sites from the protohistoric period show this not to have been the case. Cyrus may have been the leader of Persian tribes not yet as sophisticated nor as civilized as the Babylonians or Egyptians, but, when he chose to build Pasargadae, he had a long artistic tradition behind him that was probably already distinctly Iranian and that was in many ways the equal of any. To show this, two examples suffice: the tradition of the columned hall in architecture and fine gold work. The former can now be seen as belonging to an architectural tradition on the Iranian plateau that extended back through the Median period to at least the beginning of the 1st millennium bc. The rich Achaemenian gold work, which inscriptions suggest may have been a specialty of the Medes, was in the tradition of the delicate metalwork found in Iron Age II times at Hasanlu and still earlier at Marlik. Persepolis, primarily the creation of Darius and Xerxes, is one of the great artistic legacies of the ancient world, with its carefully proportioned and well-organized ground plan, rich architectural ornament, and magnificent decorative reliefs.
The organization and achievement of the Achaemenian Empire
At the centre of the empire sat the king of kings. Around him was gathered a court composed of powerful hereditary landholders, the upper echelons of the army, the harem, religious functionaries, and the bureaucracy that administered the whole. This court lived mainly in Susa but went in the hot summer months to Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), probably in the spring to Persepolis in Fārs, and perhaps sometimes to Babylon. In a smaller version it traveled with the king when he was away in the provinces.
The provinces, or satrapies, were ruled by satraps (governors), technically appointed by the central authority but who often became hereditary subkings, particularly in the later years of the empire. They were surrounded and assisted in their functions by a court modeled on that of the central government and were powerful officials. The great king was nevertheless theoretically able to maintain considerable control in local affairs. He was the last court of appeal in judicial matters. He directly controlled the standing military forces stationed in the provinces, though as time went on the military and civil authority in the provinces tended to become combined under the satrap. The king was also aided in keeping control in the provinces by the so-called king’s eyes or, better, the king’s ears—officials from the central government who traveled throughout the empire and who reported directly back to the king on what they learned. The number of provinces and their boundaries varied greatly from time to time; at the beginning of Darius’s reign there were 20 provinces. In general, as time went on, the number increased, partly because of the need to reassert control over the satraps by decreasing their power base, partly because the feudal structure that underlay Persian society required rewarding more and more people with a role in government, and partly because the original 20 provinces were undoubtedly simply too large to permit efficient administration.
The army was a particularly important element within the empire. It, too, developed and changed with time. After Cyrus the Persian tribal levy, based on the responsibility of all male Persians to fight for the king, was replaced by a professional standing army supplemented by a troop levy from the subject peoples in times of intensive military activity. The elite of the standing army were the 10,000 “immortals,” composed of Persians and Medes, 1,000 of whom were the personal guard of the king. The person who controlled this elite guard, as did Darius on the death of Cambyses, usually controlled all. The troops of the imperial levy fought alongside the regular army in national units, were armed according to their individual customs, but were usually officered by Persians. Permanent bodies of troops were stationed at strategic points throughout the empire, and, to judge from the garrison at Elephantine in Egypt, these were actually military colonies, firmly settled into the local countryside. Greek mercenaries were used with increasing frequency in later years, and many Greeks fought faithfully for Persian silver.
Both the civil and the military administration, as well as public and private trade, were greatly facilitated by the famous royal Achaemenian road system. Communications throughout the empire were better than any previous Middle Eastern power had maintained. The famous road from Susa to Sardis in western Asia Minor is the best known of these imperial highways. It was an all-weather road maintained by the state. Over it ran a governmental postal system based on relay stations with remounts and fresh riders located a day’s ride apart. The speed with which a message could travel from the provinces to the king at Susa was remarkable.
On the whole, Persian rule sat lightly on the subject peoples, at least under the early Achaemenids. It was a conscious policy of Cyrus and Darius to permit conquered nations to retain their own religions, customs, methods of doing business, and even to some extent forms of government. This policy was exemplified by Cyrus’s attitude toward the Babylonians, which led to his being accepted as the rightful successor of Nabonidus, his willingness to permit the Jews to return to Palestine and to their own way of life, and his successors’ concern that this promise be honoured; Cambyses’ behaviour in Egypt and his acceptance by the Egyptians as founder of a legitimate new Egyptian dynasty; and the policy adopted under Mardonius toward the Ionian cities following their rebellion. Perhaps even in the later empire, rebellious peoples, governments, and leaders were too often forgiven and not suppressed with the thoroughness sometimes characteristic of other regimes. Lapses in this policy, such as Xerxes’ violent reaction to rebellion in Babylon, stand out in the record.
Law played an important role in the administration of the empire, and stories of Persian justice abound in the Greek sources. Darius particularly wished to be remembered as the great lawgiver, and law reform was one of the cornerstones in his program for reorganizing the empire. To judge from the Babylonian evidence, two sets of law, possibly administered by two sets of courts, were in force in the provinces. One was the local law, undoubtedly based on custom and previous local codifications; the other was the Persian, or imperial, law, based ultimately on the authority of the great king. A new word for law appeared in the Middle East in Achaemenian times, the Iranian dāta, and was borrowed by the Semitic languages used in the empire. In Babylonian and Aramaic, sources give evidence for Persian judges called by the Iranian word dāta-bar. These were probably the judges of the imperial courts.
With legal reform came reform and unification of tax structures. The tax structure of the empire was apparently based on the principle that all of the conquered lands were the actual property of the king. Thus taxes were rather rents, and the Persians and their land, Fārs, by virtue of not being a conquered people or land, were always tax-free. Each province was required to pay yearly a fixed amount in gold or silver, and each vassal state paid a fixed tribute in kind. Again going on the Babylonian evidence, in previous times agricultural taxes had been levied in fixed amounts regardless of the fluctuating quality of the harvest, but under Darius all land was surveyed, an estimate of its yield (based on an average of the harvests over several years) was from time to time established, and taxes were levied in fixed amounts based on a percentage of that average yield. This was not quite an income tax, since it was not based on a percentage of each year’s production, but it was at least a reasonable figure based on a reasonable production average.
Breakdowns often occurred in the Achaemenids’ effort to maintain a productive balance between local social structures, customs, laws, and government and the demands of the empire. The failure of the Persians to find such a balance when dealing with what was for them an extremely strange system of social and political organization—the Greek polis, or city-state—probably lay at the heart of their never-ending troubles in Ionia as much as did the power and ambitions of mainland Greeks. Yet even the Ionians, at the best of times, often realized the mutual advantages and benefits of the king’s peace and a unified western Asia under a tolerant central administration.
The economy of the empire was very much founded on that king’s peace; it was when the peace broke down with ever-increasing frequency during the last century of Achaemenian rule that the economy of the empire went into a decline that undoubtedly contributed significantly to the eventual political and military collapse. Wealth in the Achaemenian world was very much founded on land and on agriculture. Land was the principal reward that the king had available for those who gave service or who were in positions of great political or military power in the empire. Under Darius there was a measure of land called a “bow” that was originally a unit considered sufficient to support one bowman, who then paid his duty for the land in military service. At the other end of the scale were enormous family estates, which often increased in size over the years and which were or became hereditary holdings. They were often administered by absentee landlords. Such major landholdings were, as one would expect, usually in the hands of Iranians, but non-Iranians were also able to amass similar wealth and power, thereby testifying once again to the inherent tolerance with which the empire was administered. The Achaemenids themselves took a positive role in encouraging agriculture by investing state funds and effort in irrigation and the improvement of horticulture.
They also invested in and endeavoured to promote trade, a major source of imperial wealth. The effect of the state-maintained road system on the encouragement of trade has already been mentioned. Equal attention was paid to developing seaborne trade. State-sponsored voyages of exploration were undertaken in order to search for new markets and new resources. Darius completed a project, begun by the Egyptians, that connected the Nile to the Red Sea by a canal, so that routes across the Arabian Sea and into the Persian Gulf could be used to link the eastern and western ends of his empire. As part of the same program, port development on the Persian Gulf coast was encouraged. Imperial standardized weights and measures, efforts to develop and use coinage, and standardizing that coinage in the king’s name were all policies intended to encourage commerce and economic activity within the realm.
Banking also played a role in the economy. Documents have survived from a family banking business in Babylonia—the house of Murashu and sons of Nippur—covering the years c. 455–403 bc; the firm evidently prospered greatly by lending money and by acting as a middleman in the system of tax collection. Interest rates were high, but borrowers were numerous.
As time went on, there were clearly more and more such borrowers, for the later empire is marked by a general economic decline. The principal cause of this decline was the unsettled political conditions, but other, more indirect causes were unwise government interference in the economy, overtaxation, and the removal of too much hard money from the economy. Gold and silver tended to drain into the treasury of the central government from the provinces, and too little found its way back into general circulation. Disastrous inflation was the result. The large sums of money paid to foreign mercenaries and as bribes to foreign governments must also have contributed to an unfavourable balance of payments that in turn stimulated inflation. Such conditions hardly strengthened the empire and must have contributed, in ways that cannot be documented with certainty, to the political unrest that was their own main cause.
Ultimately, the achievement of the Achaemenian Persians was that they ruled with such creative tolerance over an area and a time that, for both the Middle East and for Europe, included the end of the ancient and the beginning of the modern world. In one sense, the ancient Middle East died when Cyrus marched into Babylon. Others would argue that its death came when Alexander burned Persepolis. The question remains open. What is clear is that the Achaemenian Empire—the largest anyone had ever yet tried to hold together and one that was not surpassed until Rome reached its height—was a profound force in western Asia and in Europe during an important period of ferment and transition in human history. That era was one of major developments in art, philosophy, literature, historiography, religion, exploration, economics, and science, and those developments provided the direct background for the further changes, along similar lines, that made the Hellenistic period so important in history. Hellenism probably would not have been possible, at least not in the form we know it, if it had had to build directly on the rather more narrow and less ambitious bases of the individual civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, or Greece. In a sense, the Achaemenian Persians passed on a concept of empire that, much modified by others, has remained something of a model of how it is possible for diverse peoples with variant customs, languages, religions, laws, and economic systems to flourish with mutual profit under a central government. In narrower terms, but for the Iranians themselves no less important, the Achaemenian Empire is seen as the beginning of the Iranian nation, one of the pivotal peoples in the modern Middle East. T. Cuyler Young
The Hellenistic and Parthian periods
Alexander and his successors
Between 334 and 330 bc Alexander completed the conquest of the whole Achaemenian Empire. (For the story of the conquest, see Alexander the Great and ancient Greek civilization: Alexander the Great.) Alexander’s burning of the royal palace at Persepolis in 330 symbolized the passing of the old order and the introduction of Greek civilization into western Asia. Greek and Macedonian soldiers settled in large numbers in Mesopotamia and Iran. Alexander encouraged intermarriage and fostered Greek culture, but he also retained a large part of the Achaemenian administrative structure and introduced Oriental elements and Greek political institutions.
Alexander left no heir. His death in 323 bc signaled the beginning of a period of prolonged internecine warfare among the Macedonian generals for control of his enormous empire. By the end of the 4th century bc, Seleucus I Nicator had consolidated his control over that part of Alexander’s territory that had corresponded to the Achaemenian Empire. Seleucus—who, with his son Antiochus I Soter, assumed supreme power—established a government with two capitals: Antioch on the Orontes River in Syria and Seleucia on the Tigris River in Babylonia. The greatest part of western Asia—from the Aegean to the Punjab—belonged to this vast Seleucid kingdom, and to its diverse and varied populace must be added several allied Greek cities, both in Greece and in Asia Minor. (See also bc to c. ad 620" class="md-crosslink">Mesopotamia, history of: Mesopotamia from c. 320 bc to c. ad 620.)
The nobles and the nomads
As he was finishing the conquest of eastern Iran—and at a moment when his attention was being drawn toward the conquest of India—Alexander was confronted by two human factors thatwere of the greatest importance for the future of his empire. The first of these was the powerful local aristocracy of this part of the Achaemenian Empire, which held enormous properties and dominated the indigenous population. The second was the nomad population that for centuries had wandered along the northern and northeastern frontiers of Iran.
Alexander seems to have admired greatly the barons of eastern Iran; he had taken note of their ardour during the two years of hard and constant fighting in his conquest of northeastern Iran. Realizing how such a force could benefit the future of his empire, Alexander convoked an assembly of Bactrian nobles. He ordered 30,000 young men to be chosen for training in the Macedonian military disciplines. He understood the importance and effectiveness of the Iranian light cavalry armed with the bow, and his army would make use of this training in its march toward the plains of India. Alexander married Roxana of Sogdiana, daughter of a chief of one of the conquered countries, thereby symbolizing the union of the two peoples.
But Alexander was not unaware that other measures were needed to ensure his control of these vast territories. He founded many new cities, or refounded some that were already in existence. Many of these were placed strategically along the northern frontiers as protection. Almost half of these new cities were located in the high (eastern) satrapies. This policy of Alexander’s would soon be abandoned by the Seleucids, whose efforts at city planning were mostly confined to their western possessions. In contrast with Alexander, the Seleucids were unable to maintain the good rapport with the eastern Iranian nobility that Alexander had believed essential. And this deficiency, a result of the Seleucids’ “pro-Macedonian” policies, was one of the principal causes for the progressive decline of the Seleucid empire.
The second of the human factors, the nomads, inhabited the immense territories beyond the northern frontiers. They fought constantly with the settled populations but could nevertheless occasionally ally with them in the face of necessity. When Alexander arrived on the banks of the Jaxartes (Syr Darya) River, it marked the limit of the “civilized” world; beyond stretched the Eurasian wilderness. The Roman historian Quintus Curtius recounts Alexander’s meeting with a delegation of Scythians who gave him a warning. They told him,
Just cross the Tanais [properly the Jaxartes] and you will see how far Scythia stretches. You will never conquer the Scythians. Our poverty makes us quicker than your army, which bears plunder from so many nations. Just when you think we are far away, then will you see us in your camp. We know how to pursue and how to flee with the same swiftness. [One recalls here the famous “Parthian shot,” a metaphor drawn from a neighbouring people.] We seek out those deserts totally devoid of human culture rather than the cities and the rich countryside.
These words sum up what the nomad world represented to an empire that stretched several thousand miles from east to west. The settled population knew the threat only too well. Alexander was not the first to cross swords with the nomads. Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenian Empire, had paid with his life while fighting them, and Darius I, believing he could take them from behind through southern Russia, suffered a crushing defeat in his campaign against the Scythians along the shores of the Black Sea.
If the nomads and the eastern Iranian nobility were the two dominant factors in the decline of the Seleucid kingdom and if the events they provoked were some of the principal causes for the exhaustion and eventual fall of that state, these same causes later played a significant role in the collapse of Parthian power. Parthia was undermined by an aristocracy that retained its military power and refused to bend before the royal will or to give up its meddling in the country’s politics. In the meantime the kingdom’s unruly nomadic neighbours to the north and the northeast, at the cost of the lives of several Parthian sovereigns, weakened the kingdom and sometimes added a complementary element to the often numerous intrigues of the pretenders to supreme power during the course of the almost half a millennium of the existence of the Parthian kingdom.
The Seleucids
In the struggle for power after Alexander’s death, Seleucus I brought under his control the whole eastern part of Alexander’s empire. But even before he had consolidated his control over this territory, the eastern provinces on the Indian frontier had begun to revolt. By about 304 bc Seleucus was forced to abandon these to Chandragupta, the founder of the great Maurya empire in India. This was a serious loss to the Seleucids, for they lost not only the Indian territory conquered by Alexander but also frontier districts west of the Indus River. As recompense, Seleucus received 500 elephants, which he took back with him to Syria. From this time on, the west was dominant in the Seleucids’ politics, to the detriment of their eastern possessions. This near disinterest of the Seleucids in the far-off eastern regions must have alienated the Greeks who had settled there, far from their homeland, and the thought of taking back their full independence could not have been far from their minds.
Soon afterward (c. 290–280 bc) the two eastern provinces of Margiana and Aria suffered an invasion by nomads. But the invasion was repelled, and the nomads were pushed back beyond the Jaxartes. Demodamas, a general to the first two Seleucid kings, crossed the river and even put up altars to Apollo, ancestor of the dynasty. Alexandria in Margiana and Heraclea in Aria, founded by Alexander, were rebuilt by Antiochus I under the names Antioch and Achaea, respectively, and a wall nearly 100 miles (160 km) long was put up to protect the oasis of Merv against future invasions, the menace of which was never far away. Patrocles received a commission to explore the Caspian Sea.
Seleucus I and his successors hoped to Hellenize Asia and held the conviction that the Greeks and Macedonians were a superior people and the bearers of a superior civilization. A network of cities and military colonies was built to assure the stability of a state whose inhabitants would be Asians. The Greek language made deep inroads, especially among the families of those numerous Greeks who married the local women and among those engaged in commerce. But after the 2nd century bc and the slowing of the Greco-Macedonian immigration, the Greek language lost ground and the local element became dominant.
The people of Iran, particularly those in the upper stratum of society, borrowed nothing from Hellenism but its exterior forms. Even the Iranians who lived in such cities as Seleucia or Susa do not seem to have been deeply affected by Greek ideas.
The movement of Iranian peoples
The victories of Alexander had brought the Greeks to the limits of the known world. But less than a century after Alexander’s death there began a great movement back, propelled by stirring peoples in the Iranian world. In a movement westward from the 3rd century bc, the Sarmatians occupied the northern shore of the Black Sea. While driving back their close relatives, the Scythians, they succeeded in “Sarmatizing” the Greek cities along its shores. At the end of the 3rd century, there began in Chinese Turkistan a long migration of the Yuezhi, an Iranian people who invaded Bactria about 130 bc, putting an end to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom there. (In the 1st century bc they created the Kushān dynasty, whose rule extended from Afghanistan to the Ganges River and from Russian Turkistan to the estuary of the Indus.) Finally, the Parni, a nomadic or seminomadic people from Iran, appeared in the mid 3rd century bc. Taking a median direction between the Sarmatians and Yuezhiuezhi, the Parni gained control of the Seleucid satrapy of Parthia and created the Parthian (Ashkanian) kingdom. The Parthian state restored Achaemenian power for nearly half a millennium, and its arrival coincided with the expansion of Rome and played a significant role in the destinies of the world during the last three centuries bc and the first two centuries ad.
Revolt of the high satrapies
The empire of the Seleucids, like that of the Achaemenids before them, was shaken by revolts of the satraps. The difficult situation in the west and the grave reverses suffered by the royal house accelerated the weakening of the Macedonian kingdom. The loss of its eastern possessions in the 3rd century bc, however, proved fatal to the Seleucid cause. Diodotus I, a Greek who found himself at the head of the satrapy of Bactria, led a revolt that brought independence about 250 bc; at about the same time, Arsaces led the Scythian Parni into Parthia and defeated Andragoras, establishing an independent native dynasty.
Parthia was the first province to detach itself from the Seleucid empire, just as it had been the first to rise up on the occasion of the accession of Darius the Great. Andragoras, though he did not declare himself king, showed his independence by minting his own coins. At this time Parthia was one of the poorer of the high satrapies, caught between the mountains and the great central desert and without large agricultural resources. This satrapal independence might seem surprising if it were not for the fact that the main route for the silk trade crossed right through Parthia over a distance of more than 100 miles (160 km). The tolls the caravans paid must have produced a sizable income.
The defection of Diodotus I is still easier to understand. Bactria, a vast country of a “thousand cities,” was located at the junction of the routes to China and India, and it was rich in cultivable land. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom founded by Diodotus expanded rapidly, embracing Sogdiana and Aria and extending southward and southeastward.
Being at some distance from the west, Diodotus and his successors gradually adopted the customs and lifestyles of their subjects. The closer these ties were drawn, the stronger became the loyalty of the Bactrians. It is believed that the separation of Diodotus from the Seleucids might, over the long term, have seemed to the Bactrians and Sogdians as the realization of their political destiny, and they might have looked on these satraps as men acting in their interest. For more than a century (230–130 bc) this kingdom held the frontiers and barred the route to the nomads.
The rise of the Parthians
Invasion of the Parni
Arsaces, who was chief of the Parni (a member tribe of the Dahae confederation) must have begun his struggle against the Seleucids from 247 bc, the year from which the Parthians dated their history. This does not necessarily mean that Arsaces was crowned king in 247. Other Iranian dynasties (e.g., the Sāsānids; see below The Sāsānian period) dated the beginning of their eras from the time when they began to establish their power rather than from the time of coronation of the first monarch of their line.
The Parthian empire in the 1st century bc.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Daho-Parno-Parthian tribes “chose chiefs for war and princes for peace” from among the closest circle of the royal family. They were famous for their breeding of horses, their combat cavalry, and their fine archers. Alexander encountered them during his Bactrian campaign, and the Greek writers who recorded his reign remarked on their agility and effectiveness as horsemen. They were a people who kept the traditions of patriarchal tribal organization. The Parni, with Arsaces at their head, took the province of Parthia after having beaten Andragoras; soon neighbouring Hyrcania was annexed, and the Parni reached the Caspian Sea. Arsaces had himself crowned in the city of Asaak, and the tribe took the name of the Parthians, their close relatives, which was derived from a word meaning “exiled.” Their language was closely related to Scythian and Median. The dynasty these people produced never broke its links with the people, and rare was the Arsacid dynastic sovereign who did not turn to his people in time of danger.
Formation of the Parthian state
Although the two new kingdoms, that of Arsaces I’s Parthians and the Greco-Bactrian kingdom of Diodotus I, sprang up almost simultaneously and very near each other, there were notable differences between them. The motivating force behind the rebellion in Bactria was an association—or perhaps even a collaboration—between the local nobility (large landholders who dominated the whole indigenous population) and the local Greek community. Both groups were opposed to the Macedonian domination represented by the Seleucid dynasty.
The makeup of the Parthian kingdom seems to have been different. It was essentially built on the relationship of the inhabitants of Parthia to the neighbouring tribes outside the static frontiers—an ethnic mass, half nomadic and half settled, that inhabited the north of Iran. The success of Arsaces and his men was based on their strength, their spirit, and the weakness of their enemies. The Greek element present in Parthia does not seem to have played a role similar to that played by its counterpart in Bactria. In fact, the Parthians, at least initially, may have been hostile to the local Greek populations. During their war with Antiochus III (see below), they massacred all the Greek inhabitants of the city of Syrinx in Hyrcania.
Arsaces
Arsaces seems to have enjoyed great fame among the tribes. His name remained linked with the names of the sovereigns of this dynasty, who succeeded each other for the four and a half centuries of the Parthian state. His image regularly appeared on the obverse of Parthian coins until the end of the period.
The rupture of the communications link between the Seleucid capitals and the east caused by Arsaces’ success placed Diodotus in a difficult situation. He seems to have wanted to collaborate with Seleucus II Callinicus in a campaign he was preparing against the Parthians. The death of Diodotus (c. 234 bc) and the accession of his son, Diodotus II, reversed matters, for the young successor changed his father’s policy and joined with Arsaces. It was not until 232 or 231 bc that Seleucus arrived in the east to put down the rebellion. Arsaces, who had remained closely allied with the nomads to the north, sensed his own weakness in the face of Seleucus’s army and fled to the home of the Apasiacae, or “Scythians of the Waters.” Seleucus tried to cross the Jaxartes but, having suffered losses at the hands of the nomads, decided to return to Syria after receiving alarming news from the west. He made peace with Arsaces, who recognized his suzerainty.
From that time on, Arsaces changed his policy: he acted no longer as a nomad but rather as a chief of state—a worthy successor to the Seleucids, whose example he followed, in Parthia. He had himself crowned. Besides Asaak and Dārā (an impregnable fortress), he founded such cities as Nisā, where he would be buried. These new cities were usually named for the king or the dynasty. Arsaces seems not to have infringed on the rights of the Greeks and Macedonians living in these cities, perhaps hoping to win their support. From the beginning, while maintaining the autonomy of the cities, he made use of propaganda to ensure their continuing obedience. He installed his capital at Hecatompylos, on the Silk Road. His death is dated between 217 and 211 bc.
Artabanus I
Arsaces’ successor, Artabanus I (reigned c. 211–191 bc), sometimes known as Arsaces II, continued the work of consolidation. Artabanus, already solidly established in Parthia and Hyrcania, tried to extend his possessions toward Media. But events in the neighbouring Greco-Bactrian kingdom worked against him: Diodotus II (accused, it is thought, of treason to Hellenism through his alliance with the nomads) lost his throne, which passed to Euthydemus by the time the Syrian army of the Seleucid king Antiochus III (the Great) arrived in Hyrcania.
The wave of revolts by the eastern satraps, which began a movement away from unity in the state, also affected western Iran; the beginning of the reign of Antiochus (223–187 bc) was marked by the dissidence of Molon and his brother Alexander, satraps of Media and Persis, respectively. Antiochus did not undertake his campaign for recovery of the high satrapies—a project his father had planned and never carried out—until 212 bc. At that time his kingdom stretched no farther east than Media, Persis, Susiana, and Carmania. His operations against Artabanus were successful; he took Hecatompylos and crossed the mountains separating it from Parthia, which he occupied. Artabanus fled and took refuge with the friendly Apasiacae, as had his father, Arsaces. However, the conflict between the Seleucids and Parthia was ended by a compromise, just as it had been at the time of the invasion of Seleucus II. Because a much more important struggle, against the Bactrian kingdom of Euthydemus, awaited Antiochus, he preferred to make peace with Artabanus, to whom he accorded the title of king in exchange for recognition of his fealty, and he obliged the Parthian to send troops to reinforce the Syrian army. The rear of the Seleucid king was safeguarded, but the two provinces held by Artabanus were definitively lost by the Macedonians.
The period following Antiochus’s campaign against the Parthians was marked by a strong resistance by the Bactrian cavalry at the frontier and by a Seleucid siege of Bactra, for two years the Bactrian capital (208–207 bc). There, too, the Seleucid king made peace: Euthydemus, like Artabanus, kept his title of king. Demetrius, son of Euthydemus, married a daughter of Antiochus the Great, thus preserving his political prestige.
Having acquired war elephants and provisions for his army in Bactria, Antiochus crossed the Hindu Kush into the Kabul valley, where he concluded a pact with the Indian king Sophagasenos, secured still more elephants, and returned by way of southern Iran. The results of this long campaign were meagre. Antiochus recognized the independence of two kingdoms, that of the Parthians and that of Euthydemus, which previously had been no more than satrapies. The struggle must have weakened these two states, but, after their status was legalized, they proceeded to reestablish their material and military resources.
Phraates I
Precise information is not available concerning the reign of Priapatius (c. 191–176 bc), who succeeded Artabanus and whose name appears in documents found in excavations at Nisā. Under his son Phraates I (reigned c. 176–171 bc), the young Parthian kingdom seems to have recuperated sufficiently to have taken up once again its expansionist activities. It attacked Media, succeeded in the conquest of the Mardi tribe near the Caspian Sea, and set up a defense of the “Caspian Gates,” an important strategic point of penetration in Phraates’ possessions. Overturning tribal tradition, which reserved the succession to the throne to the eldest son, he wisely designated as a successor—even though he had several sons—his brother Mithradates.
The “phil-Hellenistic” period (c. 171 bc–ad 12)
The accession of Mithradates I about 171 bc opened a new period in the destinies of the Parthian kingdom, which historians call “phil-Hellenistic” and which lasted until ad 12. This period was characterized by a strong Hellenistic cultural influence, manifested in the use of the Greek language and in particular in the arts, where, however, national traditions were not completely abandoned.
Mithradates I
Parthian military, political, and economic power expanded considerably following the accession of Mithradates I. The king began with an attack on the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which at the time was going through a period of weakness; then he turned against the west and declared himself independent of the Seleucids. To show his complete independence—he was the first of the Parthian sovereigns to do so—he began issuing coins bearing his likeness wearing a royal diadem like the Seleucid kings. On the reverse side was a representation of Arsaces, ancestor of the Parthian dynasty, seated on an omphalos (hemispheric altar) and holding a bow, in imitation of Seleucid coins that showed Apollo in the same way, as the ancestor of the Seleucids.
The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes took action against Mithradates but was killed at Tabae (or Gabae, probably present Eṣfahān). His death brought about a widespread dislocation of the Macedonian kingdom, which crumbled into several smaller states. Toward 160 bc the power to unite most of the high satrapies and other eastern satrapies could come only from the Parthians, who under Mithradates began the assault. They occupied Media in 155, which opened the route to Mesopotamia. In 148–147 Mithradates reached Ecbatana, where he moved his capital. Rhagae was “refounded” and given the dynastic name of Arsacia, and in 141 Mithradates took Seleucia on the Tigris and was recognized king of Babylonia. His forces conquered Susiana and Elymais, either at this time or after 139. In 141 he was obliged to leave Hyrcania for his eastern possessions, which were evidently being menaced by hostile movements of the nomads. There he spent the remaining three years of his reign.
The Seleucid king Demetrius II, probably aware of Mithradates’ difficulties in the east, undertook an effort to recover Mesopotamia, but after a few successes he suffered defeat and was taken prisoner (139 bc). He was sent to Hyrcania and was married there to a daughter of Mithradates, who by this union became related to the house of Seleucus. The army of Demetrius included Greco-Bactrian and Elymaian troops—which is understandable—as well as men from Persis, or Persians, who by their cooperation with the Macedonians seem to indicate their opposition to the expansionism of the Parthians, whom they considered foreigners and conquerors. Iran under the Parthians was an empire but not yet a nation.
Phraates II
Like his father, Mithradates I, Phraates II (reigned c. 138–128 bc) was to remain for some time in the eastern provinces. He also endured a last Macedonian attempt to break the Parthian advance. Antiochus VII Sidetes—brother of Demetrius II, who had been taken prisoner—assembled a powerful army, which once more included men of Persis and Elymais. The strength in numbers and the wealth of this army made an impression on contemporaries, who reported that even the simple soldiers wore shoes cobbled with gold. Phraates was beaten in several battles, but time worked on his side. With the arrival of winter, Antiochus quartered his troops in several localities in Media. The local population, exasperated by the undisciplined Syrian soldiery, rose up in revolt. Antiochus was killed and his son taken prisoner (129 bc). Thanks to the loyalty of the Medians, whose sentiments contrasted with those of the Persians, Phraates was victorious. The year 129 bc was a turning point in the history of the eastern Mediterranean: Greco-Macedonian domination received a decisive blow; it would survive for only 46 more years.
The route to great acquisitions in the west seemed to open before Phraates, if the nomads did not stop him. Weakened in his struggle against Antiochus VII, he called on the Śaka nomads to the north of his frontiers for aid, promising them payment. The reinforcements arrived too late to be of use; he sent them back, which provoked them to revolt and pillage the countryside. The Greek prisoners drafted by Phraates into his army participated in the pillaging, and Phraates lost his life fighting them. The same fate was reserved for his successor and uncle, Artabanus II (c. 128–124/123 bc). The Śaka were pushed back with some difficulty toward Drangiana, to which they gave their name, Sakastan (Sīstān). Another branch of the vast nomadic movement crossed the Oxus and put an end to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, on the ruins of which the powerful Kushān kingdom was to be built.
The second stage of the phil-Hellenistic period extends from the first quarter of the 2nd century until about 30 bc and embraces a period when Parthia reached the apogee of its power and worldwide territorial expansion.
Mithradates II
The reign of Mithradates II, from 123 to 88 bc, constitutes the most glorious chapter of Parthian history. It put an end to the ambitions of Artabanus’s son Himerus, left by his father as governor of Mesopotamia, and brought Hyspaosines, king of Mesene (Characene), who had extended his possessions too far toward the north, back into submission. In the east the Śaka were on the move—soon an independent state would be formed there that would push toward eastern Iran and India; in the 1st century bc two dynasties, the Indo-Scythian and the Indo-Parthian, whose members would remain closely linked to the Arsacid dynasty, were to reign in that region. They would disappear after being absorbed by the Kushān kingdom.
The eastern frontiers of Mithradates II incorporated Margiana and Aria. Once order was restored in the east, the king turned toward the west: he placed Tigranes II (the Great) on the throne of Armenia, and, extending his hegemony over this kingdom and over eastern Asia Minor, he organized pressure on the last Seleucids. A meeting with Rome, which had already formed a “Province of Asia” in Asia Minor, became inevitable and took place in 92 bc on the Euphrates River between the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla and the Parthian ambassador Orobaze. Mithradates II wisely refused to agree to follow in the Roman path and preferred to retain his neutrality in the struggle between Rome and Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontus. Rome in the west and Parthia in the east met as Alexander’s successors and, with a common accord, settled the inheritance. The two parties recognized the Euphrates as a common frontier. It seems there was no longer a question of either an alliance or a signed convention. Upon his return, Orobaze paid with his head for the lèse-majesté he had committed by accepting a seat lower than Sulla’s at their meeting.
For the first time, Parthian power entered into direct contact with the Chinese empire and received an embassy from the Han emperor Wudi (140–87 bc), who dispatched an escort of 20,000 men to meet the Parthians. The Chinese were particularly interested in the horses raised in Fergana, which they needed to create a cavalry to fight the nomadic Xiongnu on their northern border.
At the zenith of his power, Mithradates II took the title of “king of kings”; in the east as well as in the west, his empire achieved a position of power and stability previously unknown. He maintained diplomatic relations with the two greatest world powers, Rome and China. Mithradates I, Phraates II, and Mithradates II were the true creators of the Parthian state, winning for it military and economic victories and raising it to a level comparable to that of the Achaemenian Empire. After the death of Mithradates II, a short period of intrigue and rivalry saw the succession, in turn, of Gotarzes I, Orodes I, and Sanatruces. The latter came to power late in life and was replaced in 70 bc by his son, Phraates III (70–58/57 bc), under whom sustained contacts with Rome took place.
Wars with Rome
In 69 bc the Roman general Lucius Licinius Lucullus, in charge of looking after Roman interests in the East, attempted to lure Phraates III into an alliance that would help Rome in its struggle against Pontus and Armenia, but the Parthian king, while still maintaining “friendly” relations with Rome, retained his neutrality. An agreement with the Romans renewed the Euphrates line as a frontier. Three years later the Roman general Pompey the Great replaced Lucullus and succeeded in concluding a real alliance with Phraates III. This proved, however, to be of short duration, for affairs in Armenia, aggravated by Roman operations on Parthian territory, had brought the two empires to a parting of the ways. Pompey replied to Phraates’ protestations by occupying Gordyene, a vassal state of the Parthians, and addressed Phraates with the simple title “king.” Pompey did not trouble himself over entering into direct relations with the sovereigns of Media and Elymais, vassals of Phraates. The position taken by the Romans toward the king of kings was rather more like that of conquerors than of allies. Pompey’s policy became clear: from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, he hoped to create a wall of states friendly to Rome that would encircle Parthia, in preparation for Roman conquest.
That action fell within the jurisdiction of the Roman triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus. As early as 57 bc a conflict with Rome broke out over the case of Mithradates III (58/57–55 bc), who, opposing Orodes II (c. 57–37/36 bc), his brother (both having killed their father, Phraates III), fled to Syria and asked the legate Aulus Gabinius for aid and asylum. The Roman Senate forbade Gabinius to involve himself in the dispute over the succession to the Parthian throne. Three years later the tension between the two powers was settled in bloody fashion, and the rupture was consummated in 53 bc. Without provocation, the army of Crassus—the only one of the triumvirs without military glory (Julius Caesar was conqueror of Gaul, and Pompey was conqueror of the Middle East)—crossed the Euphrates. Orodes protested and invoked the treaty of friendship in vain. Crassus refused to reply until he arrived at Seleucia on the Tigris. It was a brutal breaking of all the agreements concluded in 69 and 66 bc.
The Battle of Carrhae (53 bc), with the Parthians led by Surenas with his light and heavy cavalry, cost Rome seven legions and the lives of Crassus and his son. Through Surenas’s brilliant victory the routes to Iran and India were closed to Rome, and its ambitions in the Orient were so weakened that the Euphrates became not only a political but also a spiritual frontier; no effort at Romanization beyond it was possible any longer. A united Greco-Iranian front protected Asia against the Romanization of Iranianized Hellenism and destroyed the myth of Roman invincibility.
The insignia of the Roman legions fell into Parthian hands, and 10,000 Roman prisoners were sent into captivity in Margiana. The victory over Crassus had great repercussions among the peoples of the East. It shook the Roman position in Asia Minor, Syria, and Palestine, while it restored the Parthians’ confidence in their power and in their ability to resist Rome and promised them a dominant position among the peoples of the East. According to the Greek writer Plutarch, the severed head of Crassus was brought to Orodes like a hunting trophy while he was attending a presentation of Euripides’ play The Bacchae.
The Parthian counterthrust in 52–50 bc under the command of Prince Pacorus (Pakores) was not crowned with success. The Arsacid army did not know how to organize long campaigns or how to lay siege to fortified cities. But soon, civil war in Rome reinforced the position of the Parthians, and Pompey, after being defeated by Caesar, thought of taking refuge among them. It is thought that Orodes, taking advantage of this lull, succeeded in resolving difficulties in the east with the Yuezhiuezhi, even perhaps with the Kushān. In 48 bc, with Pompey dead, Caesar was the absolute master of the Roman world. He was preparing to avenge Crassus’s defeat when he was assassinated in 44 bc. The duty of following through on Caesar’s project fell to Mark Antony. Pacorus, anticipating Antony, crossed into Syria after having concluded an agreement with Quintus Labienus, a Roman commander on the side of Caesar’s assassins who had gone over to the Parthians. The successes of the two armies were startling: Labienus took all of Asia Minor, Pacorus all of Syria and Palestine. For nearly two years all the western provinces of the Achaemenids remained in Parthian hands. In Rome it was rumoured that the Parthians were planning to invade Italy itself. But the successes of the Arsacid armies were as ephemeral as they were remarkable. Disagreement between the two generals weakened their effect. In 39 bc Labienus was conquered by Roman forces under Publius Ventidius and slain. Asia Minor was recovered by the Romans, and the following year the same fate struck Pacorus and his conquests.
Under Orodes II the Parthians had reached the zenith of their power: in the west the Arsacids had for a short time reestablished the empire of the Achaemenids almost in its entirety. Their successes in the east seem to have been equally important. Their capital was moved to Ctesiphon, where a military camp was transformed into a great metropolis, facing Seleucia across the Tigris. At Nisā the city was expanded, the royal palaces were enlarged, and the royal hypogea (catacombs) were enriched with precious pieces of fine Greco-Iranian art.
In 37 bc Orodes was assassinated by his son Phraates IV, who also did away with his brothers and his eldest son. In 36 bc Mark Antony began to carry out the revenge Caesar had planned. He brought his army to Armenia, through which he planned to enter Media and attack Parthia from the north. But cold weather and Phraates’ cavalry combined to force Antony to abandon the fight and return to Syria. In 34 bc he launched another campaign and again suffered heavy losses, and his power struggle with Octavian forced him to abandon his plans for war against the Parthians.
About 30 bc Tiridates II, a pretender to the throne of Parthia supported by Rome, forced Phraates IV to leave Mesopotamia and take refuge with his eastern neighbours, the Scythians, who restored him to power. Driven out, Tiridates took refuge at Rome. He returned again in 26 bc, after which Phraates was able to definitively reestablish his power at the same time that Octavian was inaugurating the imperial period of Roman history.
Settlement with Rome
The new stage in the phil-Hellenistic period began about 31 bc, when, after his victory over Mark Antony, Octavian (now Caesar Augustus) was the sole master in Rome. Before that, however, he had already proposed to Phraates an alliance and a treaty ending the war. The Battle of Carrhae and Antony’s defeat had raised Parthia to a major power in the eyes of Rome. Augustus put pressure on Phraates IV through the pretender Tiridates and even tried military intervention. In the end a pact was signed in 20 bc that allowed Roman prisoners and the insignia of the conquered legions to be returned. A new stage began in relations between the two states, marked by the conclusion of a real peace that recognized the Euphrates as a frontier between them. Phraates was dealt with as the sovereign of a great nation. Rome renounced its ambitions in the east, and Augustus inaugurated a policy of respect. The two states could do nothing but profit from the agreement, for a defeat would have been fatal to either power and a victory hazardous. The caravan route to India and China was reopened. Augustus received ambassadors from the many eastern peoples, including the Indo-Scythians and the Sarmatians. The only country in the east where Rome remained active was Armenia.
All obstacles, however, were not necessarily eliminated. There remained the question of Armenia: if it was controlled by Rome, it would be a channel for penetration into Parthia from the north, but if it was controlled by Parthia, it would offer an outlet on the Black Sea, over which Rome asserted its authority. The rivalry of the two powers over this country would remain for centuries a stumbling block to peace.
Toward 10 or 9 bc Phraates sent his four sons and grandsons to Rome, a gesture that was both one of confidence in a “friendly” power and also a guarantee that his throne would pass to his son by Musa, an Italian slave girl given him by Augustus. This son would assassinate his father with his mother’s help and occupy the throne as Phraates V from 2 bc to ad 4 after having married his mother.
The end of the “phil-Hellenistic” period is marked by the clash of the ruling class with foreign influences that had penetrated life in Parthian society. These influences came from Rome and were often introduced by princes of the Arsacid house returning from stays abroad. The short reign of Orodes III (ad 4–6/7) was followed by that of Vonones I (7/8–11), a son of Phraates IV who, because of his Roman habits, was driven out by the Parthian nobility, whose role by that time had become dominant in internal politics and dynastic questions. Vonones’ fall brought about a change in the destinies of the country.
The “anti-Hellenistic” period (ad 12–162)
A new and important period in Parthian history, often called “anti-Hellenistic,” embraces a century and a half, from ad 12 to 162. It is characterized by an expansion of the native Parthian culture and an opposition to all things foreign. The weakness of the reigning dynasty opened wide avenues to the nobility to involve themselves in the official existence of the state. They chose the sovereign whose reign opened the first stage in this new period.
Artabanus III
The king chosen by the barons to replace Vonones was Artabanus III (reigned 12–38). They were certainly mistaken in believing they would find in him an easy instrument to manipulate. Artabanus was the son of a viceroy of Hyrcania and was Arsacid only on his mother’s side. Under his rule Parthia entered a brilliant but troubled era, one completely dominated by the personality of this violently anti-Roman sovereign who was eager to drive Rome out of Asia. However, after he failed to place his son on the throne of Armenia, for years Artabanus avoided precipitating matters with Rome and dedicated himself to internal reforms, among which centralization was the most important.
The humbling of the great nobles, an enterprise in which he was sustained by the lesser nobles, became necessary. He had to reduce the hereditary privileges the barons had carved out for themselves. It was also necessary to reorganize the states that made up the kingdom. He put princes of his family on the thrones of Mesene, Persis, Elymais, Atropatene—all little states that were governed by men loyal to the throne. But it proved impossible for him to put down a revolt in the eastern possessions, where the Indo-Parthian king Gondophares declared himself independent (c. 19) and took the title “king of kings.”
It is thought that the position taken toward the city-states, about which precise information is lacking, was the reason for the seven-year-long revolt of Seleucia on the Tigris. The fighting there took place between the Greek and Hellenized elements and the Semites, who demanded their right to participate in the autonomy of the city and who supported pretenders against Artabanus III.
A new attempt to place a son on the throne in Armenia angered Rome, which, with the aid of the nobility, sent for Tiridates III, a pretender the barons had crowned at Ctesiphon. Artabanus was forced to take refuge with the Dahae, who helped him win back his throne. In 37 a meeting with a representative of Rome on a bridge in the middle of the Euphrates allowed an agreement to be reached that maintained the status quo in Armenia and recognized Parthian sovereignty with the river as the frontier. Artabanus, a strong personality, did not seek to impose his kingdom as a world power, but he did not hesitate to make plans to regain the western provinces, the former Achaemenian possessions.
Dissolution of the Parthian state
The period from 51 to 122 is one in which the Parthian state slowly dissolved and decomposed into several small countries, and various parties lay claim to the throne—an inevitable result of the weakness of the central power. In the 1st century ad the Parthian empire, according to the Roman historian Pliny, was composed of 18 kingdoms, 11 in the north and seven in the south, some governed by Arsacid princes and others by local dynasties. In 58 Hyrcania became independent. In the realm of external affairs, an effort was made to maintain good relations with Rome, especially because of the new kingdom of the Kushān, which was causing concern on the eastern frontiers. It might be for this reason that in 87 Parthia sent an embassy to neighbouring China to the east of the Kushān. Internally, the ethnic upsurge became more accentuated.
After the short reign of Vonones II (51), the throne passed to Vologeses I (reigned 51–80), an ardent anti-Roman. One of his brothers, Vonones, was made king of Media. Vologeses I wanted his second brother, Tiridates, to be king of Armenia—putting him in position to break with Rome, which opposed him militarily. Upon orders from Nero, the Roman general Corbulo secured Armenia, but his operations were broken off by the exchange of ambassadors. An agreement was finally reached: in 66 Tiridates left for Rome with his whole family, surrounded by a retinue of princes and 3,000 Parthian nobles. He received from Nero the crown of Armenia. Parthian control and the end of hostilities were announced by closing the doors to the Temple of Janus.
Nationalist sentiment—which had been expressed under Artabanus III in a genealogical table invented to prove the Achaemenian descent of the Arsacid house—also manifested itself under Vologeses I: the Avesta, the holy book of the Iranians, was compiled, and coins were issued on which, for the first time, Pahlavi (Middle Persian) characters were added to the Greek legend.
In 78 Pacorus II came to the throne, to be supplanted in 79 by the ephemeral Artabanus IV (80/81), who was then replaced permanently by Pacorus II. During his reign the country showed signs of a profound decomposition. The barons refused to obey the crown. In the provinces the army and the finances were in the hands of the nobility. Aristocrats occupied the highest positions, which became hereditary. Plots with Rome were hatched, and the nobility felt itself the equal of the dynasty, ready to revolt in defense of their privileges. Externally, the dynasty was unable to count on Rome, which constantly plotted in support of new pretenders. In 109/110 Pacorus II was eclipsed by Osroes, his brother or brother-in-law, but he maintained limited power until his death in 115/116.
In 114 the emperor Trajan invaded Armenia. In vain did the king put his crown at Trajan’s feet—he was defeated by the Roman soldiery. With Armenia occupied, the emperor descended with his army into Mesopotamia. All of Babylonia was taken, and Ctesiphon, the capital, fell into the hands of the Romans, who carried off a daughter of Osroes and the golden throne of the Parthian kings. Victorious, Trajan went as far east as the Persian Gulf. Iranian reaction was not long in coming. Faced with the gravity of the Roman offensive, all the princes of the royal house, formerly divided by internal strife, united against the invader. At Ctesiphon Trajan crowned a new vassal king, but revolt was in the wind, and attempts to disunite the Parthian chiefs failed. The Romans suffered losses, and, after a reverse on the walls of Hatra, Trajan abandoned the campaign and died on his way home. Trajan’s successor, Hadrian (reigned 117–138), abandoned all pretensions to Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Assyria.
Hadrian’s desire for peace seems to have been sincere. He sent back Osroes’ daughter, promised to return the golden throne, and did not try to profit from the long power struggle between Osroes and Vologeses III (or II). He even invited Osroes to come to Rome.
Peace with Rome
Thus ensued four decades of peace with Rome. The status quo it maintained with its western neighbour seems even to have been a necessity for Parthia, the expansion of the Kushān kingdom on the eastern frontiers having reached the peak of its power under King Kaniṣka (Kanishka). Accurate information about the relations between the Kushān and the Parthians is not available, but this long peace sought with Rome suggests that certain precautions were necessary for the kingdom of Iran.
The end of the Parthian empire (162–226)
The 40 years’ peace was succeeded by almost uninterrupted hostilities with Rome, with varied success; Parthia was more vulnerable because of the exposed position of its capital.
The reigns of Vologeses III (or II; c. 105/106–147?) and especially Vologeses IV (or III; 148–192), the latter not having to dispute the throne with a pretender, could by their lengths be a sign that the country might have experienced a certain stability. But underneath the apparent calm the intrigues continued, with Rome receiving embassies from the Hyrcanians, the Bactrians, and doubtless from the Kushān.
A new clash with Rome came in 161, this time on the initiative of Vologeses IV (or III), who considered himself strong enough to attack. He occupied Armenia, crossed the Euphrates, and invaded Syria, which for two centuries had not seen Parthian cavalry. And, although the country had been Roman since the time of Pompey, the Syrian population, which included Jews driven from Palestine by the Romans, received the Parthians as liberators. The situation became so serious that Lucius Verus, co-emperor with Marcus Aurelius, was dispatched to the east with strong reinforcements taken from the fronts on the Danube and the Rhine. The Romans retook Armenia (163) and succeeded in a campaign similar to Trajan’s: Dura-Europus was taken and remained Roman until its destruction by the Sāsānids; Seleucia on the Tigris, despite the welcome it reserved for the Romans, was sacked; and in 164 or 165 for the second time Ctesiphon fell into the hands of Romans, who razed the royal palace.
Once more success was not continuous. The Roman army had come from Armenia and crossed through Azerbaijan, where it was exposed to plague. Contaminated, the Roman army was sorely tried by disease and obliged to retreat, but not definitively. Lucius Verus, repeating his campaigns in Armenia and northern Mesopotamia, inflicted heavy losses on the Parthians.
The tensions between the two states did not diminish when Vologeses V (or IV; reigned 191–208/209) supported a pretender (Pescennius Niger) against Septimius Severus. The latter became emperor in 193 and began operations that permitted him to occupy first northern and then southern Mesopotamia and, for the third time in a century, Ctesiphon. The Parthians in their retreat adopted a scorched-earth policy. As under Trajan, the starving Roman army went back up the Tigris, failed in its attempt to take Hatra, and left the country.
Vologeses VI (or V), son of the previous king, succeeded him (reigned 209–c. 222), but his throne was contested—and the empire divided (see below)—from 213 on by another prince, Artabanus V (c. 213–224), who was able to maintain his claim with the support of the kingdom of Media (see table for chronology). A new Roman invasion of Mesopotamia took place under Caracalla, the casus belli being the refusal of Artabanus V to give Caracalla his daughter in marriage. The young emperor dreamed of rebuilding Alexander’s empire but succeeded only in pillaging Media and destroying the hypogea of the Arsacid kings at Arbela. The Parthian reply was harsh. Artabanus avenged himself by invading the Roman provinces and destroying several cities. Rome sued for peace. Artabanus’s conditions were too hard and were refused. Hostilities were taken up again and once more turned in favour of the Parthians, who were so successful that the emperor Macrinus paid a large sum to make peace.
Sasanian dates established on direct ancient evidence*Syrian reckoning. event reign years Seleucid era Christian era accession of Artabanus (Ardawan) V 1 212/213 inscription of Khwasak at Susa names Artabanus "king of kings" 215 birth of Mani 5 527 216/217 Artabanus V overthrown and killed by Ardashir 224 official first year of Ardashir 538* 226/227 last coin of Vologases V minted at Seleucia 539 228/229 Mani, in 13th year, receives divine revelation 539 228/229 official first year of Shapur I 553 241/242
Since 208 Pāpak (Bābak), a lesser prince of Persis, had been preparing a revolt, which his son Ardashīr I finally declared openly. A battle took place between him and Artabanus V in 224; the Parthian was killed, and the throne of Iran passed into the hands of the Sāsānids, a new dynasty, originally from Fārs, the cradle of the Achaemenids.
The Iran of the Parthians—in the middle between the Romans in the west and the Kushān in the east, a region strategically crucial for international commerce—maintained open roads, created cities, and encouraged exchanges that were the lifeblood of this great empire stretching from the portals of China and India to the Roman Empire. Tolerant in religion, it was Parthia that contributed to the dissemination of Buddhism to China, where a Parthian prince spread the word of Buddha near the mid 2nd century ad. For nearly half a millennium Parthia pursued its great ambition to recover the western provinces of the Achaemenids. Undermined by internal weaknesses, Parthia finally succumbed, leaving its great dreams to its successors, the Sāsānids. Roman Ghirshman
The Sāsānian period
Foundation of the empire
Rise of Ardashīr I
At the beginning of the 3rd century ad, the Arsacid empire had been in existence for some 400 years. Its strength had been undermined, however, by repeated Roman invasions, and the empire became once more divided, this time between Vologeses VI (or V), who seems to have ruled at Ctesiphon, on the left bank of the middle Tigris in what is now Iraq, and Artabanus V, who was in control of Iran and whose authority at Susa, in southwestern Iran, is attested by an inscription from 215. (See also Mesopotamia, history of: The Sāsānian period.)
It was against Artabanus V that a challenger arose in Persis. Ardashīr I, son of Pāpak and a descendant of Sāsān, was the ruler of one of the several small states into which Persia had gradually been divided. His father had taken possession of the city and district of Istakhr (Estakhr), which had replaced the old residence city of Persepolis, a mass of ruins after its destruction by Alexander the Great in 330 bc. Pāpak was succeeded by his eldest son, who was soon killed in an accident, and in ad 208 Ardashīr replaced his brother. He first built for himself a stronghold at Gūr, named, for its founder, Ardashīr-Khwarrah (“Ardashīr’s Glory”), now Fīrūzābād, southeast of Shīrāz in Fārs. He subdued the neighbouring rulers and in the process disposed of his own remaining brothers. His seizure of such areas as Kermān, Eṣfahān, Elymais, and Mesene—to the east, north, and west of Fārs, respectively—led to war with Artabanus, his suzerain. The conflict between the two rivals lasted several years, during which time the Parthian forces were defeated in three battles. In the last of these, the battle on the plain of Hormizdagān (224), Artabanus was killed.
There is evidence to support the assumption that Ardashīr’s rise to power suffered several setbacks. Vologeses VI (or V) struck coins at Seleucia on the Tigris as late as ad 228/229 (the Seleucid year 539). Another Parthian prince, Artavasdes, a son of Artabanus V, known from coins on which he is portrayed with the distinguishing feature of a forked beard, seems to have exercised practical independence even after 228. Numismatic evidence further reflects the stages of Ardashīr’s struggle for undisputed leadership. He appears on his coins with four different types of crowns: as king of Fārs, as claimant to the throne before the battle at Hormizdagān, and as emperor with two distinctly different crowns. It has been suggested that this evidence points to two separate coronation ceremonies of Ardashīr as sovereign ruler, the second perhaps indicating that he may have lost the throne temporarily.
According to al-Ṭabarī, the Muslim historian (9th–10th century), Ardashīr, after having secured his position as a ruler in western Iran, embarked on an extensive military campaign in the east (227) and conquered Sakastan (modern Sīstān), Hyrcania (Gorgān), Margiana (Merv), Bactria (Balkh), and Chorasmia (Khwārezm). The inference that this campaign resulted in the defeat of the powerful Kushān empire is supported by the further statement of al-Ṭabarī that the king of the Kushān was among the eastern sovereigns, including the rulers of Tūrān (Quzdar, south of modern Quetta) and of Mokrān (Makran), whose surrender was received by Ardashīr. These military and political successes were further extended by Ardashīr when he took possession of the palace at Ctesiphon and assumed the title “king of kings of the Iranians” and, across the Tigris River, when he refounded and rebuilt the city of Seleucia under the new name Veh-Ardashīr, the “Good Deed of Ardashīr.”
The chronology of events in the early Sāsānian period was calculated by the German Orientalist Theodor Nöldeke in 1879, and his system of dating is still generally accepted. The discovery of fresh evidence in manuscript materials dealing with the life of Mani, a religious leader whose activities fall in the early Sāsānian period, led to a reassessment of Nöldeke’s calculations by another German, Walter Bruno Henning, by which the principal events are dated about two years earlier. Another alternative was proposed by the Iranian scholar Sayyid Hasan Taqizadeh, who preferred a sequence by which the same events are placed about six months later than the dates established by Nöldeke. Since the dating systems employed by the Sāsānians themselves were based on the regnal years of the individual kings, whose exact coronation dates are often subject to disputation, several details remain uncertain, and their definite solution has not been possible. A firmer basis of calculation is obtained when the ancient sources quote dates in terms of the Seleucid era, either according to the computation that prevailed in Babylonia, which started from 311 bc, or after the Syrian reckoning, beginning in 312 bc. See the table for dates of events of the early Sāsānian period as they can be established on direct numismatic or literary evidence in the differing chronological systems of Nöldeke, Henning, and Taqizadeh. The table of reign dates of the kings is based mainly on Nöldeke’s system.
Sasanian kings**Based mainly on T. Nöldeke's chronology. name reign years defeat of Artabanus V (Ardavan) 226 Ardashir I 224–241 Shapur I 241–272 Hormizd I 272–273 Bahram I 273–276 Bahram II 276–293 Bahram III 293 Narses 293–302 Hormizd II 302–309 Shapur II 309–379 Ardashir II 379–383 Shapur III 383–388 Bahram IV 388–399 Yazdegerd I 399–420 Bahram V Gur 420–438 Yazdegerd II 438–457 Hormizd III 457–459 Firuz 457–484 Balash 484–488 Kavadh (Qobad) I
(first reign) 488–496 Jamasb 496–499 Kavadh (second reign) 499–531 Khosrow I 531–579 Hormizd IV 579–590 Khosrow II Parviz
(first reign) 590 Bahram VI 590–591 Khosrow II Parviz (second reign) 591–628 Bestam (rebel in Media) 591–596 Kavadh (Qobad) II Shiruye (Siroes) 627–628 Ardashir III 628–630 Shahrbaräz 630 Purandokht 629–631 Hormizd V 631–632 Khosrow III 632–633 Yazdegerd III 633–651
Chronological systems of Nöldeke, Henning, and Taqizadeh event Nöldeke Henning Taqizadeh Ardashir's first year begins Sept. 27, 223 Sept. 26, 226 Ardashir's actual accession Sept. 26, 266 April 28, 244 April 6, 227 Shapur's first year begins Sept. 23, 239 Sept. 22, 241 Shapur's actual accession Sept. 22, 241 Shapur's coronation April 12, 240 April 9, 243 Shapur's death May 270 April 273 accession of Hormizd I Sept. 14, 272 Hormizd I's death June 271 April 274 accession of Bahram I Sept. 14, 273 death of Mani (about age 60) March 2, 274 Feb. 26, 277 death of Bahram I Sept. 274 July 277 accession of Bahram II Sept. 13, 276
Wars of Shāpūr I
The Sāsānian empire at the time of Shāpūr I.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The surrender of the emperor Valerian to the Persian king Shāpūr, rock relief, ad 260, in the province of Fārs, Iran.© lukakikina/FotoliaShortly before his death, probably because of failing health, Ardashīr abdicated the throne in favour of his chosen heir, his son Shāpūr I. The latter assumed the responsibilities of government but delayed his coronation until after his father’s death. Coins thus exist showing Ardashīr together with his son as heir apparent and Shāpūr alone wearing the eagle cap, indicating the exercise of royal rule before his coronation—besides the normal series showing Shāpūr crowned as king.
Shortly after his accession, Shāpūr was faced with an invasion of Persia by the emperor Gordian III (reigned 238–244):
The emperor Gordian levied in all of the Roman empire an army of Goths and Germans and marched against Asūristān [Iraq], the empire of Iran and us. On the border of Asūristān, at Massice [Misikhe on the Euphrates], a great battle took place. The emperor Gordian was killed and we destroyed the Roman army. The Romans proclaimed Philip [the Arabian; reigned 244–249] emperor. The emperor Philip came to terms, and as ransom for their lives he gave us 500,000 dinars and became our tributary. For that reason, we renamed Massice Fīrūz-Shāpūr [“Victorious (Is) Shāpūr”].
Several years later, in 256 (or 252), another confrontation between the Persians and Romans occurred:
We attacked the Roman empire and we destroyed an army of 60,000 men at Barbalissus [in Syria]. Syria and its surrounding areas we burned, devastated and plundered. In this one campaign we captured of the Roman empire 37 cities,
including Antioch, the capital of Syria, itself. A third encounter took place when the emperor Valerian came to the rescue of the city of Edessa, Syria (modern Urfa, Turkey), which was besieged by the Persian army:
He [Valerian] had with him [troops from] Germania, Rhaetia…[follow the names of some 29 Roman provinces], a force of 70,000 men. Beyond Carrhae and Edessa there was a great battle between the emperor Valerian and us. We made the emperor Valerian prisoner with our own hands; and the commanders of that army, the praefectus praetorii, senators and officers, we made them all prisoner, and we transported them to Persia. We burned, devastated and plundered Cilicia and Cappadocia…[follow the names of 36 cities].
The source for these quotations is Shāpūr’s own account of the events. It was unknown until 1938, when expeditions sponsored by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago discovered a long inscription on the walls of an Achaemenian building known as the Kaʿbe-ye Zardusht (“Kaaba of Zoroaster”). The text is in three languages, Sāsānian Pahlavi (Middle Persian), Parthian, and Greek. Besides the narrative of the military operations, the inscription provides a description of the Persian empire of the time and an inventory of the Zoroastrian religious foundations established by Shāpūr to commemorate his victorious wars. These foundations were fire temples dedicated to the “soul” (memory) of the founder himself, members of the royal family, and prominent officials who had served under Shāpūr and his predecessor. The list of the officials, who are specified by the positions they held, throws light on the administrative organization of the empire.
Organization of the empire
In contrast to his father, who claimed to be “king of kings of Iran” (shāhanshāh īrān), Shāpūr I assumed the title “king of kings of Iran and non-Iran” (shāhanshāh īrān ud anīrān). This formula was retained by his successors as the regular designation of the Sāsānian emperors. The hereditary local dynasties, which under the Arsacids had ruled many of the most important provinces, were to a large extent abolished. Instead, such areas as Maishān (Mesene), in western Iran, and Sakastan (Sīstān), in eastern Iran, were now ruled by members of the Sāsānian family, who were appointed by the sovereign with the title of shāh (king). Among such provincial governors, precedence was often given to the heir to the throne, who was placed in control of large territories, such as the former Kushān empire (Kūshānshahr) and Armenia, and given the title “great king” (wuzurg shāh). This arrangement lasted until the early 4th century ad, and such emperors as Shāpūr I and Hormizd II are known to have first held the title kūshānshāh as governors of the areas of Bactria, Sogdiana, and Gandhāra. Next in the hierarchy came the few remaining hereditary vassals, such as the kings of Iberia (now Georgia) in the Caucasus, and the chief nobles of the empire, among whom the Warāz, Sūrēn, and Karēn families retained their prominent position from Parthian times. Next in line were the satraps, whose importance had diminished and who were now no more than the administrators of larger cities or court officials.
The list of provinces given in the inscription of Kaʿbe-ye Zardusht defines the extent of the empire under Shāpūr, in clockwise geographic enumeration: (1) Persis (Fārs), (2) Parthia, (3) Susiana (Khūzestān), (4) Maishān (Mesene), (5) Asūristān (southern Mesopotamia), (6) Adiabene, (7) Arabistān (northern Mesopotamia), (8) Atropatene (Azerbaijan), (9) Armenia, (10) Iberia (Georgia), (11) Machelonia, (12) Albania (eastern Caucasus), (13) Balāsagān up to the Caucasus Mountains and the Gate of Albania (also known as Gate of the Alans), (14) Patishkhwagar (all of the Elburz Mountains), (15) Media, (16) Hyrcania (Gorgān), (17) Margiana (Merv), (18) Aria, (19) Abarshahr, (20) Carmania (Kermān), (21) Sakastan (Sīstān), (22) Tūrān, (23) Mokrān (Makran), (24) Paratān (Paradene), (25) India (probably restricted to the Indus River delta area), (26) Kūshānshahr, until as far as Peshāwar and until Kashgar and (the borders of) Sogdiana and Tashkent, and (27), on the farther side of the sea, Mazun (Oman). This empire, considerably more extensive than that controlled by the Arsacid dynasty, was governed by members of the royal family and by appointed officials directly responsible to the throne. The greater degree of centralization thus attained by the Sāsānian government partly explains its increased military effectiveness in comparison with the Arsacid administration. Tight organization of the numerous central and provincial officials, whose ranks in the bureaucratic structure on different levels were strictly defined, also contributed toward general administrative efficiency.
Another trend that developed in the Sāsānian period, although it had already made itself felt under the Arsacids, was a strict principle of dynastic legitimacy. For a usurper not of the royal blood to come to the throne was an extremely rare occurrence, though it was in fact accomplished by Bahrām VI Chūbīn in 590. Loyalty was given, however, to the whole royal house, rather as it was in the later Ottoman Empire. The person of the individual ruler was a matter of comparatively lesser importance, and one member of the dynasty could readily be removed and replaced by another. In accordance with this principle of legitimacy, Persian tradition carried the Sāsānian line back to the Achaemenids and, ultimately, to the kings of the legendary period.
Religious developments
Zoroastrianism
The ancestors of Ardashīr had played a leading role in the rites of the fire temple at Istakhr, known as Ādur-Anāhīd, the Anāhīd Fire. With the new dynasty having these priestly antecedents, it seems only natural that there would have been important developments in the Zoroastrian religion during the Sāsānian period. In fact, the evolution of Zoroastrianism as an organized religion into something resembling its modern form can be regarded as having begun in this period. Under the Parthians, local magi (priests) had no doubt continued to perform the traditional ceremonies associated with the old Iranian deities, the fire cult, the creed preached by Zoroaster, with its emphasis on the worship of Ahura Mazdā, and even the cults of cosmopolitan deities that were introduced in the Hellenistic period and later.
Under the Sāsānians, stress was increasingly placed on the fire cult and the worship of Ahura Mazdā. Strong mutual relationships, furthermore, were developed between religion and the state, and an ecclesiastical organization was set up in which every local district of any importance had its own mobed (“priest”; originally magupat, “chief priest”). At their head stood the mobedān mobed (“priest of priests”), who, in addition to his purely religious jurisdiction, appears, especially in later times, to have had a more or less decisive voice in the choice of a successor to the throne and in other matters of state. There is also some evidence that the mobeds, by virtue of their proficiency in reading and writing in general and in the interpretation of the sacred scriptures in particular, performed the duties of registrars and scribes in semireligious or nonreligious matters, like the Christian clergy in medieval Europe. This situation in turn makes it likely that the priestly library buildings not only contained the sacred texts, charters, and other church records but also served as repositories of local archives, title deeds, and other documents of a legal nature. The building known as Kaʿbe-ye Zardusht and referred to as a bun-khānag (“foundation house”) may well have served this very purpose.
In the matter of religious practice, the theology of the Sāsānians appears to have developed from that of their home province of Persis. There, extraneous religious influences were limited. The opposition between the good spirit of light and the demons—between Ahura Mazdā (Ormizd) and Angra Mainyu (Ahriman)—remained the essential dogma. All the other gods and angels were restricted to the role of subordinate servants of Ahura Mazdā, whose highest manifestation on earth was not so much the sun or the sun god Mithra (Mihr) but rather the holy fire guarded and attended by his priests. At the same time, the names of such deities as Verethraghna (Wahrām), Mithra, and Anāhitā (Anāhīd) were still associated with the names of fire temples or classes of fires. Divine names were also used to designate the 30 days of each month and of the 12 months of the year, plus five epact days, called gahānīg, to align the lunar with the solar year.
All the prescriptions of purity were scrupulously observed. The elaborate ritual still maintained in modern times by the Parsi for the purification and custody of the sacred fire was no doubt observed under the Sāsānians. The officiating priest was girt with a sword and carried in his hand the barsman (barsom), or bundle of sacred grass. His mouth was covered to prevent the sacred fire from being polluted by his breath. The practice of animal sacrifice, abhorred by the modern followers of Zoroaster, is attested for the Sāsānian period at least as late as the reign of Yazdegerd I (399–420). On the days of the important festivals, such as Nōgrūz (Nōrūz), the first day of the vernal equinox, and on the day of Mihragan (the 16th day of the seventh month), the sacred fire was displayed to the faithful (wehden) at nightfall from some vantage point. Under the Sāsānians the injunction not to pollute the earth by contact with corpses but to expose the dead on mountaintops to vultures and dogs was strictly observed. Ahura Mazdā preserved his character as a national god who bestowed victory and world dominion on his worshipers. In rock-relief sculptures he appears on horseback as a god of war.
Theology was further developed, and an attempt was made to modify the old dualistic concept by considering both Ahura Mazdā and Angra Mainyu as emanations of an original principle of infinite time (Zurvān). This doctrine enjoyed a certain degree of official recognition in early Sāsānian times. In the reign of Khosrow I (531–579), however, the “sect of the Zurvānites” was declared to be heretical. The chief trend of Sāsānian religion, apart from the process of being institutionalized, was toward elaborating its ritual and doctrine of purity. A complete and detailed system of casuistry was developed, which dealt with all things allowed and forbidden and with the forms of pollution and the expiation of each. One of the consequences of this development was that increasing emphasis was placed on orthodoxy and rigorous obedience to priestly injunctions. Nonorthodox and heretical cults and forbidden manners and customs came to be regarded as a pollution of the land and a serious offense to the true God. It was the duty of the believer to combat and destroy the unbelievers and the heretics. In short, the tolerance of the Achaemenids and the indifference of the Arsacids were gradually replaced by religious intolerance and persecution.
Despite his priestly family origin, Ardashīr himself seems not to have been the person responsible for initiating these new directions in religious affairs. It was once believed that the institutionalization of the Zoroastrian church and the codification of its scriptures and beliefs were the work of a high priest named Tansar, a contemporary of Ardashīr I, of whose activities an account is preserved in the Letter of Tansar, contained in the History of Ṭabaristān (Tārīkh-e Ṭabaristān) by the Persian writer Ibn Isfandiyār (flourished 12th–13th century). New inscriptional evidence, however, suggests that, if Tansar was, in fact, a historical personage, his role in religious matters was overshadowed by Kartēr (Karder). The latter, an ehrpat (or herbed, “master of learning”) and mobed (or magupat, “priest”) already prominent under Shāpūr I, appeared during the reigns of Bahrām I (reigned 273–276) and Bahrām II (276–293) as the dominant figure in the Zoroastrian church. As stated in the Kaʿbe-ye Zardusht inscription of Kartēr, he claims credit for suppressing non-Zoroastrian religious communities in Iran (“and Jews, Buddhists, Brahmans, ‘Nazoreans,’ Christians…were struck upon”), imposing orthodoxy and discipline on the priesthood (“the heretics [ahlomog]…who in the Magus estate did not attend to the Mazdean religion and the services to the gods with discrimination, I struck them with punishment and I castigated them”), and establishing royal foundations for the maintenance of priests and of sacred fires. (See also Zoroastrianism.)
Christianity
The reference in the Kartēr inscription to two sects of Christians continues the indications from Syriac sources that Christianity had by that time (the second half of the 3rd century) gained a firm footing in the lands of the Tigris and the Euphrates, where it was strongest among the Aramaic-speaking communities. Ultimately, Christian missionary effort came to expand over the whole of Iran and even beyond. As long as the Roman Empire remained pagan, the Christian communities of Iran lived undisturbed by persecution, while the Christians themselves showed outspoken hostility toward such heterodox sects as the Manichaeans and the Gnostic followers of Marcion (the Marcionites) and Bardesanes, who existed side by side with them. Once the emperor Constantine I (the Great; reigned 306–337) made Christianity the official religion of the Roman world, the Iranian Christians were drawn to feel a certain sympathy for their foreign coreligionists, and political significance came to be attached by the Sāsānian rulers to these religious connections with an often hostile foreign power. After 339 the Christians of Iran were subjected to severe persecutions at the hands of Shāpūr II and his successors. Nonetheless, substantial Christian communities survived in parts of Iran long after the end of the Sāsānian dynasty.
Manichaeism
During the reign of Shāpūr I a new religious leader and movement made their appearance. Mani (216?–274?) was the offspring of a Parthian family resident in Babylonia (“a thankful disciple I am, risen from Babel’s land”) but was himself a speaker of Aramaic. Knowledge of his teachings was greatly increased by the discovery in the early 20th century of many fragments of Manichaean literaturein eastern Turkistan. Subsequently a large part of the Kephalaia, a collection of the religious injunctions of Mani, was recovered in a Coptic version found in Egypt. These texts can now be collated with the versions of Manichaean doctrines as reported by the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine. From this cumulative documentation, to which other sources can be added, it appears, among other things, that Mani’s teachings were formulated under the strong influence of Gnostic ideas and philosophy. Mani proclaimed himself to be the last and greatest Apostle of Jesus as well as the Paraclete announced in the Gospel According to John. With the Gnostic interpretation of the Gospel, Mani tried to combine the doctrines of Zoroaster and Jesus in order to create a new religion of a universal character. There is a tradition that he made his first appearance as a teacher on the coronation day of Shāpūr (April 12, 240, or April 9, 243), but other evidence suggests that Mani was not necessarily in Iran at the time and may have been on a sea journey to India when he started preaching. He later returned and found many followers, among whom were Fīrūz (Pērōz) and Mihrshāh, governor of Maishān (Mesene), both brothers of Shāpūr. Even the king himself is said to have been impressed and to have granted the prophet several personal interviews. On the last such occasion, Mani presented the king with his first book, the Shāpuragān (Shabuhragan), a summary of his teachings (“dedicated to Shāpūr”) written in the Middle Persian language, which provides further evidence of a degree of royal favour. During Shāpūr’s reign the religion of Mani was thus propagated in and beyond Iran. The heir to the throne, Hormizd I, was also favourably disposed toward him. Shāpūr’s younger son, Bahrām I, however, yielded to pressure from the priestly establishment, and Mani was executed. After that, Manichaeism was persecuted and destroyed in Iran. Yet it maintained itself not only in the West, penetrating far into the Roman Empire, but also in the East, in Khorāsān and beyond the boundaries of the Sāsānian empire. There the seat of its leader was at Samarkand, whence it penetrated Central Asia.
Art and literature
Perhaps the most characteristic and certainly among the most impressive relics of Sāsānian art are the great rock sculptures carved on the limestone cliffs that are found in many parts of the country. The best-known groups are at Naqsh-e Rostam and Naqsh-e Rajab, both near Persepolis, and at Bishāpūr, an ancient city a few miles north of Kāzerūn in Fārs. At Fīrūzābād—the ancient Gūr, also in Fārs—are two reliefs of Ardashīr I, one depicting the overthrow of Artabanus V, the other depicting an investiture scene. Not far away, in the valley at Sar Mashhad, a representation of Bahrām II shows that king in the process of slaying two lions. At Dārābgerd, about 180 miles (290 km) southwest of Shīrāz, Shāpūr I is shown triumphing over three Roman emperors—Gordian III, Philip the Arabian, and Valerian. At Naqsh-e Bahrām, north of Kāzerūn, Bahrām III is depicted enthroned. The same ruler appears at Qaṣr-e Abū Nasr, near Shīrāz, and at Gūyom, not far from there. Sāsānian sculptured reliefs are less numerous outside Fārs, but a Sāsānian equestrian that once existed at Rayy (ancient Rhagae), southeast of modern Tehrān, was replaced in the 19th century by a representation of Fatḥ ʿAlī Shāh, a member of the then-ruling Qājār dynasty. At Salmās, near Lake Urmia, Ardashīr I is shown on horseback while receiving the surrender of a Parthian personage. There are also later Sāsānian sculptures at Ṭāq-e Bostān, near Kermānshāh, showing Ardashīr II, Shāpūr III, and Khosrow II. In many of these representations the Sāsānian kings can be identified by their individual crowns.
The most ambitious and celebrated architectural achievement of the dynasty is the vast palace at Ctesiphon, built by Khosrow II (590; 591–628), a part of which is still standing. It is known as the Ṭāq Kisrā and is notable for its great barrel vault in baked brick, a typically Sāsānian architectonic device. Many Sāsānian buildings can also be seen in Fārs, where the characteristic construction is of limestone blocks embedded in strong mortar. The most important of these are near Shīrāz: the palace of Ardashīr I to the south at Fīrūzābād and a small, well-preserved palace at Sarvestān, southeast of Shīrāz, in which the rooms are roofed with domes and squinches, features often found in Sāsānian architecture. Excavations at Bishāpūr, or Shāhpūr, have revealed some mosaic floors and other features of this important Sāsānian town. Numerous fire temples of the period survive, especially in Fārs; these are square buildings roofed by a dome over four arches. Sāsānian remains of considerable extent also exist at Qaṣr-e Shīrīn, on the road from Baghdad to Tehrān, and at Gondēshāpūr, modern Shāhābād, south of Dezfūl.
Generally speaking, the Sāsānian era was one of a renaissance in Iranian art, which, if not quite on the same level as the Achaemenian achievement, was of no small importance. Metalwork reached a high level of artistry and craftsmanship; its most characteristic decorative themes are hunting scenes portraying the Sāsānian kings in action. A gold and enamel drinking vessel (now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris) from the time of Khosrow I—known as the Cup of Solomon and, according to one tradition, a gift from the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd to Charlemagne—is perhaps the most sumptuous specimen of Sāsānian metalworking. The art of gem engraving produced many fine intaglio stamp seals and cameos. The coins invariably bear a Pahlavi inscription; on the obverse (see photograph) is the head of the king, wearing his characteristic crown, accompanied by his name and title, while on the reverse is the fire altar with its guardians and a legend such as “Fire of Ardashīr” or “Fire of Shāpūr” or, in the later period, an abbreviated mint name and the regnal date. (For additional discussion of Sāsānian visual arts, see art and architecture, Iranian.)
Khosrow II, coin, ad 590–628; in the collection of the American Numismatic Society.Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society
The acquaintance with Greek language and literature maintained by the Arsacid court had begun to decline during the last century of that dynasty. Greek versions nonetheless accompany the Parthian and Middle Persian texts of the inscriptions of Ardashīr I and Shāpūr I, as in the case of the Kaʿbe-ye Zardusht inscription. Later inscriptions, however, are only in Parthian and Middle Persian, as in the case of the inscription of Narses at Paikuli.
Most of the comparatively few remaining examples of literature in Book Pahlavi—a form of Middle Persian somewhat different from that used in the Sāsānian inscriptions—is of late or post-Sāsānian date in its actual form, if not in content. This is partly due to the fact that the transition from an oral to a written literary tradition (both religious and secular compositions) took place in the latter part of the Sāsānian era. A passage in a religious text states that “it is proper to consider the living spoken word more weighty than the written.” It should be added that most Sāsānian literary remains are primarily of religious and historical rather than of literary interest. Just as foreign learning appears in religious works, likewise foreign prose works of entertainment came to Persia, where they were translated; among them, in the time of Khosrow I, were Hellenistic romance literature and Indian books of tales, such as Kalīlag and Dimnag, based on the Indian Pañca-tantra, or the legends of Barlaam and Josaphat (Balauhar and Budasaf).
Foreign policy
In foreign policy the issues under the Sāsānian kings remained, as of old, the defense and, when possible, the expansion of the eastern and western frontiers. The successful military campaigns in the eastern areas by Ardashīr I and Shāpūr I, which resulted in the annexation of the western part of the Kushān empire, have already been mentioned.
Conflicts with Rome
In the west the old contest for northern Mesopotamia—with the fortified cities of Carrhae, Nisibis, and Edessa—continued. The Sāsānians were all the more eager to regain and retain control of Armenia because there the Arsacid dynasty still survived and turned for protection to Rome, with which, in consequence, new wars continually broke out. In the reign of Bahrām II (276–293), the Roman emperor Carus (282–283) invaded Mesopotamia without meeting opposition and reached Ctesiphon. His sudden death, however, caused the Roman army to withdraw. Bahrām II had been prevented from meeting the Roman challenge by the rebellion of his brother, the kūshānshāh Hormizd, who tried to establish an independent eastern empire. This attempt ended in failure, however, and Bahrām II appointed his younger son, the future Bahrām III, as viceroy of Sakastan (Sīstān). After Bahrām II died, Narses, the youngest son of Shāpūr I, contested the succession of Bahrām III and won the crown. In memory of his victory, Narses erected a tower at Paikuli, in the mountains west of the upper Diyālā River, which was discovered in 1843 by the British Orientalist Sir Henry Rawlinson. Decorated with busts of Narses, the monument has a long inscription in Parthian and Middle Persian that tells the story of the events. In 296 Narses was forced to conclude a peace treaty with the Romans by which Armenia remained under Roman suzerainty and certain areas in northern Mesopotamia were ceded to Rome. By this treaty, which lasted for 40 years, the Sāsānians withdrew completely from the disputed districts. The Roman Empire had meanwhile become Christian, and the Syro-Christian populations of Mesopotamia and Babylonia began to feel sympathy with Roman policies for religious reasons. Christianity also became predominant in Armenia after its king adopted the Christian faith in 294. The Sāsānian emperors consequently felt the need to consolidate their Zoroastrianism, and efforts were made to perfect and enforce state orthodoxy. All heresy was proscribed by the state, defection from the official faith was made a capital crime, and persecution of the heterodox, the Christians in particular, began. Competition between Iran and Rome-Byzantium thus took on a religious dimension.
A new war was inevitable. It was begun by Shāpūr II in 337, the year of the death of Constantine I. Shāpūr besieged the fortress city of Nisibis three times without success. The emperor Constantius II (reigned 337–361) conducted the war weakly, but Shāpūr was distracted by the appearance of a new enemy, the nomadic Chionites, on his eastern frontier. After a long campaign against them (353–358), he returned to Mesopotamia and, with the help of Chionite auxiliaries, captured the city of Amida (modern Diyarbakır, Turkey) on the upper Tigris, an episode vividly narrated by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330–395). The emperor Julian the Apostate (361–363) reopened hostilities after the death of Constantius but died after having reached the vicinity of Ctesiphon. His successor, Jovian (363–364), was forced to give up the Roman possessions on the Tigris, including Nisibis, and to abandon Armenia and his Arsacid protégé, Arsaces III, to the Persians. The greater part of Armenia then became a Persian province.
Intermittent conflicts from Yazdegerd I to Khosrow I
After about two decades of disturbed reigns (Ardashīr II, Shāpūr III, Bahrām IV), Yazdegerd I came to the throne in 399. His reign is viewed differently by Christian and Zoroastrian sources. The former praise his clemency; the latter refer to him as “Yazdegerd the Sinful.” His initial inclination toward tolerance of Christianity and Judaism was met by resistance on the part of the nobility. Because of their attitude and because of the growing fanaticism of the Christians, Yazdegerd was forced to turn to repression. After his death (420) the nobles refused to admit any of Yazdegerd’s sons to the throne. But one of them, Bahrām, had the support of al-Mundhir, Arab king of Al-Ḥīrah (east of the lower Euphrates) and a Sāsānian vassal, and also, apparently, of Mihr-Narseh, chief minister in Yazdegerd’s last years, who was retained in office, and Bahrām eventually won the throne. As King Bahrām V (420–438), surnamed Gūr (for the onager, or wild ass), he became the favourite of Persian popular tradition, which exuberantly celebrates his prowess in hunting and in love. Unsuccessful in war with Byzantium (421–422), Bahrām V made a 100-year peace and granted freedom of worship to the Christians. In the east he did succeed in repelling an invasion by the Hephthalites. In the following decades, however (the second half of the 5th century), Hephthalite attacks continued to harass and weaken the Sāsānians. Fīrūz (reigned 457–484) fell in battle against them; his treasures and family were captured, and the country was devastated. His brother Balāsh (484–488), unable to cope with continuing incursions, was deposed and blinded. The crown fell to Kavadh (Qobād) I, son of Fīrūz. While the empire continued to suffer distress, he was dethroned and imprisoned (496), but he escaped to the Hephthalites and was restored (499) with their assistance. The Nestorian doctrine (claiming that divine and human persons remained separate in the incarnate Christ) had by then become dominant among the Christians in Iran and was definitely established as the accepted form of Christianity in the Sāsānian empire.
Kavadh I proved himself a vigorous ruler. He restored peace and order in the land. Amida was destroyed during his campaign against the Romans in 502, but another inroad by the Hephthalites in the east compelled him to ratify a peace treaty with the Byzantines. Toward the end of his reign, in 527, he resumed the war and defeated the Byzantine general Belisarius at Callinicum (531) with the support of al-Mundhir II of Al-Ḥīrah. Earlier in his reign he had moved away from the Zoroastrian church and favoured Mazdakism, a new socioreligious movement that had found support among the people. The crown prince, Khosrow, however, was an orthodox Zoroastrian; toward the end of his father’s reign, in collaboration with the chief mobed, he contrived to condemn the Mazdakites, who were destroyed in a great massacre in 528. On his father’s death, after acceding as Khosrow I (531–579), he concluded peace with the Byzantine emperor Justinian (532). He reestablished Zoroastrian orthodoxy, and, although some persecution of Christian communities occurred during periods of tension with Byzantium, the restoration of peace brought about a considerable amount of religious tolerance.
Khosrow I was one of the most illustrious Sāsānian monarchs. From his time dates a new and more equitable adjustment of the imperial tax system. The levying of land revenue in kind was replaced by a fixed assessment in cash, and these assessments continued in force later under the Arab administration. His reputation as an enlightened and just ruler was high during his lifetime and later became legendary. When Justinian I closed the philosophy school in Athens in 529, the last Neoplatonists turned to Khosrow in hopes of finding in him the true philosopher-king. Although they were disillusioned by conditions at his court, their gratitude was great when Khosrow obtained for them the right to return to Athens. From 540 onward Khosrow had been conducting a long war against Justinian, which, although interrupted by several armistices, lasted until the so-called 50 years’ peace of 561. Khosrow also extended his power to the Black Sea and inflicted heavy defeats on the Hephthalites. These military successes resulted partly because the armed forces and the chain of command were reorganized several times during Khosrow’s long reign.
Conflicts with the Turks and Byzantium
About 560 a new nation, that of the Turks, had emerged in the east. By concluding an alliance with a Turkish leader called Sinjibu (Silzibul), Khosrow was able to inflict a decisive defeat on the Hephthalites, after which event a common frontier between the Turkish and Sāsānian empires was established. Inevitably, this alliance became a source of possible friction, and the Turks sometimes acted as an ally of Byzantium against Iran in a second war (572–579).
Khosrow bequeathed this war to his son Hormizd IV (579–590), who, in spite of repeated negotiations, failed to reestablish peace between Byzantium and Iran, and fighting occurred intermittently throughout his reign. Hormizd was unable to display the same authority as his father, and he antagonized the Zoroastrian clergy by failing to take action against the Christians. He finally fell victim to a conspiracy headed by the general Bahrām Chūbīn. Hormizd’s son, Khosrow II, was set up against his father and forced to acquiesce when Hormizd was executed. New unrest broke out, in which Bahrām Chūbīn—though not of royal lineage—attempted to secure the throne. Simultaneously another pretender, Prince Bestām, decided to try his luck. Khosrow fled to Byzantium, and the emperor Maurice undertook to restore him by military force. Bahrām Chūbīn was routed (591) and fled to and was killed by the Turks, and Khosrow again ascended the throne in Ctesiphon. Bestām held out in Media until 596.
During the two reigns (590 and 591–628) of Khosrow II—surnamed Parvīz (the “Victorious”)—the Sāsānids achieved unprecedented splendour and material wealth. The assassination of Maurice (602) impelled Khosrow to war against Byzantium, in the course of which his armies penetrated as far as Chalcedon (opposite Constantinople), ravaged Syria, and captured Antioch (611), Damascus (613), and Jerusalem (614); in 619 Egypt was occupied. The Byzantine Empire was, indeed, at its lowest ebb.
It took the great emperor Heraclius, who was crowned in 610, many years to rebuild the nucleus of a new army. This done, however, he set out in 622 and retaliated vigorously against the Persians, whose armies were defeated everywhere. In 624 Heraclius invaded Atropatene (Azerbaijan) and destroyed the great Zoroastrian fire temple; in 627 he entered the Tigris provinces. Khosrow II attempted no resistance, and a revolution followed in which he was defeated and slain by his son Kavadh (Qobād) II (628). When Kavadh died a few months later, anarchy resulted. After a succession of short-time rulers, Yazdegerd III, grandson of Khosrow II, came to the throne in 632.
Triumph of the Arabs
All these prolonged and exhausting hostilities drastically reduced the powers of both Byzantium and Iran. The door was open to a newly emerging force that challenged both states and religions—the Arabs. After several encounters, the fate of the Sāsānian empire was decided in the battle of Al-Qādisiyyah (636/637)—on one of the Euphrates canals, not far from Al-Ḥīrah—during which the Sāsānian commander in chief, Rostam, was killed. Ctesiphon with its treasures was at the mercy of the victors. Yazdegerd III fled to Media, where his generals tried to organize new resistance. The Battle of Nahāvand (642), south of Hamadān, put an end to their hopes. Yazdegerd sought refuge in one province after another, until at last, in 651, he was assassinated near Merv.
With the fall of the empire, the fate of its religion was also sealed. The Muslims officially tolerated the Zoroastrian faith, though persecutions were not unknown. Little by little it vanished from Iran, except for a few surviving adherents who remain to the present day in Yazd and a few other places. Other Zoroastrians emigrated to western India, where they are now chiefly concentrated in Mumbai (Bombay). These Parsi (Persians) have preserved only a relatively small portion of their sacred writings. They still number their years by the era of Yazdegerd III, the last king of their faith and the last Sāsānian sovereign of Iran. Adrian David Hugh Bivar Mark J. Dresden
Persian dynasties
A list of Persian dynasties is provided in the table.
Persian dynasties1Dates from the death of Darius III, the last Achaemenian king, and the invasion of Alexander the Great.
2Dates from the year in which the Parnian chief Arsaces first battled the Seleucids.
3Includes the Tahirid, Samanid, Ghaznavid, and Buyid dynasties.
4Mainly the Il-Khanid dynasty (1256–1353). dynasty/kingdom period Median 728–550 BCE Achaemenian 559–330 BCE Hellenistic period of Alexander and the Seleucids1 330–247 BCE Parthian period (Arsacid dynasty)2 247 BCE–224 CE Sasanian 224–651 Arab invasion and the advent of Islam 640–829 Iranian intermezzo3 821–1055 Seljuqs 1038–1157 Mongols4 1220–1335 Timurids and Ottoman Turks 1380–1501 Safavid 1502–1736 Afghan interlude 1723–36 Nader Shah 1736–47 Zand 1750–79 Qajars 1794–1925 Pahlavi 1925–79
Citation Information
Article Title: Ancient Iran
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 25 May 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/ancient-Iran
Access Date: August 20, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
The Cambridge History of Iran (1968– ) contains extensively documented studies from the beginning to the Ṣafavid period in the six volumes already published. Essays in volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History (1923– ) also examine particular periods. Other works include Percy Sykes, A History of Persia, 3rd ed., 2 vol. (1930, reissued 1969); Roman Ghirshman, Iran from the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest (1954, reissued 1978); Alessandro Bausani, The Persians: From the Earliest Days to the Twentieth Century (1971, originally published in Italian, 1962); Richard N. Frye, The Heritage of Persia, 2nd ed. (1976), and The History of Ancient Iran (1984); and Donald N. Wilber, Iran: Past and Present: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic, 9th ed. (1981). Dynastic tables and essays on different aspects of Iranian history and culture may be found in A.J. Arberry (ed.), The Legacy of Persia (1953, reissued 1968).
Prehistory
L. Vanden Berghe, Archéologie de l’Irān ancien (1959, reissued 1966), is a fairly complete survey by province and period of Iranian archaeology for all periods to the Sāsānian, with a good bibliography. Although written as a guidebook, Sylvia A. Matheson, Persia: An Archaeological Guide, 2nd ed., rev. (1976), contains much detailed information on monuments dating from 6000 bc to the 13th century and on archaeological finds up to 1970. Frank Hole (ed.), The Archaeology of Western Iran: Settlement and Society from Prehistory to the Islamic Conquest (1987), is written for a reader with some previous knowledge of the history and archaeology of the area; the last chapter provides a useful summary and overview of developments.
The Elamites, Medians, and Achaemenids
George G. Cameron, History of Early Iran (1936, reissued 1976); and William Cullican, The Medes and Persians (1965), are good general surveys. Muhammad A. Dandamaev and Vladimir G. Lukonin, The Culture and Social Institutions of Ancient Iran (1989), includes a section on prehistory up to the 6th century bc but concentrates on the Achaemenian period. A.R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks: The Defence of the West, c. 546–478 B.C., 2nd ed. (1984), provides a fairly balanced view of the Achaemenids in their dealings with the Greeks. A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire: Achaemenid Period (1948, reissued 1978); and J.M. Cook, The Persian Empire (1983), are good introductions. T. Cuyler Young
The Hellenistic and Parthian periods
Franz Altheim, Weltgeschichte Asiens im griechischen Zeitalter, 2 vol. (1947–48), is a brilliant study of Hellenism in the Orient with particular attention paid to the role of the Iranians. Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, Geschichte Mittelasiens im Altertum (1970), includes two chapters in English. Other works include Neilson C. Debevoise, A Political History of Parthia (1938, reissued 1969); and W.W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria & India, 3rd ed. by Frank Lee Holt (1985). K.H. Ziegler, Die Beziehungen zwischen Rom und dem Partherreich (1964), is a valuable work with a bias toward Rome. Roman Ghirshman
The Sāsānian period
The History of al-Ṭabarī (1985– ) provides a translation of and a commentary on the essential work by al-Ṭabarī (c. 859–923). Georgina Herrmann, The Iranian Revival (1977), examines Parthian and Sāsānian antiquities and history. Arthur Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides, 2nd ed., rev. (1944, reissued 1971), is a comprehensive one-volume history of this period. Adrian David Hugh Bivar Mark J. Dresden
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Arabia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Pre-Islamic Arabia, to the 7th century ce
Arabia since the 7th century
History of Arabia, history of the region from prehistoric times to the present.
Sometime after the rise of Islam in the first quarter of the 7th century ce and the emergence of the Arabian Muslims as the founders of one of the great empires of history, the name ʿArab came to be used by these Muslims themselves and by the nations with whom they came in contact to indicate all people of Arabian origin. The very name Arabia, or its Arabic name Jazīrat al-ʿArab, has come to be used for the whole peninsula. But the definition of the area, even in Islamic sources, is not agreed upon unanimously. In its narrowest application it indicates much less than the whole peninsula, while in ancient Greek and Latin sources—and often in subsequent sources—the term Arabia includes the Syrian and Jordanian deserts and the Iraqi desert west of the lower Euphrates. Similarly, “Arabs” connoted, at least in pre-Islamic times, mainly the tribal populations of central and northern Arabia.
Arabia has been inhabited by innumerable tribal units, forever splitting or confederating; its history is a kaleidoscope of shifting allegiances, although certain broad patterns may be distinguished. A native system has evolved of moving from tribal anarchy to centralized government and relapsing again into anarchy. The tribes have dominated the peninsula, even in intermittent periods when the personal prestige of a leader has led briefly to some measure of tribal cohesion.
Arabian culture is a branch of Semitic civilization; because of this and because of the influences of sister Semitic cultures to which it has been subjected at certain epochs, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is specifically Arabian. Because a great trade route passed along its flanks, Arabia had contact along its borders with Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Indo-Persian civilizations. The Turkish overlords of the Arabic-speaking countries affected Arabia relatively little, however, and the dominant culture of western Europe arrived late in the colonial era.
Arabia was the cradle of Islam, and through this faith it influenced every Muslim people. Islam, essentially Arabian in nature, whatever superficial external influences may have affected it, is Arabia’s outstanding contribution to world civilization. Mahmud Ali Ghul Alfred Felix L. Beeston
Pre-Islamic Arabia, to the 7th century ce
Prehistory and archaeology
At one time Arabia as a whole may have had greater rainfall and richer vegetation than it does today, as shown by the large dried-up watercourses intersecting the peninsula. But climatic conditions seem to have changed little in the past five millennia; human life—settled or nomad—has been a struggle to cope with the harsh realities of this vast subcontinent.
Stone Age settlements of fishermen and shellfish eaters going back to the 3rd millennium bce have been found on the northeast coast and in the islands of Faylakah and Bahrain. Surface scatters of flint implements are seen in many places in the peninsula, as are undatable but probably ancient rock drawings for which affinities have been thought to exist with rock drawings in the Sahara.
Southern Arabia (comprising Yemen and Oman) lies within the climatic zone of the Indian Ocean monsoons, which yield enough rainfall to make it potentially the most fertile part of Arabia. In Yemen, sophisticated irrigation techniques go very far back indeed; soundings in the silt deposits around the great dam of Maʾrib attest intensive agricultural exploitation there from at least 2000 bce.
The racial affinities of the Arabian populations are not traceable. A theory by which Arabia was considered the birthplace and homeland of the nations of Semitic culture is not now regarded as tenable. Arabian peoples have been held to be related to a variety of groups, with homelands in almost all directions outside Arabia: the view that sought to visualize all Arabians as a single race has never been valid. The oldest evidence indicates the presence of Africans in the Red Sea coastal plain, Iranians in the southeastern tip of the peninsula, and peoples of Aramaean stock in the north. The racial affinities of the ancient Yemeni peoples remain unsolved; the marked similarity of their culture to the Semitic cultures that arose in the Fertile Crescent to the north of the peninsula can be attributed to cultural spread rather than to immigration.
Apart from pursuing the few prehistoric evidences, archaeological research centres mainly on sites of the historic period, which is also attested by written records beginning in the first half of the 1st millennium bce. Some sites in the northern Hejaz, such as Dedān (now Al-ʿUlā), Al-Ḥijr (now Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, barely six miles north of Dedān), and Taymāʾ to the northeast of the other two, have long been known but not fully explored. In south-central Arabia, near Al-Sulayyil, a town site at Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil (now Qaryat al-Fāw) has yielded rich results from excavation. In northeastern Arabia, inland from modern Al-Qaṭīf, a Danish expedition has revealed a hitherto unsuspected pre-Islamic walled town of large dimension.
The written records consist of a vast number of inscriptions (especially thickly clustered in Yemen) on stone slabs, rock faces, bronze tablets, and other objects, together with graffiti on rock, scattered widely through the peninsula. In all this material, only a handful of inscriptions can properly be called Arabic. In the north and centre the dominant linguistic form is Old North Arabian (subclassified into Liḥyānic, Thamūdic, and Ṣafaitic); despite close connections between this group and Arabic, the latter cannot be regarded as lineally descended from it. The Yemenite inscriptions are in Old South Arabian (subclassified into Minaean, Sabaean, Qatabānian, and Hadhramautic), which is a wholly independent group within the Semitic family of languages. (The Old North Arabian and Old South Arabian inscriptions and graffiti are in scripts of a South Semitic type, of which Ethiopic is the only present-day survivor; modern Arabic script is of a North Semitic type.) Unscientific pillaging, however, has deprived many of the Yemeni inscriptions of a good deal of their value by removing them from their archaeological context. There are also inscriptions in extraneous languages: Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.
In the ancient Yemeni culture area are many great structures and monuments, such as dams, temples, and palaces, as well as a wealth of plastic art of extremely high quality. The motifs, such as the ubiquitous bull heads and ibex figures, are partly characteristic of Yemen, but from the 3rd century bce onward the style is markedly Hellenistic.
Fresh data, both archaeological and epigraphic, appear every year and sometimes entail radical reappraisal of earlier hypotheses. Any attempt at a synthetic picture is therefore strictly provisional.
Sabaean and Minaean kingdoms
The Greek writer Eratosthenes (3rd century bce) described “Eudaimon Arabia” (i.e., Yemen) as inhabited by four major peoples (ethne), and it is on the basis of his nomenclature for these groups that modern scholars are accustomed to speak of Minaeans, Sabaeans, Qatabānians, and Hadramites. The fourfold categorization does indeed correspond to the linguistic data, but the political and historical facts are a good deal more complex. The capitals of the four peoples were not located in the centres of their respective territories but instead lay close together on the western, southern, and eastern fringes of a tract of sand desert known to medieval Arab geographers as the Ṣayhad (modern Ramlat al-Sabʿatayn). This off-centre placing has been thought to originate from proximity to the trade route by which frankincense was conveyed from Hadhramaut first westward, then north to Najrān, then up the west coast of Arabia to Gaza, and across the peninsula to the east coast. The territories attached to the latter three of the capitals spread out fanwise into the mountainous regions.
Sabaeans
The people who called themselves Sabaʾ (biblical Sheba) are both the earliest and the most abundantly attested in the surviving written records. Their centre was at Maʾrib, east of present-day Sanaa and on the edge of the sand desert. (In the indigenous inscriptions Maʾrib is rendered Mryb or Mrb; the modern spelling is based on an unjustified “correction” by medieval Arabic writers.) The town lay in a formerly highly cultivated area watered by the great Maʾrib Dam, which controlled the flow from the extensive Wadi Dhana basin.
Sabaean rulers—who are mentioned in Assyrian annals of the late 8th and early 7th centuries bce (although some scholars date Sabaean inscriptions to about the 6th century bce)—were responsible for impressive constructions both cultic and irrigational, including the greatest part of what is now visible of the dam; but there are traces of earlier dam works, and the silt deposits indicate agricultural exploitation far back in prehistory.
From the early historic period one ruler, named Karibʾil Watar, has left a long epigraphic record of victories over peoples throughout the major part of Yemen, most importantly the Awsānian kingdom to the southeast, but the victories did not lead to permanent conquest. Nor did his campaigns ever extend into the Hadhramaut region or to the Red Sea coastal area. At no period of their history as an independent people did the Sabaeans have real control of those two areas; in the Red Sea coastal area the sole indication of their presence is a small temple near Zabīd, probably attached to a military outpost guarding a route down to the sea.
Two secondary centres were Ṣirwāh, on a tributary of the Wadi Dhana above the dam, and Nashq (now Al-Bayḍāʾ), at the western end of Wadi al-Jawf.
From perhaps just before the Christian era, however, the highland regions, both north and west of Sanaa, played a much more active part in Sabaean affairs, and some of the rulers belonged to highland clans. The early centuries of the Christian era also saw the emergence of Sanaa as a government centre and royal residence (in its palace, Ghumdān) almost rivaling the status of Maʾrib. Nevertheless, Maʾrib (with its palace, Salḥīn) retained its prestige into the 6th century ce.
Sabaean rulers of the early period employed a regnal style consisting of two names, each chosen from a very short list of alternatives; possible permutations were thus limited, and the same style recurs several times over. In drafting their own texts, the rulers adopted the title mukarrib, now generally thought to mean “unifier” (with allusion to the process of expansion of Sabaean influence over neighbouring communities). Persons other than the rulers never used this title in their texts but referred to the rulers by their regnal styles or occasionally as “king of Maʾrib.” Later the title mukarrib disappeared, and the rulers referred to themselves, and were referred to by their subjects, as “king of Sabaʾ.”
As among the Minaeans, the early rulers were only one element in a legislature including both a council and representatives of the nation. The rulers’ personal activity lay mainly in building and in leading wars. The first three centuries of the Christian era have yielded a more ample documentation than any other period, but during those centuries the Sabaeans were facing a strong threat from the Ḥimyarites to the south of them. The Ḥimyarites succeeded at times in gaining supremacy over the Sabaeans, and at the end of the 3rd century they definitively absorbed the Sabaeans into their realm. In the wars of the 1st century onward, the kings (whether Sabaean or Ḥimyarite) were supported both by a national army (khamīs) under their own command and by contingents raised from the associated communities led by qayls, belonging to the aristocratic clans that headed each associated community. The oldest documents attest a number of other kingdoms. The most important was Awsān, which lay in the highlands to the south of the Wadi Bayḥān. An early Sabaean text speaks of a massive defeat of Awsān, in terms that attest its high significance. Yet the kingdom had a brief resurgence much later, around the turn of the Christian era, when it appears to have been wealthy and heavily influenced by Hellenistic culture. One of its kings of this period was the only Yemeni ruler to be (like the Ptolemies and Seleucids) accorded divine honours, and his portrait statuette is dressed in Greek garb, contrasting with those of his predecessors who are dressed in Arabian style, with kilt and shawl. Awsānian inscriptions are in the Qatabānian language (which might account for the fact that Eratosthenes gives no separate mention to Awsān in his list of the main ethne).
Minaeans
The Minaean kingdom (Maʿīn) lasted from the 4th to the 2nd century bce and was predominantly a trading organization that, for the period, monopolized the trade routes. References to Maʿīn occur earlier in Sabaean texts, where they seem to be loosely associated with the ʿĀmir people to the north of the Minaean capital of Qarnaw (now Maʿīn), which is at the eastern end of the Wadi Al-Jawf and on the western border of the Ṣayhad sands. The Minaeans had a second town surrounded by impressive and still extant walls at Yathill, a short distance south of Qarnaw, and they had trading establishments at Dedān and in the Qatabānian and Hadramite capitals. The overwhelming majority of Minaean inscriptions come from Qarnaw, Yathill, and Dedān, and there is virtually no evidence of territorial possessions apart from the immediate vicinities of these three centres, which have more the aspect of typical “caravan cities.” A thin scattering of Minaean inscriptions has been found in places just outside Arabia, such as Egypt and the island of Delos, all manifestly resulting from far-flung trading activities; and texts from Qarnaw refer to a number of important points on the caravan routes, such as Yathrib (Medina) and Gaza, and also to interruption of trade by one of the several phases of warfare between Egypt and the Seleucids of Syria. An explicit mention of caravans is perhaps found in the expression mʿn mṣrn, interpreted by the scholar Mahmud Ali Ghul as “the Minaean caravaneers.”
Minaean social structure differed from that of the other three, predominantly agricultural peoples. The latter were federations of communities (often termed by modern scholars “tribes,” though they were not genealogically based) grouped under a leading community, with the nation as a whole designated by the name of the hegemonial community, followed by the phrase “and the [associated] communities.” The Minaeans, however, were subdivided into groups of varying size and importance, some quite small, with none exercising a dominating role over the others. Among the other three peoples the office of “elder” (kabīr) was normally filled by the head of one of the associated communities in a national federation. Among the Minaeans, however, the kabīr was a biennially appointed magistrate controlling one of the trading settlements or, in some cases, invested with authority in all of them. Legislative functions were exercised by the king acting together with a council and representatives of all the Minaean social classes. Minaean inscriptions make no mention of wars undertaken by the king or the state; this suggests that Maʿīn may have enjoyed covenants of safe-conduct with their neighbours along the trade routes.
Other pre-Islamic Yemeni kingdoms
Qatabānians
The heartland of the Qatabān people was Wadi Bayḥān, with the capital, Timnaʿ, at its northern end, and Wadi Ḥarīb, immediately west of Bayḥān. As in the case of Maʿīn, the earliest references are in Sabaean inscriptions; native Qatabānian inscriptions do not seem to antedate the 4th century bce. Timnaʿ was destroyed by fire at a date not easy to fix; pottery evidence has been thought to suggest the 1st century ce, but epigraphy points to a survival of the kingdom at least until the end of the 2nd century. Its fortunes had fluctuated: in the earliest Sabaean phase it was “liberated” by the Sabaeans from Awsānian domination in the above-mentioned defeat of Awsān. At some periods the Qatabānians themselves dominated a federacy similar to the Sabaean one, and at a relatively late date a ruler whom his subjects called “King of Qatabān” styled himself mukarrib of Qatabān. Inasmuch as Eratosthenes says that this people extended to “both seas”—i.e., the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden—it might be inferred that there was some sort of Qatabānian presence in the southwest corner of the peninsula, an area later ruled by the Ḥimyarites.
Hadramites
Inscriptions from the Hadramite kingdom are scantier in number than from the Sabaean, Minaean, or Qatabānian. Yet the Hadramite was probably the wealthiest of them all. Hadhramaut and the Saʾkal area to the east (modern Dhofar province of the sultanate of Oman) are the only places in Arabia where climatic conditions make production of frankincense possible, and Pliny wrote that the whole of the produce was collected at the Hadramite capital, Shabwah, on the eastern fringe of the Ṣayhad sands, and taxed there before being handed over to the caravans that carried it to the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. In addition, Hadhramaut was an entrepôt for Indian goods brought by sea and then forwarded by land. The caravan trade may have suffered to some degree from competition by Red Sea shipping, which, from the 1st century ce, began to sail through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait into the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless, as late as about 230 ce a king of Hadhramaut received missions from India and Palmyra (Tadmor), at the opposite ends of the long-standing trade route along which Hadhramaut occupied a central position. At Shabwah, French archaeological work begun in 1975 adjacent to the visible temple ruin has revealed a walled town of larger extent than any other ancient Yemeni site. The palace, on the opposite side of the town from the temple, was, according to the archaeological evidence, a truly magnificent building. The main port of Hadhramaut was at Cane on the bay of Biʾr ʿAlī; and the Hadramites had a settlement at Samhar-m (now Khawr Rawrī) on Qamar Bay in the Saʾkal region, founded about the turn of the Christian era.
Ḥimyarites
Ḥimyar is the Arabic form of the name of a people who appear in the inscriptions as Ḥmyr and in Greek sources as Homeritai. They occupied the extreme southwest of the peninsula and had their capital at Ẓafār, a site some nine miles southeast of present-day Yarīm, on the motor road from Aden and Taʿizz to Sanaa. The first appearance of Ḥimyar in history is in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (latter half of the 1st century ce); a short time later the Greek document known to scholars as the Periplus Maris Erythraei mentions an individual who was “king of two nations, the Homerites and the Sabaeans.” But this dual kingship was not definitive: throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries there were phases of warfare between native Sabaean rulers and Ḥimyarite ones. Royal titulature in this period is confusing: alongside “kings of Sabaʾ” are found “kings of Sabaʾ and the Raydān,” but the implications of the latter are still debated. A thesis advanced by the Arab scholar M.A. Bafaqih is that the former are native Sabaeans and the latter heads of a dual kingship over both peoples. Others have held that native Sabaean rulers sometimes claimed the longer title even when there was little reality behind it. Moreover, the Ḥimyarites, until the 6th century ce, used the Sabaean language for their epigraphic records, and there are no inscriptions or other monuments at Ẓafār or elsewhere in the true Ḥimyarite area that can be confidently dated before 300 ce.
In the last decades of the 3rd century ce, a Ḥimyarite ruler named Shammar Yuharʿish ended the independent existence of both Sabaʾ and Hadhramaut, and, inasmuch as Qatabān had already disappeared from the political map, the whole of Yemen was united under his rule. Thereafter, the royal style was “King of Sabaʾ and the Raydān and Hadhramaut and Yamnat.” Arabic writers call him and his successors the Tabābiʿah (singular Tubbaʿ), and, because in the centuries immediately preceding Islam Yemen was dominated by the Ḥimyarites, the Arabic writers (followed by many 19th-century Europeans) apply the term Ḥimyaritic to all pre-Islamic monuments of Yemen, irrespective of date or location.
The Tubbaʿ kings
A major break with the past was made in the 4th century ce, when the polytheistic religion of the earlier cultures was replaced by a monotheistic cult of “The Merciful (Raḥmān), Lord of heaven and earth.” There was also an increasing interest, both friendly and hostile, in central Arabia. Already in the 2nd and 3rd centuries ce Sabaean, Ḥimyaro-Sabaean, and Ḥimyarite rulers had employed central Arabian Bedouin mercenaries; and the first Tubbaʿ king, Shammar Yuharʿish, sent a diplomatic mission to the Sāsānian court at Ctesiphon.
The kingdom of Aksum in Eritrea is mentioned in Sabaean texts of the 2nd century ce as having some not very definable link with Habashite (“Abyssinian”) people settled in the Arabian coastal areas, who were throughout the 2nd and 3rd centuries a thorn in the flesh of both Sabaean and Ḥimyaro-Sabaean rulers, even at one point occupying Ẓafār. Tension between Aksum and Ḥimyar reached a climax in 517 or 522 ce, with a Jewish Ḥimyarite king (traditionally said to have been a convert to Judaism) named Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar. It seems that the conflict escalated from what had been (in one account) a trade dispute. Yūsuf massacred the entire Ethiopian population of the port of Mocha and of Ẓafār and, about a year later, the Christians of Najrān. Aksum retaliated with invasion, leading to the defeat and death of Yūsuf (who is known in Arabic tradition mostly by the nickname Dhū Nuwās) and the establishment of a puppet kingdom in Yemen subject to Aksum. Somewhat later the Ḥimyarite king Abraha regained some measure of independence, and he was responsible for major repairs to the Maʾrib Dam in the 540s. His reign was followed by a fairly brief Persian occupation of Yemen. Early in the 7th century Yemen accepted Islam peacefully, and its antique native culture merged into the Islamic culture.
Central and northern Arabia
The oasis of Taymāʾ in the northern Hejaz emerged briefly into the limelight when the Neo-Babylonian king Nabu-naʾid (Nabonidus, reigned c. 556–539 bce) took up his residence there for 10 years and extended his power as far as Yathrib. A few important monuments of this time are known.
Dedān and Al-Ḥijr
It is possible that the Minaean settlement at Dedān (see above) coexisted with a native Dedānite town. But only one “king of Dedān” is recorded. This kingdom seems to have been replaced quite soon by a kingdom of Liḥyān (Greek: Lechienoi). The entire area, however, was not long in coming under the rule of the Nabataean kings of a dynasty (centred at Petra) covering the 1st century bce and the 1st ce; and the ancient town of Dedān was eclipsed by a new Nabataean foundation just to the north at Al-Ḥijr (Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ). At the beginning of the 2nd century ce the Nabataean kingdom was annexed by Rome, the official decree of annexation being dated 111. The Nabataeans, like the Minaeans before them, had been involved in the caravan trade, and it would appear probable that for at least a time after the annexation they continued this role, under Roman aegis. Subsequent history of the area remains obscure.
The Khasneh (“Treasury”), Nabataean tomb at Petra, Jordan.© Shawn McCullars
Kindah
Kindah was a Bedouin tribal kingdom quite unlike the organized states of Yemen; its kings exercised an influence over a number of associated tribes more by personal prestige than by coercive settled authority. Its area of influence was south-central Arabia, from the Yemeni border nearly up to Mecca. The discovery of the tomb of a king of Kindah (datable to perhaps the 3rd century ce) at Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil, on the trade route linking Najrān with the east coast, suggests that this site was in all likelihood the royal headquarters. Sabaean texts of the 2nd and 3rd centuries contain a number of references to Kindah, attesting relations sometimes hostile (as when an assault was made on Qaryat Dhāt Kāhil) and other times friendly (as evidenced by the supply of Kindite troops for the Yemenite rulers). This pattern of relationship seems to have continued down to the early 6th century, when the Kindite hegemony collapsed, partly as a consequence of tribal wars and partly perhaps as a result of the emergent power of the Meccan Quraysh at that time. The last Kindah king, the famous poet Imruʾ al-Qays, became a fugitive.
Al-Ḥīrah
Al-Ḥīrah was similarly a Bedouin tribal kingdom, the kings of which are commonly designated the Lakhmids. According to tradition, the founder of the dynasty was ʿAmr, whose son Imruʾ al-Qays died in 328 ce and was entombed at Al-Nimārah in the Syrian desert. His funerary inscription is written in an extremely difficult type of script. Recently there has been a revival of interest in the inscription, and a lively controversy has arisen over its precise implications. One thing that is certain is that Imruʾ al-Qays claimed the title “king of all the Bedouin” and claimed to have campaigned successfully over the entire north and centre of the peninsula, as far as the border of Najrān. In Muslim sources it is said that he was given by the Sāsānian king Shāpūr II a “governorship” over the Bedouin of northeast Arabia, being charged with the task of restraining their incursions into Sāsānian territory. Later kings of the dynasty settled themselves definitively in that area, at Al-Ḥīrah (near modern Kufah). They remained influential throughout the 6th century, and only in 602 was the last Lakhmid king, Nuʿmān ibn al-Mundhir, put to death by the Sāsānian king Khosrow II (Parvīz) and the kingdom swept away. In the 6th century Al-Ḥīrah was a considerable centre of Nestorian Christianity.
Ghassān
The dynasty of the Ghassānids, though often called kings, were in fact Byzantine phylarchs (native rulers of subject frontier states). They had their headquarters well within the Byzantine Empire, a little east of the Sea of Galilee at Jābiyyah in the Jawlān (Golan) area, but they controlled large areas of northwestern Arabia, as far south as Yathrib, serving as a counterpoise to the Sāsānian-oriented Lakhmids in the northeast. The Ghassānids were Monophysite Christians and played an important part in the religious conflicts of the Byzantine church. Their influence spanned the 6th century ce, and their most prominent member, al-Ḥārith ibn Jabalah (Greek: Aretas), flourished in mid-century. The last three phylarchs fell out with Orthodox Byzantium because of their Monophysite creed; in 614 the power of Ghassān was destroyed by a Persian invasion.
Quraysh
According to Muslim tradition, Mecca had at one time been in the hands of Jurhum, a people living on the central west coast recorded in Greco-Latin sources as Gorrhamites. But sometime about 500 ce (“five generations before the Prophet Muhammad”) Quṣayy ibn Kilāb, called al-Mujammiʿ (“The Unifier”), is credited with having brought together scattered groups of Bedouin and installed them in Mecca. They took over a role that had long before been played by Minaeans and Nabataeans, controlling the west coast trade routes; they sent annual caravans to Syria and Yemen. Authority in Quraysh was not royal but was vested in a mercantile aristocracy, not unlike the Venetian republic. Their trading contracts ensured them considerable influence, and, when in the opening years of the 7th century the collapse of the Ḥimyarites, Lakhmids, and Ghassānids had left a power vacuum in the peninsula, Quraysh remained the only effective influence. There is, however, little doubt that the ancient traditions of Yemenite civilization contributed substantially to the consolidation of the Islamic empire. Alfred Felix L. Beeston
Arabia since the 7th century
Arabian and Islamic expansion
In the 6th century Quraysh—the noble and holy house of the confederation of the Hejaz controlling the sacred enclave (ḥaram) of Mecca—contrived a chain of agreements with the northern and southern tribes that opened the highways of Arabia to commerce. Under Quraysh aegis, caravans moved freely from the southern Yemen coast to Mecca and thence northward to Byzantium or eastward to Iraq. Another agreement made trade with Axum (in what is now Ethiopia) and the African coast secure, as was also the Arabian coastal sea route. Furthermore, members of the Quraysh house of ʿAbd Manāf concluded pacts with Byzantium, Persia, and rulers of Yemen and Ethiopia, promoting commerce outside Arabia. The ʿAbd Manāf house could effect such agreements because of Quraysh’s superior position with the tribes. Quraysh had some sanctity as lords of the Meccan temple (the Kaʿbah) and were themselves known as the Protected Neighbours of Allah; the tribes on pilgrimage to Mecca were called the Guests of Allah.
In its ḥaram Quraysh was secure from attack; it arbitrated in tribal disputes, attaining thereby at least a local preeminence and seemingly a kind of loose hegemony over many Arabian tribes. Temple privileges held by Quṣayy, who established the rule of Quraysh, passed to his posterity, the ʿAbd Manāf house of which collected the tax to feed the pilgrims. The Kaʿbah, through the additions of other cults, developed into a pantheon, the cult of other gods perhaps being linked with political agreements between Quraysh—worshipers of Allah—and the tribes.
The life of Muhammad
Muhammad was born in 570 of the Hāshimite (Banū Hāshim) branch of the noble house of ʿAbd Manāf; though orphaned at an early age and, in consequence, with little influence, he never lacked protection by his clan. Marriage to a wealthy widow improved his position as a merchant, but he began to make his mark in Mecca by preaching the oneness of Allah. Rejected by the Quraysh lords, Muhammad sought affiliation with other tribes; he was unsuccessful until he managed to negotiate a pact with the tribal chiefs of Medina, whereby he obtained their protection and became theocratic head and arbiter of the Medinan tribal confederation (ummah). Those Quraysh who joined him there were known as muhājirūn (refugees or emigrants), while his Medinan allies were called anṣār (supporters). The Muslim era dates from the Hijrah (Hegira)—Muhammad’s move to Medina in 622 ce. (For more detail about the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam, see Islam; Islamic world.)
The Prophet's Mosque, site of the tomb of Muhammad, Medina, Saudi Arabia.© Mawardibahar/Dreamstime.com
Muhammad’s men attacked a Quraysh caravan, thus breaking the vital security system established by the ʿAbd Manāf house, and hostilities broke out against his Meccan kinsmen. In Medina two problems confronted him—the necessity to enforce his role as arbiter and to raise supplies for his moves against Quraysh. He overcame internal opposition, removing in the process three Jewish tribes, whose properties he distributed among his followers. Externally, his ascendant power was demonstrated following Quraysh’s failure to overrun Medina, when he declared it his own sacred enclave. Muhammad foiled Quraysh offensives and marched back to Mecca. After taking Mecca he became lord of the two sacred enclaves (al-ḥaramayn). However, even though he broke the power of some Quraysh lords, his policy thenceforth was to conciliate his Quraysh kinsmen.
The rise of Islam
After Muhammad’s entry into Mecca the tribes linked with Quraysh came to negotiate with him and to accept Islam; this meant little more than giving up their local deities and worshiping Allah alone. They had to pay the tax, but this was not novel because the tribal chiefs had already been taxed to protect the Meccan ḥaram. Many tribesmen probably waited to join the winner. Doubtless they cared little for Islam—many tried to break away (the so-called apostasy) on Muhammad’s death.
Islam, however, was destined for a world role. Under Muhammad’s successors the expansionist urge of the tribes, temporarily united around the nucleus of the two sacred enclaves, coincided with the weakness of Byzantium and Sāsānian Persia. Tribes summoned to the banners of Islam launched a career of conquest that promised to satisfy the mandate of their new faith as well as the desire for booty and lands. With families and flocks, they left the peninsula. Population movements of such magnitude affected all of Arabia; in Hadhramaut they possibly caused neglect of irrigation works, resulting in erosion of fertile lands. In Oman, too, when Arab tribes evicted the Persian ruling class, its complex irrigation system seems to have suffered severely. Many Omani Arabs about the mid-7th century left for Basra (in Iraq) and formed the influential Azd group there. Arabian Islam replaced Persian influence in the Bahrain district and Al-Ḥasā province in the northeast, and in Yemen.
As the conquests far beyond Arabia poured loot into the Holy Cities (Mecca and Medina), they became wealthy centres of a sophisticated Arabian culture; Medina became a centre for Qurʾānic study, the evolution of Islamic law, and historical record. Under the caliphs—Muhammad’s successors—Islam began to assume its characteristic shape; paradoxically, outside the cities it made little difference to Arabian life for centuries. Sharīʿah (Islamic law), promoted often by the Prophet’s own descendants, developed in the urban centres; but outside them customary law persisted, sometimes diametrically opposed to Sharīʿah. In time the Hejaz and Yemen came to make notable contributions to Islamic culture, but Islam’s basically Arabian nature first shows in the early mosque, which resembles the pre-Islamic temple, and in the pilgrimage rites, little altered from paganism.
Struggle for leadership
In Arabia offices were generally hereditary and elective, but on Muhammad’s death Abū Bakr, the first caliph, aided by his own eventual successor, ʿUmar, gained the leadership that Quraysh might have lost to others. They were not of the house of Hāshim, which, from the outset, felt cheated of its rights. ʿAlī, Muhammad’s stepbrother and son-in-law, became the focus of legitimist claims to succeed the Prophet. ʿUthmān, however, the third caliph, was descended from both the Umayyah and Hāshim branches of ʿAbd Manāf. The latter half of ʿUthmān’s reign coincided with a slackening in the tide of conquest. ʿUthmān was censured for diverting property, revenues, and booty in Iraq and Egypt to his Quraysh relatives. Squabbles with the tribes resulted in ʿUthmān’s murder at Medina by opponents from Egypt. ʿAlī was proclaimed caliph by the anṣār, but he lost the political battle with ʿUthmān’s powerful relative Muʿāwiyah, governor of Syria, who demanded retaliation against the murderers. ʿAlī was later murdered by a Khārijite, a member of a dissident group. ʿAlī had quitted Medina for Iraq, and the political power centre of Islam left the peninsula, never to return. ʿAlī’s posterity, however, played a key role in subsequent Arabian history.
The Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid periods
Regional centres
Once Muʿāwiyah and the Umayyads had seized overlordship of the far-flung Islamic empire, which they ruled from Damascus, the Holy Cities remained only the spiritual capitals of Islam. The Umayyad caliphs appointed governors over the three crucial areas of the Hejaz, Yemen, and Oman, but in Iraq occasional powerful governors managed to control the Persian Gulf provinces, the gulf being an important maritime trade route, especially under the ʿAbbāsids. Occasionally Bahrain, Al-Ḥasā, and Najd also became regional centres of power within Arabia.
The brief unity that Islam had imposed on the Arabian Peninsula was irrevocably broken as the main Islamic sects took shape—the “orthodox” Sunnis and the “legitimist” Shīʿites (who were distinguished from the Sunnis principally by their tenet that the imam of the Muslim community must be descended from ʿAlī by Muhammad’s daughter Fāṭimah).
Umayyad forces defeated a Quraysh pretender, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr, who had been proclaimed caliph in the Hejaz. Medina was captured; Mecca was besieged, the ḥaram bombarded, and the Kaʿbah set on fire (the sacred Black Stone—an object of veneration probably appropriated from pre-Islamic religion—was split in three places). The harsh Umayyad general al-Ḥajjāj captured the city, and the pretender perished. The violation of the sacred enclaves by troops, including Arab Christians, was an act of sacrilege, but it broke any power remaining with the tribal “supporters” in Medina. The Prophet’s original simple mosque in Medina, already enlarged by the early caliphs, was rebuilt by the Umayyad al-Walīd (it has been much altered and restored since). The Umayyads spent lavishly on the Holy Cities and developed Hejaz irrigation.
The Umayyads collapsed before the ʿAbbāsids in 750, a fall to which rivalry between the tribes, aligned as northern and southern Arabs, contributed materially. The ʿAbbāsids claimed adherence of the Legitimists, since their ancestor, the Prophet’s uncle, was of the Hāshimite house. The ʿAbbāsids maintained a policy of strict adherence to religious observance, and they too devoted large sums to supporting and embellishing the Holy Cities, to which they sent annually a pilgrim caravan. Zubaydah, wife of the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd, celebrated for her public works, is said to have ordered the construction of the qanāt, a tunneled conduit that took water to Mecca. The threat of insurrection by Legitimist pretenders of the ʿAlīd branch of the Hāshimite house—who denied ʿAbbāsid claims to the caliphate as they had with the Umayyads—was a constant danger to the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. The ʿAlīd family developed both Sunni and Shīʿite branches, but the latter split into a multiplicity of sects, of which the most important are the “Twelvers” (Ithnā ʿAshariyyah, or Imāmīs), who recognized 12 imams, and the Ismāʿīlite “Seveners” (Ismāʿīliyyah, or Ismāʿīlīs, for Imam Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar), who acknowledged only seven.
Yemen
To quell a rising in Yemen, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn dispatched Ibn Ziyād, who refounded in 820 the southern city of Zabīd and became overlord of Yemen, Najrān, and Hadhramaut. About a century later the Najāḥids—Ethiopian slaves or local Afro-Asians—supplanted the Ziyādids in Zabīd; however, though independent, neither dynasty renounced vague ʿAbbāsid suzerainty. The Banū Yaʿfur, lords north of Sanaa, expelled the Ziyādid governor and ruled independently from 861 to 997. Najāḥid rule ended when ʿAlī ibn Mahdī captured Zabīd in 1159.
The Qarmatians
A more serious loss to ʿAbbāsid power in Arabia was occasioned by the appearance of Ismāʿīlite propaganda in Yemen about 880, in eastern Arabia about 899, and even briefly in Oman. From Yemen, Ismāʿīlīs reached North Africa, where the Fāṭimid movement arose and conquered Egypt and for a time seriously threatened the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad. The Qarmatians (Qarāmiṭah), an extremist offshoot of the Ismāʿīlīs, founded a state in Al-Ḥasā, in northeastern Arabia. They set out to subvert Sunni Islam. They were alleged to oppose many of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and they encouraged social equality for nomads, townspeople, and peasants. In 930 the Persian Gulf Qarmatians plundered Mecca, carrying off the Black Stone to Al-Ḥasā; they later returned it under Fāṭimid pressure. The Qarmatians were overthrown in 1077–78 by local Sunni tribes, but Qarmatian influence persisted in Bahrain. From the 13th century, Twelver, or Imāmī, Shīʿism spread in Al-Ḥasā and Bahrain, while political power was held by the Shīʿite Sevener Jarwānid dynasty (1305 to about 1450).
In 1037 ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣulayḥī of Yemen proclaimed the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustanṣir but set up a dynasty in Sanaa. The Ṣulayḥid dynasty ruled most of upper Yemen, warred with the pro-ʿAbbāsid Najāḥids, and gained control of Aden.
Oman
In the last decades of the 7th century, the Ibāḍites (Ibāḍiyyah), regarded as a moderate Khārijite sect, conquered southern Arabia, established a Kindite imam in Hadhramaut, occupied Sanaa, and took Mecca and Medina, before the Umayyads drove them back to Hadhramaut. Oman had early become Khārijite; the first Ibāḍite imam, al-Julandā ibn Masʿūd, was elected at about the beginning of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. After the Ibāḍite invasion of southern Arabia in 893, Oman wavered between independence and subjection to the ʿAbbāsids and their Būyid or Seljuq supporters. By the 12th century the Seljuq hold had become rather precarious and local imams existed. During periods when the Indian trade used the Persian Gulf, Omani ports flourished; however, revenues diminished wherever trade was switched to the Red Sea. From the mid-12th century until 1406, the Nabhānid dynasty controlled the interior of Oman, but Turkic Oğuz (Ghuzz), Persians, and others variously possessed the coastal flank of the mountains.
The Zaydīs and ʿAlawīs
In Yemen lasting movements were being shaped by the close of the 9th century; the imam al-Hādī, a theocratic arbiter-ruler of traditional type, founded the ʿAlīd Zaydī dynasty in Ṣaʿdah of northern Yemen. About the mid-12th century a Zaydī imam extended his rule northward to Khaybar and Yanbuʿ (Yenbo) and southward to Zabīd.
In the mid-10th century a refugee from disturbances in Iraq, Aḥmad ibn ʿĪsā al-Muhājir, arrived in Hadhramaut, then under Ibāḍite domination, and founded the ʿAlawite (ʿAlawī) Sayyid house, which was instrumental in spreading the Shāfiʿite (Shāfiʿī) school of Islamic law to India, Indonesia, and East Africa.
The Ayyūbids and Rasūlids
The Ayyūbids of Egypt, when they invaded Yemen in 1173, found it parceled out among several dynasties. Ayyūbid objectives were probably part political, to find themselves a haven and destroy the Ismāʿīlites, and part economic, to control the India trade route. They remained in power until about 1229, generally controlling Aden, Hadhramaut, the Tihāmah, and the districts south of Sanaa. They introduced an administrative centralization apparently adapted from Syro-Egyptian organization.
With the Ayyūbids arrived the emir ʿAlī ibn Rasūl, probably of Oğuz origin, whose descendants, at first Ayyūbid governors, grasped independence (c. 1229). The Rasūlid period is the most brilliant era of Islamic history in Yemen. These monarchs embellished their capital, Taʿizz, and other cities with fine buildings; several kings had a literary bent and, besides belles lettres, wrote treatises of some originality on various subjects. A fiscal survey still surviving provides an account of the trade through Al-Shiḥr, Aden, and the Tihāmah ports, with budgets for maintaining castles, troops, and hostages kept as surety of good tribal conduct. Aden served as an important trade centre in a flourishing period of Arab and Jewish commercial enterprise. The Rasūlids kept the southern coast under loose control up to Dhofar, even holding Hadhramaut to some extent and maintaining a squadron against pirates.
The sharifs of the Holy Cities
At Mecca in the mid-10th century commenced the 1,000-year ascendancy of the ʿAlīd sharifian families. Mecca now became capital of the Hejaz, replacing Medina, the centre from which it had been ruled since the Prophet’s days. The sharifs, though at times subject to such foreign overlords as the rulers of Egypt and of other parts of Arabia, exercised virtual independence. Throughout the ʿAbbāsid-Fāṭimid struggle, however, the sharifs took the opportunist line of supporting the side in ascendancy. When the Ayyūbid Saladin, after deposing the Fāṭimids in 1171, brought back orthodoxy, the sharifs again recognized the ʿAbbāsids and Ayyūbids and, from being Zaydīs, turned Sunni Shāfiʿī.
In 1181 the French Crusader knight Reynaud de Châtillon raided Arabia. He intended to attack Medina but, switching his plan, raided in 1182 the Red Sea ports as far south as Bab El-Mandeb; Saladin destroyed Reynaud’s vessels and so ended the threat to Mecca.
By the early 13th century the sharifs had conquered the Hejaz, extending their power southward to Ḥalī, but, when they sought support from Egypt, Syria, or Yemen, the Rasūlids managed temporarily to dispute the overlordship of Mecca with the Egyptians.
After Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, the pilgrim caravan from Iraq lost all political significance for the Hejaz. As Iraq declined, Egyptian influence increased and the sharifs became steadily more dependent on the Mamlūks of Egypt.
Mamlūk and Ottoman influence
Although the Yemeni Rasūlids sometimes disputed with the Mamlūks the overlordship of the Holy Cities, the Mamlūks generally prevailed. Egyptians and Meccans attacked al-Mujāhid the Rasūlid on a pilgrimage in 1350, and he was held prisoner in Egypt though released later.
The Mamlūks
During the 14th and 15th centuries the Mamlūks became the dominant power, maintaining a political agent in the Hejaz and a body of cavalry in Mecca. Eventually they made or unmade the sharifian rulers, though the local Egyptian commander’s policy sometimes ran counter to that of Cairo. From the mid-15th century the Mamlūks took charge of the customs at Jiddah, Mecca’s port, allotting a portion of the revenue to the pasha of that port. Sharif Muḥammad ibn Barakāt (ruled 1425–53), however, received one-quarter of the value of all wrecked ships, one-quarter of all gifts arriving from abroad for the Meccans, and one-tenth of all imported goods. About half his income was distributed among the leading sharifian families.
By the mid-15th century the foundering of the Rasūlid dynasty in Yemen made way for the Ṭāhirids; about the same time the Kathīrī tribe ofsoutheastern Arabia controlled Hadhramaut on behalf of the new dynasty.
The beginning of the 16th century witnessed Portuguese penetration of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Though they failed to capture Aden, the Portuguese blockaded the Indian trade routes to Europe via the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, eventually causing severe, lasting damage to the economy of Muslim Middle Eastern countries.
The Ottomans
In 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered Egypt and proclaimed the Hejaz part of the Ottoman dominions. Sharif Barakāt II of Mecca sent his son to negotiate at the Ottoman court and was confirmed as lord of the Holy Cities and Jiddah, subject to recognizing the Ottoman sultan as overlord. Selim’s successor, Süleyman I the Magnificent, at the zenith of Ottoman power, munificently subsidized the Holy Cities, devoting large sums to new building.
In Yemen the Mamlūks of Zabīd and Taʿizz acknowledged Ottoman authority, and Ottomans took over naval operations against the Portuguese in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. They seized Aden and forced the Yemenis into the mountains, capturing Sanaa and Shahārah. Ultimately, however, the Yemenis drove them back into the Tihāmah. The Ottomans adopted Mocha (Al-Mukhā) in southern Yemen as their base, and Aden declined in importance. After conquering Iraq in 1534–36, the Ottomans could operate in the Persian Gulf against the Portuguese, who had taken Hormuz and Muscat in 1507 and Bahrain in 1521 and freely harried the Arabian coasts.
The Ottomans reached as far as Al-Ḥasā by 1550 as they sought to curb Portuguese expansion. With Ottoman help, local merchants partially revived the spice trade, especially in pepper, but the Sunni Banū Khālid expelled Ottoman forces in 1670. The Portuguese maintained themselves in Muscat until 1649, although they could hold Bahrain only until 1602, when they were expelled by Ṣafavid Iran, which ruled there until 1717. Many Bahraini Shīʿite scholars in the 17th century moved to Iran, where they led in the development of Shīʿite theology.
Coastal Arabia was coming into direct contact with other Christian European maritime nations, which had begun their commercial penetration of the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, English, and French followed the Portuguese. The Western nations traded with Yemen through Mocha, whose coffee trade began in the 17th century; later the Europeans opened trading stations, or “factories,” there.
By 1635 the Zaydīs of Yemen, supported by the northern tribes, had expelled the Ottomans, and the Zaydīs had their first great, if short-lived, expansion when their tribes moved into much of southern Arabia. The broken terrain made it impossible for them to maintain their supremacy, and local tribes drove out Zaydī garrisons by about the second decade of the 18th century.
In the 17th century Mecca and Medina saw a sharing of power between the locally autonomous sharifs and Ottoman Sunni governors. Mecca was important in the spread and development of Islamic theology, even for Shīʿite thinkers, while the pilgrimage reinforced a common Muslim identity among the far-flung and diverse Muslim communities of the world. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, however, there was confusion and civil war in Mecca, with disputes among the sharifian tribes and struggles at Jiddah with Ottoman officials, who, notwithstanding the virtual independence of the sharifs, still dabbled in Hejaz politics. A new element was introduced in Najd (in central Arabia) in the mid-18th century with the rise of the puritan Wahhābīs, who, because the sharifs regarded them as dangerous heretics, for a time were refused permission to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Omani expansion
In Oman events took an independent course. The Yaʿrubid dynasty—founded about 1624 when a member of the Yaʿrub tribe was elected imam—expelled the Portuguese from Muscat and set to harrying Portuguese possessions on the Indian coast. Embarking on expansion overseas—to Mombasa in 1698, then to Pemba, Zanzibar, and Kilwa—the Omanis became the supreme power on the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, and European merchants feared marauding Omani fleets.
Muscat, Oman, spreading inland behind a 16th-century Portuguese fort (left background).© Ronsmith/Shutterstock.com
The Persians captured Muscat in 1743. The Yaʿrubids dissolved into dynastic dispute, and a leader named Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd set to liberating Oman from the Persians. He became imam in 1749, founding the Āl Bū Saʿīd dynasty. This period in Oman is marked by the crystallization of the political alignment of the tribes of the Banū Ghāfir (Ghāfirī) against those of the Banū Hinā (Hināwī).
During the 18th century the growth of the East India Company and British paramountcy in India began to affect Arabian politics and commerce most directly in the southern coastal region, while the interior was little concerned at first. Coastal Arabia now came fully into the world economy through commerce in coffee, slaves, pearls, and dates and the continuing pilgrimage to Mecca. Oman, Iran, and Sunni Arab tribes struggled to dominate the coasts of the Persian Gulf, while a series of agreements later paved the way for British control in that area.
The Wahhābīs
The Ottomans, clinging to the Hejaz for religious prestige and claiming to be custodians of the Holy Cities, had little power outside their garrisons in those cities and along the pilgrim route. The bribes they gave the nomads for allowing the caravans to pass, and the need to keep food subsidies for Mecca and Medina, however, prevented their expulsion.
Religious reform
The Wahhābī movement, which introduced a new factor into the pattern of Arabian politics, was founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, a reformer influenced by the writings of the 13th–14th-century pietist theologian Ibn Taymīyah, of the strict Ḥanbalī school of Islamic law. It was ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s intention to purify Islam of polytheism and to return it to an idealized primitive state. Expelled from his hometown in Najd, he moved to Al-Dirʿiyyah, a village that had never been ruled by the Ottomans, and obtained the protection and the adherence of its chief, Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd.
Resistance to the Ottomans
Propagating the doctrines of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Ibn Saʿūd and his son mastered all Najd. Late in the 18th century the Wahhābīs began raiding Iraq and then besieged Mecca, which they definitively conquered in 1806. The Ottomans became so alarmed at the Saʿūdī-Wahhābī peril that they urged Muḥammad ʿAlī, viceroy of Egypt, to drive the Wahhābīs from the Holy Cities. Egyptian troops invaded Arabia, and after a bitter seven-year struggle the viceroy’s forces recaptured Mecca and Medina. The Wahhābī leader was forced to surrender his capital and was then beheaded. Egyptian occupation of western Arabia continued some 20 years.
The second Saʿūdī-Wahhābī kingdom began when Turkī, of a collateral Saʿūdī branch, revolted and in 1824 captured Riyadh in Najd and made it his capital. He was succeeded by his son Fayṣal. By 1833 Wahhābī overlordship was generally recognized in the Persian Gulf, though the Egyptians remained in the Hejaz.
After Fayṣal’s death the fratricidal ambitions of his two eldest sons allowed Ibn Rashīd, ruler of Ḥāʾil in Jabal Shammar to the north, to take Riyadh. Ibn Rashīd ruled northern Arabia until he died in 1897. Meanwhile, the Saʿūdīs in 1871 had lost the fertile Al-Ḥasā to the Ottoman Turks, and the family ultimately took refuge in nearby Kuwait.
Ibn Rashīd’s son and successor became involved in a struggle with the sheikh of Kuwait, which enabled the greatest of the Saʿūdīs, Ibn Saʿūd (ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz II), to retake Riyadh in 1902 and establish the third Saʿūdī kingdom. By 1904, through raiding and skirmishing, Ibn Saʿūd had recovered much of the earlier Saʿūdī territory. In 1912, to bring the nomads under control, he set up agricultural settlements colonized by Wahhābī warrior groups called Ikhwān.
Ibn Saʿūd (ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz II), founder of the third Saʿūdī kingdom and the country of Saudi Arabia.Camera Press/Globe Photos
When World War I broke out, Kuwait renounced allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Saʿūd fought the pro-Ottoman Rashīdīs but otherwise remained inactive.
The Hejaz
The Meccan sharifs were merely the nominees of Egypt until 1840, when the Egyptians evacuated Arabia. Thereafter the sharifs were usually semiautonomous beside the Ottoman governors of the Hejaz. Improved communications after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 allowed the Ottoman Empire to send troops by sea to Arabia. An attempt to establish direct administration in the Hejaz in the 1880s failed when the sharifs and the population objected to Ottoman reforms. Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, appointed grand sharif in 1908, also successfully resisted Ottoman measures aimed at centralization by means of the new Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Medina.
Yemen
In 1839 the British took Aden, ruling it and the island of Socotra (at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden) from India; the port of Aden became valuable as a coaling station. In 1849 the Ottoman Turks occupied the Yemeni Tihāmah but could not hold Sanaa in the interior until 1872. They were never able to break the resistance of the Zaydī tribes completely and were forced to an accommodation with the imam, Yaḥyā ibn Muḥammad, a few years before World War I. Aden developed into a large town and port, especially after the Suez Canal opened. Protectorate treaties concluded with the independent tribes around Aden were gradually extended inland. Many Yemenis worked overseas, especially in India and Southeast Asia.
The gulf states
In 1835 the Qawāsim coastal tribes of the Persian Gulf, earlier conquered and inspired by the Wahhābīs, were induced to bind themselves by a maritime truce to end hostilities with the British by sea, and the truce was made permanent in 1853. In Oman, Sulṭān ibn Aḥmad, revolting against his uncle the imam in 1793, gained mastery of the coastal towns. The British made Omani Zanzibar, in East Africa, a protectorate in 1890. The extension of British influence over Bahrain culminated in 1900 with the opening of a British political agency. The British also persuaded the gulf states, Zanzibar, and the Ottomans to help suppress the slave trade.
World War I
The Ottoman Empire entered World War I holding all of western Arabia and supported in central northern Arabia by the Rashīdīs of Ḥāʾil. Earlier Ottoman attempts to extend the empire to eastern Arabia, however, had been countered by the British, who were then paramount in the gulf and in treaty relation with the Arab sheikhdoms there. Sharif Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī of Mecca, with assurance of British support, revolted against the Ottomans in June 1916, taking Mecca but failing to capture Medina. The British also supported the Idrīsī in Asir against the Ottomans. In Yemen Ottoman forces entered the Aden Protectorate, but the war subsequently settled down to a stalemate.
Arabia, c. 1900Map of Arabia, with insets of Jerusalem and Palestine (c. 1900); from the 10th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, published in 1902.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Fayṣal I, king of Iraq (1921–33).BBC Hulton Picture Library
ʿAbdullah I, the first king of Jordan (1946–51).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.Two sons of Sharif Ḥusayn of Mecca, Fayṣal and Abdullah, stirred up the Hejazi tribes against the Ottomans and, assisted by British supplies and liaison officers, including the famous T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), moved northward to Transjordan along the right flank of the British armies and into Damascus (1918). Fayṣal set up an Arab government there, only to be dislodged by the French in 1920. In 1921 he was made king of Iraq, Abdullah emir of Transjordan.
Wahhābī-sharifian dispute
During the war, relations between Sharif Ḥusayn and Ibn Saʿūd worsened. In 1919 the dispute broke into an open clash. The Wahhābīs won so decisive a victory that they might have advanced unopposed into the Hejaz but for pressures on Ibn Saʿūd by the British. Instead, Ibn Saʿūd concentrated his forces against Ibn Rashīd, mastering all Shammar territory and capturing Ḥāʾil in 1921.
Meanwhile, the grand sharif refused the terms of a treaty with Britain, mainly because of the Balfour Declaration, which approved a national home in Palestine for the Jews. The Wahhābīs marched into the Hejaz in 1924, and by October Ḥusayn was ruler no longer.
Saudi Arabia
Ibn Saʿūd’s zealous Wahhābī followers, arriving in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Hejaz society, were now exposed to the world of Islam at large. Ibn Saʿūd managed the resulting problems with firmness and tact. He had furthermore to enforce his rule over the tribes impatient with centralized government. His tough action with them won, and he set out to develop security, economic reform, and communications.
On Ibn Saʿūd’s southern border the Idrīsī sayyids of Asir had risen to power in the first decade of the 20th century. When in 1926 and 1930 Ibn Saʿūd concluded agreements with the Idrīsī, rendering Asir a virtual dependency of Saudi Arabia, Imam Yaḥyā of Yemen took Al-Ḥudaydah and southern Asir. Saudi troops swept into the Yemeni Tihāmah, but they withdrew after the Treaty of Al-Ṭāʾif in 1934, which acknowledged Saudi rule over Asir.
In the postwar years Britain and Saudi Arabia concluded agreements defining the frontiers with the British mandates of Jordan and Iraq (though most Saudi borders remained uncertain), and by treaty in 1927 Ibn Saʿūd was recognized as a sovereign, independent ruler.
Yemen
Imam Yaḥyā had to virtually conquer Yemen, in the Zaydī interest, after the Ottoman departure; by stern measures he established security. He refused to recognize the British-backed border between the Aden protectorates and Yemen. The British in the later 1930s pacified and, to a limited degree, developed their protectorates.
Postwar Arabia, to 1962
The post-World War I settlement and centralization of power in the hands of Yaḥyā, Ibn Saʿūd, and the British gave Arabia a large measure of internal peace and external security, which endured until 1962. A new factor in the 1930s was the discovery of immense quantities of petroleum in the deserts. In Bahrain oil was struck in June 1932. The American-owned Arabian Standard Oil Company (later Saudi Aramco) discovered oil in the Dhahran area of Saudi Arabia, and the first shipments left in September 1938. The Kuwait Oil Company, a joint Anglo-American enterprise, began production in June 1946. Thereafter oil was discovered in many other places, mostly in the Persian Gulf. Vast petroleum revenues brought enormous changes to Saudi Arabia and transformed the gulf states. The market for labour brought migrants from Yemen and other Arab countries.
Egypt, and later Syria and Iraq, utilized resentment of Israel and the appeal of Pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s to try to undermine “feudal” Arab kingdoms and to remove British and American influence from Arabia.
Arabia since 1962
Political changes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia during the early 1960s epitomized a vast transformation of the Arabian Peninsula that affected the lives of most of its inhabitants. In 1962 Egyptian-trained Yemeni officers led a coup d’état and invited Egypt to send troops to support the republic. The imam’s forces, although backed by Saudi Arabia during five years of war against large Egyptian armies, ultimately lost, and the republic was triumphant. Following the death of King Ibn Saʿūd of Saudi Arabia in 1953, his ineffective heir, Saʿūd, was replaced in a royal family coup d’état in 1964 by another son, Fayṣal, who initiated a number of modernizing changes.
Oil rig in the Persian Gulf off Kuwait.© Piergiorgio Sclarandis/Black Star
The power of governments increased in all the countries of the peninsula as oil production provided most ruling elites with unprecedented wealth. Religion and dynasty, the two pillars of most earlier regimes, were increasingly supplemented by the distribution to the people of oil revenues; individual national identities also began slowly to develop. Governments whose effective jurisdiction had often been limited to the coast now expanded their powers into the interior, while commercial, social, cultural, and diplomatic interactions with the rest of the world played a larger role in determining local matters.
President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt applied political pressure to remove the British from Aden, and Britain left Aden and South Yemen in 1967. A violently leftist group, the National Liberation Front (NLF), proclaimed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (Yemen [Aden]), which became communist and formed links with the Soviet Union.
After a compromise between royalists and republicans, northern Yemen, with its capital at Sanaa, was ruled by relatively liberal military governments, with army officers as presidents, including the long-lasting ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ, who first took office in 1978. North Yemen gained considerable income from the hundreds of thousands of Yemenis who worked in oil-rich Saudi Arabia; in the 1980s both Yemens discovered oil fields of their own.
Over several years a struggle for control of Yemen (Aden) waged within the ruling political party resulted in a brief civil war in 1986. The collapse of communism in Europe and the yearning of Yemenis for the union of the two parts of Yemen in the north and south, despite the great differences between them, resulted in the proclamation of their unification on May 22, 1990.
In Oman, after a palace revolution in 1970, the new sultan, Qābūs, opened a program of modernization, welfare, and reform. Much oil revenue initially had to be devoted to repelling rebel attacks, supported from Yemen (Aden), but the rebels were defeated in 1975. A mutual accord was signed in 1982.
At the entrance to the Persian Gulf, the Trucial States had acquired world importance from their vast oil riches. In the new alignments following Britain’s withdrawal, the former Trucial States—Abu Dhabi, Dubayy, Ash-Shāriqah, ʿAjmān, Al-Fujayrah, and Umm al-Qaywayn—proclaimed themselves the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971. They were joined by Raʾs Al-Khaymah in 1972.
Kuwait saw the British withdraw in 1961, but Iraq claimed the country, and it was deterred only by British and later by Arab armed forces. In 1970–71 Bahrain and Qatar became independent and subsequently acquired control of Western oil concerns operating in their territories. Their way of life was transformed as oil revenues and the service sector of the economy grew.
The Iran-Iraq War
A fresh threat to the rich oil states of the gulf arose with the revolution in Iran in 1978–79 and with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Islamic fundamentalism in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran struck an answering chord with Shīʿites and Iranian workers in the Arabian states, which gave financial support to Iraq. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successor in 1981, Ronald Reagan, pledged American support to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 60 percent of the industrial world’s oil supply was being transported.
In response to the tensions of the Iran-Iraq War, Saudi Arabia and other gulf Arab states expanded their military power, but the small size of their populations limited their military effectiveness. In 1979 Saudi religious extremists seized the Al-Ḥaram mosque (Great Mosque) of Mecca and revolted against the Saʿūdi dynasty. They were forcibly repressed, and few changes were made in the Saudi government.
In March 1981 Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates formed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to promote stability and cooperation in the gulf region; the GCC coordinated their economic and defensive efforts. Expected economic growth in the entire region was slowed by the fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s, and the countries of Arabia made plans to diversify their economies and to institute austerity measures in the face of falling prices.
Gulf Cooperation CouncilMap of the constituent countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski
Robert Bertram Serjeant
William L. Ochsenwald
The 1991 Persian Gulf War
Following the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, President Saddam Hussein of Iraq faced massive economic problems, including debts owed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The Iraqi president also viewed himself as the leader of Pan-Arab nationalism and socialism, two ideologies firmly opposed by the conservative monarchies that controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula outside of Yemen.
Claiming that Kuwait had historically been part of Iraq and that Kuwaiti oil policy had robbed Iraq of much-needed revenue, Saddam Hussein ordered an invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Kuwait itself fell quickly to the Iraqis, but the Kuwaiti royal family established a government-in-exile in Saudi Arabia, while hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis fled to several gulf countries. Many Kuwaiti citizens remaining in the emirate engaged in guerrilla warfare against the invaders.
Initially, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries reacted cautiously, but, when the United States suggested that Iraq might next invade Saudi Arabia, most Arabian Peninsula countries took a firm stand against the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and many warships and aircraft from a wide variety of countries acted under the authority of United Nations resolutions as they assembled in Saudi Arabia.
Since Yemen held a seat on the United Nations Security Council, its reluctance to authorize force to oust Iraq from Kuwait was particularly noteworthy; Saudi Arabia in retribution compelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers to leave the kingdom. The GCC countries provided military facilities for the coalition armed forces. The military contingents coming from the various Islamic countries acted together under the command of Saudi generals; troops from Western nations ultimately coordinated their activities under U.S. command.
Iraq attempted to link a solution of the Kuwait question to the resolution of the Palestinian Arab issue, but the coalition countries insisted on unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. After Iraq rejected this demand, the coalition launched an air war against Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait on January 16–17, 1991. A ground campaign that began on February 24 lasted only four days and secured the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait. Iraqi military and civilian casualties were heavy, but the coalition armed forces suffered fewer than 1,500 killed or wounded in action.
The Arabian Peninsula countries had not seen such a far-reaching external military intervention in their affairs since the days of Muḥammad ʿAlī and the first Saʾūdī kingdom. As a result, the diplomatic, military, and political structures and patterns created after the withdrawal of the British imperial presence in the early 1960s were placed in question. William L. Ochsenwald
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Arabia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 23 January 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Arabia
Access Date: August 10, 2019
Additional Reading
Archaeology and early history are described in Richard Le Baron Bowen, Jr., and Frank P. Albright, Archaeological Discoveries in South Arabia (1958); G. Lankester Harding, Archaeology in the Aden Protectorates (1964); F.V. Winnett and W.L. Reed, Ancient Records from North Arabia (1970); and Brian Doe, Southern Arabia (1971). General historical studies include J. Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall (1927, reprinted 1973; originally published in German, 1902), covering the Islāmic empire ad 622–750, still useful though some views are now disputed; and Hermann V. Wissmann, Zur Geschichte und Landeskunde von Alt-Südarabien (1964). The study of more recent history should begin with the brilliant but controversial analysis of Khaldoun Hasan al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (1990; originally published in Arabic, 1987). Useful surveys also include R.B. Serjeant, Studies in Arabian History and Civilisation (1981); and Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Arabia and the Gulf: From Traditional Society to Modern States (1986). More specialized works are Nigel Groom, Frankincense and Myrrh: A Study of the Arabian Incense Trade (1981); M.J. Kister, Studies in Jāhiliyya and Early Islam (1980); R.B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast: Hadrami Chronicles, with Yemeni and European Accounts of Dutch Pirates off Mocha in the Seventeenth Century (1963, reprinted 1974); Zāmil Muḥammad al-Rashīd, Suʿūdī Relations with Eastern Arabia and ʿUmān, 1800–1870 (1981); William Ochsenwald, Religion, Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz Under Ottoman Control, 1840–1908 (1984); and John C. Wilkinson, Arabia’s Frontiers: The Story of Britain’s Boundary Drawing in the Desert (1991).
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Central Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Prehistory and antiquity
The Middle Ages
The modern period: the age of decadence
History of Central Asia, history of the area from prehistoric and ancient times to the present.
In its historical application the term Central Asia designates an area that is considerably larger than the heartland of the Asian continent. Were it not for the awkwardness of the term, it would be better to speak of Central Eurasia, comprising all those parts of the huge Eurasian landmass that did not develop a distinctive sedentary civilization of their own. But the real boundaries of Central Asia are determined at any given time in history by the relationship between the “civilized” and the “barbarian”—the two opposed but complementary. The equation so often propounded—of the civilized with the sedentary and the barbarian with the nomad—is misleading, however. The most significant distinction between the two groups in Eurasia lies probably in the successful attempt of the civilized to alter and command the physical environment, whereas the barbarian simply uses it, often in a masterly fashion, to gain an advantage. In its essence, the history of Central Asia is that of the barbarian, and its dominant feature is the sometimes latent, sometimes open conflict in which the barbarian clashes with the civilized. Two basic patterns of conquest are evident in the history of Central Asia: that of the barbarian, accomplished with arms and ephemeral in its results, and that of the civilized—slow, rather unspectacular, achieved through technological superiority and absorption.
The principal difficulty for the historian of Central Asia lies in the paucity and relative lateness of indigenous written sources. The first aboriginal sources—written in a Turkic language—date from the 8th century ce, and source material of similar value does not become available again until the 13th century. Most of the written sources dealing with Central Asia originate in the surrounding sedentary civilizations and are almost always strongly prejudiced against the barbarian; the most important among them are in Chinese, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Persian.
Without a sufficient number of indigenous written sources, the language of a given Central Asian people is difficult to determine. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that many of them spoke a Uralic or an Altaic language, and it can be taken for certain that Paleo-Asiatic languages were in wider use in early times than they are now. While it seems likely that the principal languages of many great nomadic empires were Turkic or Mongolian, the attribution of such languages to peoples about whose speech insufficient linguistic evidence exists—as in the case of the Xiongnu or the Avars—is unwarranted; it is wiser to confess ignorance.
Two of the natural vegetation zones of Central Asia have played a prominent part in history: the forest belt, 500 to 1,000 miles (800 to 1,600 km) wide, and, south of it, the steppe, a vast grassland extending eastward from Hungary to Mongolia, facilitating communications and providing grass, the only raw material absolutely essential to the creation of the great nomad empires. The northern frozen marshes and the southern deserts played a minor role in Central Asian history.
Within the broad concept of Central Asia as defined above, there is in terms of historical geography a more precisely delineated Central Asian heartland consisting of three adjacent regions, collectively referred to by 19th-century explorers and geographers as Russian and Chinese Turkistan.
The first of these regions, known to the ancient Greeks as Transoxania and to the Arabs as Māwarāʿ al-Nahr (“That Which Lies Beyond the River”), consists of the area between the Amu Darya (the Oxus River of the Greeks and the Jāyḥun of the Arabs) and Syr Darya (the Jaxartes River of the Greeks and the Sāyḥun of the Arabs). It is an arid, semidesert country where, before the development of large-scale irrigation projects in the 20th century, the sedentary population maintained itself by intensive cultivation of the fertile tracts bordering the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya or by cultivation of the oases, in which were situated the major urban centres such as Bukhara and Samarkand.
The second, predominantly steppe, region extends northward from the upper reaches of the Syr Darya to the valley of the Ili River and to the foothills of the ranges lying between the Altai Mountains and the Tien Shan. Bounded on the south by the line of the Tien Shan and to the north by Lake Balkhash, this area was known to the Turks as the Yeti Su, the “Land of the Seven Rivers,” hence its Russian name of Semirechye.
The third region, centring on the Takla Makan Desert, is bounded on the north by the Tien Shan, on the west by the Pamirs, on the south by the Kunlun Mountains, and on the northeast by the Junggar Basin. Often referred to as Kashgaria, from its principal urban centre, Kashgar (Kashi), the region is characterized by small oasis settlements lying between the desert and the surrounding ranges, such as Hotan, Yarkand, Kashgar itself, and Aksu (Akosu), which served as way stations on the so-called Silk Road between China and the West.
Prehistory and antiquity
The beginnings of human history in Central Asia date back to the late Pleistocene Epoch, some 25,000 to 35,000 years ago, which includes the last full interglacial period and the last glaciation, the latter being followed by the interglacial period that still persists today. The Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic coincided with the last glaciation, which was much less severe in northern Asia than in Europe. In a period when ice covered northern France, Siberia below latitude 60° N was ice-free. The Paleolithic Malta site, 28 miles northwest of Irkutsk, is clearly Aurignacian, and it is safe to assume that in this period Siberia and the subarctic areas of Europe belonged to the same civilization. The differentiation between Central Asia and the surrounding civilization did not begin until Neolithic times, marked by tremendous technical progress and a wide diversification of cultures. This article does not discuss the development of these cultures or their contacts with eastern, southern, and western cultures; most of the archaeological results, however important, are controversial and are subject to different interpretations in the light of new finds.
Early western peoples
The first human groups to emerge at the dawn of history that are identifiable by name rather than by their artifacts are the Cimmerians and the Scythians, both located in the western half of Central Asia as reported by the Greeks.
The Cimmerians, whose name appears in the Odyssey of Homer, occupied the southern Russian steppe from about 1200 bce. Their civilization, which belongs to the Late Bronze Age, is barely distinguishable from that of other peoples with whom they mingled. From the second half of the 8th century bce, the Cimmerians were replaced by the Scythians, who used iron implements. The Scythians created the first known typical Central Asian empire. The chief thrust of their expansion was directed against the south rather than the west, where no major power existed and which thus offered little chance for valuable booty. In the late 8th century bce, Cimmerian and Scythian troops fought against the Assyrian king Sargon II, and, at the end of the 6th century bce, conflict arose between the Scythians and the Achaemenian king Darius I.
Darius’s expedition (516?–513? bce) against the Scythians in southern Russia was described in great detail by the Greek historian Herodotus, who provided the first and perhaps the most penetrating description of a great nomad empire. In more than one respect, the Scythians appear as the historical prototype of the mounted warrior of the steppe. Yet, in their case, as in others, it would be mistaken to see in them aimlessly roaming tribes. The Scythians, like most nomad empires, had permanent settlements of various sizes, representing various degrees of civilization. The vast fortified settlement of Kamenka on the Dnieper River, settled since the end of the 5th century bce, became the centre of the Scythian kingdom ruled by Ateas, who lost his life in a battle against Philip II of Macedon in 339 bce.
The Scythians had a highly developed metallurgy, and in their social structure the agriculturalists (aroteres), who grew wheat for sale, constituted a class of their own. The quality of Scythian art, characterized by a highly sophisticated style depicting animals both real and mythical, remained unsurpassed in Central Asia. Although the Scythians had no script, it has been established, nevertheless, that they spoke an Iranian language.
The Scythians appear as Shakas in the Old Iranian rock inscriptions, where three distinct groups are identified, and it is by the latter name that they appear in the history of northwestern India, which they penetrated during the 1st century bce. On the steppes of Central Asia they were gradually subsumed into the Kushan empire (see below), while on the southern Russian steppes they were absorbed by the Sarmatians, another Iranian nomad people whose hegemony lasted until the 4th century ce.
Early eastern peoples
From its earliest history China had to contend with barbarian pressures on its borders. The group of barbarians called the Hu played a considerable role in early Chinese history, leading to the introduction of cavalry and the adoption of foreign clothing, more suitable than its traditional Chinese counterpart for new types of warfare. About 200 bce a new and powerful barbarian people emerged on China’s western borders, the Xiongnu. Little is known of Touman, founder of this empire, beyond the fact that he was killed by his son Maodun, under whose long reign (c. 209–174 bce) the Xiongnu became a major power and a serious menace to China. In many respects the Xiongnu are the eastern counterpart of the Scythians. The Chinese historian Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 87 bce) described the nomadic tactics and strategy used by the Xiongnu in terms almost identical with those applied by Herodotus to the Scythians: the Xiongnu
move about in search of water and pasture and have no walled cities or fixed dwellings, nor do they engage in any kind of agriculture.
The centre of the Xiongnu empire was Mongolia, but it is impossible even to approximate the western limits of the territory under its direct control. For more than two centuries the Xiongnu, more or less constantly warring with China, remained the major force in the eastern regions of Central Asia.
In 48 ce the Xiongnu empire, long plagued by internecine struggles, dissolved. Some of the tribes, known as the southern Xiongnu, recognized Chinese suzerainty and settled in the Ordos region. The other remaining tribes, the northern Xiongnu, maintained themselves in Mongolia until the middle of the 2nd century, when they finally succumbed to the Xianbei, their neighbours. Another group, led by Zhizhi, brother and rival of the northern Xiongnu ruler, moved westward. With the death of Zhizhi in 36 ce, this group disappears from the records, but according to one theory the Huns, who first appeared on the southern Russian steppes about 370 ce, were descendants of these fugitive tribes.
Meanwhile, in the second half of the 2nd century bce the Xiongnu, at the height of their power, had expelled from their homeland in western Gansu (China) a people probably of Iranian stock, known to the Chinese as the Yuezhi and called Tokharians in Greek sources. While a part of the Yuezhi confederacy, known as the Asi (Asiani), moved as far west as the Caucasus region, the remainder occupied the region between the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya before overrunning Bactria between 141 and 128 bce. After penetrating Sīstān and the Kābul River valley, they crossed the Indus and established the Kushan empire in northwestern India. In its heyday, under Kujula Kadphises (Qiu Juique) during the 1st century ce, this empire extended from the vicinity of the Aral Sea to Varanasi in the Gangetic Plain and southward as far as Nashik, near modern Mumbai. The Kushan were thus able to control the growing transcontinental caravan trade linking the Chinese empire with that of Rome.
The Middle Ages
During the last decades of the 4th century ce, a new, powerful empire emerged in Mongolia, the political heartland of Central Asia. The Juan-juan (Rouran) had stepped into the place vacated by the Xiongnu. Chinese descriptions barely distinguish them from their predecessors. Their history is an incessant series of campaigns against their neighbours, especially the Chinese.
Central Asia in the Middle Ages.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The Turks
In 552 the Juan-juan empire was destroyed by a revolution of considerable consequences for world history. The tribe of the Turks (Tujue in Chinese transcription), living within the Juan-juan empire and apparently specializing in metallurgy, revolted and seized power. It established an empire that for about two centuries remained a dominant force in Asia. The Turks are the first people in history known to have spoken a Turkic language and the first Central Asian people to have left a written record. Inscribed funerary stelae still standing in Mongolia, mostly near the Orhon River, are invaluable from both a linguistic and a historical point of view. These Orhon inscriptions provide insights into the internal stresses of a pastoral nomad state that, at the height of its power, stretched from the borders of China to those of Byzantium.
Division of the empire
The founder of the Turk empire, Bumin—who bore the title of khagan, or great khan—died shortly after his victory. Soon afterward the empire split into two halves. The eastern part, ruled by Bumin’s son Muhan (ruled 553–572), was centred on Mongolia. The seat of the western part, ruled by Bumin’s brother Ishtemi (553–573?), lay in Ektagh, an unidentified place, possibly in either the Ili or Chu river valley.
In alliance with the Sāsānians, the Turks attacked and destroyed the Hephthalite empire (560), thereby gaining control over an important portion of the Silk Road leading from China to Byzantium. Under Ishtemi’s successor, Tardu (573–603), the western Turk empire continued to thrive and, in its westward expansion, reached the borders of Byzantium. By that time the eastern Turk empire was facing grave difficulties caused partly by internal strife and partly by the vigorous Central Asian policies of the Chinese Sui dynasty. While the weakening of the eastern Turks gave preponderance to the western Turks, basic solidarity between the two parts of the Turk empire apparently was maintained. They both fell victim to Chinese attacks. In 630 the Tang emperor Taizong occupied Mongolia, and in 659 Chinese forces under Gaozong, penetrating as far west as Bukhara and Samarkand, subdued the western Turks.
Reunification
In 683 the Turks revolted. The Turk empire was reborn and reunified under the khagan Elterish (683–692). Temporary setbacks notwithstanding, the Turk empire was now centred on Mongolia, and it prospered under the rule of Kapghan (Mochuo; c. 692–716) and Bilge (Pijia; 716–734) but disintegrated soon afterward. In spite of the relatively short duration of their state, the historical role of the Turks is considerable. They linked China, Iran, India, and Byzantium and gave their name to all the Turkic-speaking peoples. The solidarity that exists between these peoples to this day goes back to the Turks.
The Uighurs
The replacement of the Turks by the Uighurs in 744 was little else than a coup d’état. There was virtually no difference between the Turk and Uighur languages, and the bulk of the Turks, although no longer the ruling stratum, probably remained within the boundaries of the newly formed Uighur state.
The Uighur empire
This new empire comprised many tribes and seems to have been headed by a smaller tribal confederation standing under Uighur leadership. This federation is referred to in Chinese sources as the Nine Clans (Jiuxing), whereas Islamic sources and the Orhon inscriptions call it the Tokuz Oğuz. There are some indications that the Uighur empire stood under dual leadership, the khagan belonging to one tribe and the prime minister, in whose hands much of the effective power rested, to another.
Relations with China were the dominant factor in Uighur foreign affairs. The Uighurs proved somewhat less threatening for the Chinese than had the Xiongnu or the Turks. Their help to the Chinese, plagued by the rebellion of An Lushan (755) and by repeated Tibetan incursions, was appreciated and paid for through trade conducted on terms unfavourable to China. In exchange for Uighur horses, often of dubious quality, the Chinese were expected to provide the Uighurs with much-coveted riches. The third Uighur khagan—Mouyu by his Chinese name (759–780)—visited Luoyang in China, where he was converted to an Iranian religion, Manichaeism. Its adoption brought to the Uighur land many Sogdians, whose growing influence on state affairs was resented by the Turkic Uighurs and led to Mouyu’s assassination.
The Uighur empire was governed from a city on the Orhon River, Karabalghasun, the foundations of which were probably laid by the Turks and can still be seen. A Muslim traveler, Tamīm ibn Baḥr, who visited the city about 821, speaks in admiring terms of this fortified town lying in a cultivated country—a far cry from the traditional picture of the pastoral nomad existence.
The Kyrgyz invasion
In 840 another Turkic people, the Kyrgyz, put an abrupt end to Uighur rule in Mongolia. Coming from the upper reaches of the Yenisey River in north-central Siberia, the Kyrgyz represented a lower degree of civilization than the rather sophisticated Uighurs. Their political ambitions did not lead them into campaigns against China, and thus virtually no records exist concerning their activities. Content to stay in the backwaters of history, the Kyrgyz were among the very few peoples to survive the Mongol tide that was to come in the 13th century.
The Uighur kingdom
The Kyrgyz invasion, while putting an end to Uighur power, did not annihilate the people. Fleeing Uighur groups settled on the Chinese border in what is now Gansu province and in East Turkistan in the Turfan (Tulufan) region, which had been an Uighur protectorate since the end of the 8th century. Falling back now on the Turfan oases and setting up their capital city in Kucha (Kuqa), the fugitive Uighurs created a remarkably stable and prosperous kingdom that lasted four centuries (c. 850–1250). Because of the dry climate of the region, many buildings, wall paintings, and manuscripts written in a variety of languages have been preserved. They reveal a complex, refined civilization in which Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Christianity existed side by side, practiced by Turks as well as by Tokharians, Sogdians, and other Iranian peoples in the region.
When the time of the Mongol conquests came, the Uighurs lived up to their best cultural traditions. Realizing that resistance would be vain and would lead only to the destruction of his country, Barchuk, the ruler of the Uighurs of Kucha, of his own free will submitted to the Mongols. Uighur officials and scribes were the first “civil servants” of the Mongol empire and exerted a beneficial civilizing influence on the conquerors. The Sogdian script used by the Uighurs was adopted by the Mongols, who in turn passed it on to the Manchus. Side by side with the Cyrillic alphabet, it is still in use in Mongolia.
The Khitans
The first people known to have spoken a Mongol language were the Khitans. Mentioned from the 5th century ce, this people, living in the forests of Manchuria, had contacts with the Turks as well as with the Uighurs. In 924 their leader, Abaoji, defeated the Kyrgyz and offered the Uighurs the possibility of a resettlement in their former country. The Khitans conquered northern China, which they ruled under the dynastic name Liao (907–1125) until they were ousted by the Juchen, also originating in Manchuria, who founded the Jin (Juchen) dynasty (1115–1234) of northern China, which was in turn replaced by that of yet another Altaic people, the Mongols. Cathay, an early Western denomination of China, derives from the name Khitan (Khitai). The spread of this name, still used in Russian for China, is but one sign of the Khitans’ extraordinary impact on history.
Driven from China by the Juchen, in 1124 some Khitans moved westward under Yelü Dashi’s leadership and created the Karakhitan (Black Khitai, or Western Liao) state. Its centre lay in the Semirechye and the Chu valley, where the city of Balāsaghūn was located. Founded by the Sogdians, Balāsaghūn was by then occupied by the Muslim Karakhanids (Qarakhanids), a Turkish people closely related to the Uighurs and whose ruling house was probably descended from the Karluks. The Karakhanids, who became Muslims during the mid-10th century, ruled over both the Semirechye and the Tarim Basin south of the Tien Shan. While Balāsaghūn remained the residence of their principal ruler, Kashgar seems to have served as a religious and cultural metropolis. In 992 they occupied Bukhara, previously the capital of the Iranian Sāmānid dynasty (819–1005), under whose benign rule the cities of Transoxania had become celebrated centres of Islamic culture and learning.
The Karakhanids maintained the tribal traditions of the steppe world to a much greater extent than did other Muslim Turkish dynasties, such as the Ghaznavids or the Seljuqs, but they proved no less accomplished at combining native Turkish and Irano-Islamic culture. The earliest surviving work of Turkish literature shaped by Islamic values, the Kutudgu bilig (“Knowledge Which Leads to Happiness”; Eng. trans. The Wisdom of Royal Glory), was written by Yusuf Khass Hajib of Balāsaghūn in the style of contemporary Irano-Islamic “mirrors for princes” and was completed in Kashgar in 1069–1070. Almost contemporary with it was the Dīwān lughat al-Turk (1072–74; Compendium of the Turkic Dialects), an Arabic dictionary of Khakani, the Middle Turkish dialect spoken by the Karakhanids and written by Maḥmūd al-Kāshgarī.
From the late 11th century the Karakhanids in Transoxania became vassals of the Seljuqs, who by this time were already masters of much of the Middle East. Nevertheless, the Karakhitans had set their hearts on acquiring the Seljuqs’ loosely controlled eastern provinces. In 1137 Yelü Dashi had obtained the submission of the Karakhanid ruler Maḥmūd II, and in 1141, in a battle fought near Samarkand, he decisively defeated the last “Great Seljuq” sultan, Sanjar. The territories under Karakhitan hegemony now extended across Central Asia as far as the northern bank of the Amu Darya and threatened Khwārezm, located in the Amu Darya delta. However, their hold on this vast domain was finally shattered in 1211, through the combined actions of the Khwārezm-Shah ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad (1200–20) and Küchlüg Khan, a fugitive Naiman chieftain in flight from Genghis Khan’s Mongols.
The Mongol epoch
The creation of the Mongol empire by Genghis Khan was a great feat of political and military skill that left a lasting imprint on the destinies of both Asia and Europe. The geographic basis of Genghis’s power, the northwestern parts of which later became known as Mongolia, had been the centre of such Turkic empires as those of the Turks and Uighurs. There are no indications of the time and the manner in which the Mongols took over this region.
Creation of the Mongol empire
It is probable that Turks were incorporated in the nascent Mongol empire. In a series of tribal wars that led to the defeat of the Merkits and the Naimans, his most dangerous rivals, Genghis gained sufficient strength to assume, in 1206, the title of khan. Acting in the tradition of previous nomad empires of the region, Genghis directed his aggressive policies primarily against China, then ruled in the north by the Jin dynasty. His western campaigns were set in motion quite accidentally by a senseless attack on Mongol forces by the fugitive Naiman prince Küchlüg, and they maintained their momentum through the pursuit of ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad of Khwārezm, who in 1218 ordered the execution of Mongol envoys seeking to establish trade relations.
As a result, many of the flourishing cities of Khwārezm, Khorāsān, and Afghanistan were destroyed, and, by 1223, Mongol armies had crossed the Caucasus. Although an important Russo-Kipchak force was defeated on May 31, 1223, at the battle of the Kalka, the Mongols did not make a definite thrust into eastern Europe until the winter of 1236–37. The fall of Kiev in December 1240—with incalculable consequences for Russian history—was followed by a Mongol invasion of Hungary in 1241–42. Although victorious against the forces of King Béla IV, the Mongols evacuated Hungary and withdrew to southern and central Russia. Ruled by Batu (d. c. 1255), the Mongols of eastern Europe (the so-called Golden Horde) became a major factor in that region and exerted a decisive influence on the development of the Russian states.
Simultaneously with these western campaigns, Genghis’s successor Ögödei (ruled 1229–41) intensified Mongol pressure in China. Korea was occupied in 1231, and in 1234 the Jin dynasty succumbed to Mongol attacks. The establishment of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in China (1260–1368) was accomplished by the great khan Kublai (1260–94), a grandson of Genghis.
Mongol rule
The great khan Möngke (1251–59), who had sent his brother Kublai to conquer China, entrusted another of his brothers, Hülegü, with the task of consolidating the Mongol hold on Iran. In 1258 Hülegü occupied Baghdad and put an end to the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. He laid the foundations of a Mongol state in Iran, known as the Il-Khanate (because the il-khan was subordinate to the great khan in faraway Mongolia or China), which embraced, in addition to the Iranian plateau, much of Iraq, northern Syria, and eastern and central Anatolia and which, under Abaqha (1265–82), Arghun (1284–91), Ghāzān (1295–1304), and Öljeitü (1304–17), became both powerful and highly civilized. Although practically independent, the il-khans of Iran (Persia) remained loyal to Möngke and Kublai, but, with the passing of Kublai, the drift toward full independence grew stronger. With Maḥmūd Ghāzān’s decision to make Islam the state religion—a gesture intended to gain the confidence of the majority of his subjects—a big step toward integration in the purely Iranian (as opposed to Mongol) tradition was taken. A lengthy conflict that pitted the il-khans against the Mamlūks of Egypt was not resolved until 1323, when a peace was concluded between the sultan al-Malik al-Nāṣir and Abū Saʿīd (1316–35), the last effective il-khan. After Abū Saʿīd’s death the Il-Khanate, no longer held together by Mongol efficiency, disintegrated.
In Iran and China the Mongol rulers, who increasingly linked their destinies with those of their sedentary subjects, inevitably began to lose their Mongol identity. But in the Central Asian heartland the descendants of Chagatai and Ögödei, sons of Genghis, maintained traditional steppe polities geared to the interests of their nomad followers and increasingly opposed to the policies of the great khan in China and his ally, the il-khan, in Iran. After Möngke’s death in 1259 there was a struggle between his two younger brothers, Kublai and Arigböge. The steppe candidate, Arigböge, lost in his bid for supreme power to the older Kublai, and further attempts to reestablish the centre of Mongol power in the Central Asian heartland also were unsuccessful.
The most active and successful proponent of this policy was Kaidu, a grandson of Ögödei, who made several attempts to carve out an empire for himself in the heartland from lands ruled by other Mongol princes. In the course of time, he extended his control over most of the Semirechye, Kashgaria, and Transoxania, and in 1269 he even assumed the title of great khan. Chagatai’s descendants, enfeoffed with the territories stretching from Bishbaliq in the Dzungarian Basin westward to Samarkand, were to some extent victims of Kaidu’s ambitions but for lack of better alternatives lent him their support. After Kaidu’s death in 1301, however, the Chagataid khan Duwa hastened to make peace with his Mongol kin in both Iran and China.
Thereafter the Chagataid khanate, coterminous with the Central Asian heartland, enjoyed a checkered fortune. For the next 30 years it remained united, but during the 1330s and ’40s it split into a western and an eastern khanate, the former consisting of the area between the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, together with much of what is today Afghanistan, while the latter comprised the Semirechye and Kashgaria.
The Chagataid khans who ruled in the western khanate, where they usually resided in Bukhara, openly espoused Islam and a Muslim lifestyle, as did perhaps the majority of their followers. Northeast of the Syr Darya, the Chagataid rulers of the eastern khanate endeavoured to maintain the nomadic traditions of their ancestors—descendants of Genghis Khan—with a considerable degree of success. They continued to locate their headquarters in the Ili or Chu valley, while emirs of the important Mongol Dughlat clan, with whom the Chagataids were closely linked through marriage alliances, ruled the Tarim Basin on their behalf from Kashgar. To the inhabitants of Transoxania and Iran, the eastern Chagataid khanate was known as Mughulistān (literally, “Land of the Mongols”) and its inhabitants, unflatteringly, as Jats (literally, “Robbers”).
During the last third of the 14th century, the western Chagataid khanate passed under the control of the Barlas Turk Timur (d. 1405; known in the West as Tamerlane), while the eastern khanate went through a protracted period of political instability but also gradual Islamization. Under a succession of vigorous 15th-century rulers—Esen Buga, Yunus, and Ahmad—the eastern khanate held its own, ringed as it was by Oirat foes in Dzungaria, the Kyrgyz in the Tien Shan, and the Kazakhs in the Semirechye. But decline did set in, temporarily postponed during the reign of Ahmad’s able son Sultan Saʿīd Khān (1514–33), who ruled from Kashgar. By the beginning of the 17th century, however, the Chagataid khans in the east had become mere figureheads, with the towns under the quasi-theocratic rule of a family of Khwājahs originating from Bukhara, while the countryside was dominated by rival Kyrgyz confederacies. The line seems to have died out obscurely before the end of the century.
Developments within the most enduring Mongol successor state, that of the Golden Horde, with its headquarters at Sarai on the lower Volga River, followed a rather different course. Its Islamization, begun under Batu’s brother Berke (1257–67), led to tensions with the il-khans but resulted in the forging of strong links with the Mamlūks of Egypt. The Mamlūks were themselves Kipchak Turks from the Kipchak steppes of southern Russia over which the khans of the Golden Horde ruled.
The prosperity of the Golden Horde under Ghiyath al-Dīn Muḥammad Öz Beg (Uzbek) between about 1312 and about 1341 stands in sharp contrast to the disintegrating Il-Khanate and Chagataid khanate, yet it had its own problems, both internal and external. From within, the growing and unavoidable antagonism between the Turko-Mongol ruling class, Turkish-speaking and now Muslim, and their Christian Russian subjects was exacerbated by the ceaseless dissensions among the members of the ruling house and the military elite, increasingly referred to by their Slav neighbours as Tatars. In foreign policy, the peace concluded in 1323 between the il-khans and the Mamlūks weakened the Golden Horde’s influence in Egypt, while the establishment of the Ottomans on the Dardanelles (1354) put a virtual end to commercial relations between the Volga and Nile valleys. Perhaps the gravest political mistake of the rulers of the Golden Horde was their failure to recognize that the West—with which, through the Russians, they had excellent links—offered a more fertile ground for further expansion than the sunbaked deserts of Turkistan. The khans of the Golden Horde, instead of controlling the Russian and Lithuanian princes, increasingly relied upon their help in internal and dynastic struggles that were rending the khanate. While their attention was drawn southward and eastward, they overlooked the rise of dangerous Russian and Lithuanian enemies in their rear.
The policies of the khan Tokhtamysh (1376–95) differed from those of his predecessors. Hereditary ruler of the White Horde, its pastures located in western Siberia and extending to the lower reaches of the Syr Darya, Tokhtamysh was able to enlarge his power base by uniting its resources with those of the Golden Horde, of which he eventually made himself master. He thus introduced fresh “steppe power” into the Golden Horde at a time when it was no longer the force it had once been (in 1380 the Muscovites had inflicted a crushing, if temporary, defeat on the horde at Kulikovo Pole). Furthermore, instead of seeking the assistance of petty eastern European princes, Tokhtamysh hitched his wagon to the rising star of Timur, with whose support he reasserted Mongol supremacy in Russia.
After Tokhtamysh’s death the Golden Horde survived under the aegis of an able usurper, Edigü, but after Edigü’s death in 1419 a process of disintegration set in. The core territories of the former Golden Horde, centred on the Volga-Don steppes, became known as the “Great Horde,” while outlying regions seceded to form independent khanates based on Kazan and Astrakhan on the Volga, Crimea, western Siberia, and the Nogay steppe east of the lower Volga. All eventually fell victim to dynastic feuds, internecine rivalry, and Muscovite expansionism. Thus, in the case of the Kazan khanate, its founder Ulugh Muḥammad (c. 1437–45) bequeathed the throne to his able son Maḥmud (or Maḥmutek), who reigned with conspicuous success between 1445 and 1462. Maḥmud’s brothers, however, fled for sanctuary to Vasily II of Moscow, who set up a puppet khanate for one of them (Kasim) at Gorodets-on-the-Oka (thereafter renamed Kasimov). The khanate of Kasimov was to be a thorn in Kazan’s flesh until the latter’s extinction in 1552. Kasimov itself survived as a political fiction until about 1681, by which time the last khans had abandoned Islam for Christianity.
In 1502 the Great Horde was extinguished and its lands annexed by the khan of Crimea, Mengli Girai, who had already placed himself under Ottoman suzerainty in 1475. Kazan fell to the troops of Ivan IV the Terrible of Moscow in 1552, and Astrakhan was annexed two years later. The khanate of Sibir (western Siberia), after a stubborn resistance, submitted to Boris Godunov, the regent for Ivan’s son Fyodor I (1584–98). Only the khanate of Crimea was left, separated from Muscovy by the still-unconquered Ukrainian steppe and enjoying some protection because of its status as an Ottoman vassal. It survived for two more centuries, until Catherine the Great’s conquest in 1783. Its capital, Bakhchisaray, long a centre of Tatar culture, was to take on a new life in the late 19th century as the home of the Tatar national revival associated with the name of Ismail Bey Gasprinski.
Timur
While the Golden Horde was beginning to enter its long decline in the late 14th century, the demise of Chagataid rule in the area between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya was taking place as a result of the rise of Timur. Under Timur’s leadership the Turko-Mongol tribes located in the basins of the two rivers were first united. With the assistance of these tribes he expanded into the neighbouring regions of Khorāsān, Sīstān, Khwārezm, and Mughulistān before embarking upon extensive campaigning in what are now Iran and Iraq, eastern Turkey, and the Caucasus region. In addition, he launched two successful attacks on his erstwhile protégé, Tokhtamysh, ruler of the Golden Horde. In 1398–99 Timur invaded northern India and sacked Delhi, and between 1399 and 1402 he turned westward again to harry the Egyptian Mamlūks in Syria and the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I, whom he captured in battle near Ankara. At the time of his death at Otrar on the Syr Darya in 1405, Timur was leading his forces on an invasion of China.
Timur never assumed openly the full attributes of sovereignty, contenting himself with the title of emir while upholding the fictional authority of a series of puppet khans of the line of Chagatai, to whom he claimed kinship by marriage; in consequence he styled himself güregen, meaning “son-in-law” (i.e., of the Chagataid khan). He seems to have lacked the innate administrative capacity or the foresight of Genghis Khan, and after Timur’s death his conquests were disputed among his numerous progeny. In the ensuing struggles his fourth son, Shāh Rukh (1407–47), emerged victorious. He abandoned his father’s capital of Samarkand for Herāt in Khorāsān (now in western Afghanistan), where he ruled in great splendour, leaving his son, Ulūgh Beg, as his deputy in the former capital. Ulūgh Beg’s rule in Samarkand between 1409 and 1447 probably brought a considerable measure of tranquility to the long-troubled region. An enthusiastic astronomer and the builder of a celebrated observatory, Ulūgh Beg ensured that during his lifetime Samarkand would be a major centre of scientific learning, especially in astronomy and mathematics. He was killed on the orders of his son, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, in 1449.
Throughout the second half of the 15th century, the western part of Central Asia was divided into a number of rival principalities ruled by descendants of Timur, among which Bukhara and Samarkand were the most important. The courts of these rulers witnessed an extraordinary cultural florescence in literature, the arts, and architecture, with Chagatai Turkish, a dialect derived partly from Khakani, the language spoken at the Karakhanid court (and a precursor of modern Uzbek), emerging as a flexible vehicle for sophisticated literary expression. These Timurid epigones, however, were locked in unceasing rivalry with each other and were unable to combine against intruders from beyond their frontiers. By the close of the century, therefore, all the Timurid possessions in Central Asia had passed into the hands of the Uzbeks.
The Uzbeks
The early history of the Uzbek people (whose rulers were descendants of a younger brother of Batu, khan of the Golden Horde) is wrapped in obscurity, but by the mid-15th century they had migrated from their original homeland, east of the Ural Mountains, southeast toward the lower Syr Darya, whence, under their leader, Abūʾl-Khayr Khan, they began to threaten the Timurids across the river. However, before Abūʾl-Khayr could undertake a full-scale invasion, he was killed in battle in 1468 by two rebellious kinsmen who, refusing to recognize his assertion of paramountcy, had defected, together with their tribal followers, and placed themselves under the nominal suzerainty of the Chagataid khan of Mughulistān. Their descendants were to become the Kazakh hordes of later centuries.
With the death of Abūʾl-Khayr, the fortunes of the Uzbeks temporarily declined, only to be revived under the leadership of his grandson, Muḥammad Shaybānī, who by 1500 had made himself master of Samarkand as well as of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya basins and was advancing into Khorāsān (Herāt fell to him in 1507) when he was defeated and killed in 1510 by Shah Ismāʿil Ṣafavi. He had, however, changed the course of Central Asian history. By the time of his death, all the lands between the Syr Darya and Amu Darya were in Uzbek hands, and so they were to remain. Throughout the 16th century, Muḥammad Shaybānī’s kinsmen ruled over a powerful and aggressive khanate from Bukhara. They continued Muḥammad Shaybānī’s feud with the Iranian Ṣafavids, articulated along Shīʿite-versus-Sunni lines, and with the Mughal dynasty in India, whose founder, the Timurid Babur, had been driven out of Central Asia by Shaybānī. In contrast, friendly, if sporadic, ties with the Ottomans were maintained by way of the Volga-Don steppes. Unlike the Ottomans, Ṣafavids, and Mughals, however, the Uzbeks had only limited access to firearms, which placed them at a considerable disadvantage with their rivals.
During Shaybanid rule, and even more under the Ashtarkhanids (also known as Astrakhanids, Tuquy-Timurids, or Janids) who succeeded them during the 1600s, Central Asia experienced a decline in prosperity compared with the preceding Timurid period, in part because of a marked reduction in the transcontinental caravan trade following the opening of new oceanic trade routes. In the 1700s the basins of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya passed under the control of three Uzbek khanates claiming legitimacy in their descent from Genghis Khan. These were, from west to east, the Qungrāts based on Khiva in Khwārezm (1717–1920), the Mangits in Bukhara (1753–1920), and the Mings in Kokand (c. 1710–1876), in the upper valley of the Syr Darya. During this same period, east of the Pamirs, Kashgaria was torn apart by the rivalries of Khwājahs and Kyrgyz; in the Semirechye the Kazakhs were locked in conflict with the Mongol Oirat and Dzungars; while between the Aral and Caspian seas the Turkmen roamed the northern borders of Iran, enslaving the sedentary peoples there and transporting them to Bukhara to labour in the oases. The time was ripe for Russian intervention, made easier by the intruders’ possession of cannon and firearms.
The modern period: the age of decadence
From the beginnings of recorded history, pastoral nomadism, practiced on a grandiose scale, was the economic basis of the great Central Asian empires. Once the domestication of the horse was sufficiently advanced to allow for its use in warfare, the superiority of the mounted archer over the foot soldier or the war chariot was never effectively challenged.
The waning of nomadic military power
When headed by capable leaders, well-trained and disciplined mounted troops were almost invincible. The sedentary civilizations could not, by their very nature, put aside for breeding purposes pastures sufficiently large to sustain a cavalry force that could equal that of the pastoral nomads. Hence the military superiority of the nomads remained a constant for about 2,000 years of Eurasian history.
At its highest degree of development, Central Asian nomad society constituted a very sophisticated and highly specialized social and economic structure, advanced but also highly vulnerable because of its specialization and the lack of diversification of its economy. Geared almost entirely to the production of war matériel—i.e., the horse—when not engaged in warfare, it was unable to provide the people with anything but the barest necessities of life. To ensure their very existence, Central Asian empires had to wage war and obtain through raids or tribute the commodities they could not produce. When, owing to circumstances such as severe weather decimating the horse herds or inept leadership, raids against other peoples became impossible, the typical Central Asian nomad state had to disintegrate to allow its population to fend for itself and secure the necessities for a subsistence. Hunting and pastoral nomadism both needed vast expanses to support a thinly scattered population that did not naturally lend itself to strong, centralized political control. The skill of a Central Asian leader consisted precisely in the gathering of such dispersed populations and in providing for them on a level higher than they had been accustomed to. There was but one way to achieve this: successful raids on other, preferably richer, peoples. The military machinery was dependent on numbers, which then precluded self-sufficiency. In case of prolonged military reverses, the nomadic aggregation of warriors had to disband because it was only in dispersion that they could be economically autonomous without recourse to war.
In the course of the 15th century, the steppe territory suitable for great horse herds began to shrink. In the east the Yongle emperor of the Ming led five major campaigns against the Mongols (1410–24), all successful but none decisive. Yet when, under the leadership of Esen Taiji (1439–55), the Mongol Oirat pushed as far as Beijing, they found the city defended by cannon, and they withdrew. In the Middle East, as noted above, the Ottoman and Ṣafavid gunpowder empires barred the road to the no-longer-invincible nomad cavalry, and, along the western borders of Central Asia, the Russians were soon to start on their decisive and irresistible march across Central Asia to the borders of China, India, and Iran.
The Russian conquests
The most spectacular advance of the Russians into Central Asia carried them eastward through the forest belt, where the hunting and fishing populations offered little resistance and where the much-coveted furs of Siberia could be found in abundance. Acting on behalf of the Stroganov family of entrepreneurs, in 1578 or 1581 the Cossack Yermak Timofeyevich crossed the Urals and defeated the Shaybanid prince Kuchum, who alone represented organized political power in Siberia.
The Russian advance from west to east across Siberia, motivated by commercial rather than politicalconsiderations, remains unparalleled in history for its rapidity. The native Finno-Ugrians—Samoyed or Tungus hunters accustomed to paying their fur tribute—were little concerned with the nationality of the tax collectors and found it no more unpleasant to deal with the Russians than with Turks or Mongols. Russian penetration was marked by the building of small forts, such as Tobolsk (1587) near the former capital of Kuchum, Tara (1594) on the Irtysh River, and Narym (1596) on the upper Ob River. The Yenisey was reached in 1619, and the town of Yakutsk on the Lena River was founded in 1632. About 1639 the first small group of Russians reached the Pacific Ocean in the neighbourhood of present-day Okhotsk. About 10 years later, Anadyrsk was founded on the shores of the Bering Sea, and, by the end of the century, the Kamchatka Peninsula was annexed. When advanced Russian parties reached the Amur River about the mid-17th century, they entered the Chinese sphere of interest. Although some clashes occurred, restraint on both sides led to the signing of the treaties of Nerchinsk (1689) and Kyakhta (1727), which remained in force until 1858. To this day, the border delineated at Kyakhta has not been altered substantially.
The thorniest question to be dealt with in the early Russo-Chinese negotiations concerned the Mongols—wedged between the two Great Powers—who, in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, reasserted their control over most of the steppe belt. In the 15th century the western Mongols, or Oirat, had become quite powerful under Esen Taiji, but, under the strong leadership of Dayan Khan (ruled 1470–1543) and his grandson Altan Khan (1543–83), the eastern Mongols—more precisely the Khalkha tribe—gained ascendancy. In 1552 Altan took possession of what was left of Karakorum, the old Mongol capital. Altan’s reign saw the conversion of a great many Mongols to the tenets of the Dge-lugs-pa (Yellow Hat) sect of Tibetan Buddhism, a religion that, until the 1920s, played a major role in Mongol life. The attempts of Ligdan Khan (1604–34) to unite the various Mongol tribes failed not only because of internal dissensions but also on account of the rising power of the Manchu, to whom he was forced to surrender. The active Central Asian policy of China’s Qing dynasty brought a lasting transformation in the political structure of the region.
More distant from China, the Oirat could pursue a more independent course. One of their tribes, the Dzungars, under the leadership of Galdan (Dga’-ldan; 1676–97), created a powerful state that remained a serious menace to China until 1757, when the Qianlong emperor defeated their last ruler, Amursana, and thus put an end to the last independent Mongol state prior to the creation, in 1921, of Outer Mongolia (the Khalkha princes had submitted to the Manchu in 1691).
The treaties of Nerchinsk and Kyakhta established the northern border of the Chinese zone of influence, which included Mongolia. In the wars against the Dzungars, the Chinese established their rule over East Turkistan and Dzungaria. China’s western boundary remained undefined, but it ran farther west than it does in the present day and included Lake Balkhash and parts of the Kazakh steppe.
Wedged between the Russian and Chinese empires, unable to break through the stagnant but solid Ottoman and Ṣafavid barriers, the Turkish nomads of the steppe lying east of the Volga and the Caspian Sea and south of Russian-occupied Siberia found themselves caught in a trap from which there was no escape. If there is cause for surprise, it lies in the lateness rather than in the fact of the ultimate Russian conquest. Denis Sinor Gavin R.G. Hambly
West of the Uzbek khanates, between the Aral and Caspian seas, were the nomad Turkmen, notorious robbers who roamed the inhospitable land. The Kazakhs, who during the 17th century divided into three “hordes,” roamed between the Volga and the Irtysh. During the 16th and 17th centuries they fought Oirat and Dzungars but succeeded in holding their own, and in 1771 Ablai, ruler of the “Middle Horde,” located west of Lake Balkhash, was confirmed as ruler by both China and Russia. Yet Russian expansion, motivated by the urge to get closer to the Indian Ocean, forced the Kazakhs to yield. Although some Kazakh leaders, such as the sultan Kinesary, put up spirited resistance (1837–47), the line of the Syr Darya was reached by the Russians toward the middle of the 19th century.
The Uzbek khanate of Kokand was annexed in 1876; those of Khiva and Bukhara became Russian protectorates in 1873 and 1868, respectively. The conquest of the Turkmen in the last quarter of the 19th century defined Russia’s (now Turkmenistan’s) southern frontier with Iran and Afghanistan.
Under Russian rule
The Russian conquests in Central Asia had given the tsars control of a vast area of striking geographic and human diversity, acquired at relatively little effort in terms of men and money. The motives for the conquest had not been primarily economic; peasant colonization of the virgin steppes and the systematic cultivation of cotton were later developments. The factors that determined the Russian advance into the area were complex and interrelated. They included the historic pull of the frontier, the thirst for military glory on the part of the officer corps, and the fear of further British penetration into Central Asia from across the Indus River, as well as the infectious rhetoric of imperialism common to the age.
Russian penetration of western Central Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
From the outset, Russia’s objectives as a colonial power were strictly limited: to maintain “law and order” at minimum cost and to disturb as little as possible the traditional way of life of its new subjects. Such an approach was favoured by the remoteness of the area and its isolation even from the rest of the Muslim world. It was improbable that an almost wholly illiterate population, its prejudices formed by a venal and obscurantist ʿulamāʾ (class of Muslim theologians and scholars), could offer any concerted resistance to the Russian presence; and such, indeed, proved to be the case. The Russians, like other colonial powers, did experience an occasional uprising, generally of a very localized character, but the overwhelming military superiority displayed by the Russians at the time of the initial conquest, the inability of the inhabitants of the khanates to offer effective resistance, and the heavy-handedness with which subsequent insurrection or insubordination was dealt ensured minimal opposition. Finally, by preserving the titular sovereignty of the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva, they left a substantial part of the population, especially the urban classes, most deeply devoted to the Islamic way of life, under traditionally minded Muslim rulers.
Tsarist rule
Yet the Russians, whether intentionally or not, became agents of change throughout the area in much the same way as any other colonial power. The regional economy was gradually realigned to meet the Russian need for raw materials and new markets. This required the construction of railroads: by 1888 the Trans-Caspian Railroad had reached Samarkand; between 1899 and 1905 the Orenburg-Tashkent Railroad was completed; the Turkistan-Siberian Railroad came later, begun just before World War I and not completed until 1930. In Tashkent and Samarkand new European suburbs were laid out at a distance from the walled native cities, but, as in the case of the newly established garrison towns, such islands of European life required local services and supplies. Nor did the Russians wholly ignore the welfare of their new subjects. An effort was made, halfheartedly at first, to put down the indigenous slave trade, irrigation projects were initiated, and bilingual elementary education was cautiously introduced. As elsewhere in colonial Asia, the work of Russian scholars studying the literature, history, and antiquities of the Central Asian peoples aroused on the part of a numerically small but influential Russian-educated elite, especially among the Kazakhs, nostalgic awareness of a colourful past and a sense of national, or cultural, identity.
Of the major ethnic groups in Central Asia—Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz—the Kazakhs were the first to respond to the impact of Russian culture. Their early contacts with their new masters had in the main been carried out through intermediaries—Kazan Tatars, who, paradoxically, had contributed to strengthening the Kazakhs’ awareness of being part of a greater Muslim world community and their sense of being a “nation” rather than a welter of tribes and clans. Moreover, through the Tatars they were exposed to current Pan-Turkish and Pan-Islamic propaganda. In the 1870s the Russians countered Tatar influence by establishing bilingual Russian-Kazakh schools, from which emerged a Westernized elite of considerable distinction.
Kazakh unrest
This “dialogue” between the Russians and Kazakhs was, however, doomed by the government’s policy of settling peasants from European Russia and Ukraine on the Kazakh steppe, where agricultural settlement on an extensive scale could be undertaken only by curtailing the area available for grazing by the nomads’ livestock and by restricting their seasonal migrations. As early as 1867–68 the northwestern fringes of the Kazakh steppe had been the scene of violent protests at the presence of colonists, but it was not until the last decade of the century that the movement got fully under way with the arrival of upward of one million peasants, resulting in the inevitable expropriation of Kazakh grazing grounds and in savage conflict between the Kazakhs and the intruders. Finally in 1916, during World War I, the Kazakhs, driven to desperation by the loss of their lands and by the ruthlessness of the wartime administration, rose up in protest against a decree conscripting the non-Russian subjects of the empire for forced labour. The rebellion assumed the character of a popular uprising, in which many colonists and many more Kazakhs and Kyrgyz were massacred. The revolt was put down with the utmost savagery, and more than 300,000 Kazakhs are said to have sought refuge across the Chinese frontier.
With the collapse of tsarist rule, the Westernized Kazakh elite formed a party, the Alash Orda, as a vehicle through which they could express their aspirations for regional autonomy. Having found during the Russian Civil War that the anticommunist “Whites” were implacably opposed to their aspirations, the Kazakhs cast in their lot with the “Reds.” After the war the Kazakhs were granted their own republic, in which, for the first few years, the leaders of the Alash Orda maintained a fairly dominant position and were active in protecting Kazakh interests. After 1924, however, direct confrontation with the Communist Party became more intense, and in 1927–28 the Alash Orda leaders were liquidated as “bourgeois nationalists.” The history of the Kazakhs in the first half of the 20th century was bleak indeed—expropriation of their grazing lands under the tsars, the bloody uprising and reprisals of 1916, the losses in the civil war and in the famine in 1921, the purges of the intelligentsia in 1927–28, collectivization during the 1930s, and further peasant colonization after World War II.
In Transoxania—which was divided between the administration of the Russian governor-general of Turkistan, based on Tashkent, and that of the emir of Bukhara and the khan of Khiva—opposition to colonial domination was centred in the most conservative elements of a profoundly Islamic society, the ʿulamāʾ and the inhabitants of the bazaar. Nonetheless, the Russians favoured, for reasons of expediency, the preservation of the traditional social framework and endeavoured, with only partial success, to insulate the inhabitants of the region from contact with the more “advanced” Muslims of the empire—the Volga and Crimean Tatars. In this they were aided by the fact that the virtual absence of European colonization provided no fuel for popular resentment comparable to that felt by the Kazakhs; and, in consequence, the Westernized products of the bilingual Russian-Uzbek educational system, concerned primarily with reform of the Islamic way of life, regarded the Muslim “ultras” as their most dangerous opponents.
If the main influence in shaping the outlook of the Kazakh intelligentsia was the educational system imported from European Russia, the catalyst in the case of the Uzbeks was knowledge of the educational reforms and the Pan-Turkish ideology of the Crimean Tatar renaissance of the late 19th century. The Uzbek reformers, known as Jadids, advocated the introduction of a modern educational system as a prerequisite for social change and cultural revitalization; despite intense opposition from the clerical classes, they opened their first school in Tashkent in 1901 and by 1914 had established more than 100. After 1908, influenced by the Young Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Bukharans and the Young Khivans worked for a program of radical institutional change in the ramshackle governments of the khanates. It may be doubted, however, whether by 1917 the Uzbek intelligentsia had made any substantial impact outside a fairly narrow circle of like-minded persons.
Soviet rule
Neither before nor after the Russian Revolution of 1917 were the nationalist aspirations of the Muslims of Central Asia compatible with the interests of the Russian state or those of the European population of the region. This was demonstrated once and for all when the troops of the Tashkent Soviet crushed a short-lived Muslim government established in Kokand in January 1918. Indeed, the Soviet authorities in Central Asia regarded the native intelligentsia, even the most “progressive” of them, with lively and (from their point of view) justifiable apprehension. At the same time, there was the problem of an active resistance on the part of conservative elements, which was anti-Russian as much as anticommunist. Having extinguished the khanate of Khiva in 1919 and that of Bukhara in 1920, local Red Army units found themselves engaged in a protracted struggle with the Basmachis, guerrillas operating in the mountains in the eastern part of the former khanate of Bukhara. Not until 1925 did the Red Army gain the upper hand.
Thereafter, Central Asia was increasingly integrated into the Soviet system through the implementation of planned economy and improved communications, through the communist institutional and ideological framework of control, and, for young males, through compulsory service in the Red Army. The economy of the region became further distorted to meet the needs of the central planners. Traditional religion, values, and culture were suppressed, but in such areas as education, health care, and welfare Central Asians benefited to a degree from their forced participation in the system.
Eventually the Soviets developed an ingenious strategy for neutralizing the two common denominators most likely to unite Central Asians against continuing control from Moscow: Islamic culture and Turkish ethnicity. After a protracted period of trial and error, their ultimate solution was the creation of five Soviet socialist republics in the region: the Kazakh S.S.R. (now Kazakhstan) in 1936, the Kirgiz S.S.R. (now Kyrgyzstan) in 1936, the Tadzhik S.S.R. (now Tajikistan) in 1929, the Turkmen S.S.R. (now Turkmenistan) in 1924, and the Uzbek S.S.R. (now Uzbekistan) in 1924. The plan was to will into being five new nations whose separate development under close surveillance and firm tutelage from Moscow would preempt the emergence of a “Turkistani” national identity and such concomitant ideologies as Pan-Turkism or Pan-Islamism. To some extent, this ethno-engineering reflected colonial conceptions of the peoples of Central Asia dating back to tsarist times.
Thus the Kazakhs, whose absorption into the Russian Empire had been a gradual process extending from the early 18th to the early 19th century, were perceived as wholly separate from the Uzbeks south of the Syr Darya, whose territories had been annexed during the mid-19th century. As speakers of an Iranian language, the Tajiks could be clearly distinguished from their Turkish-speaking neighbours, while the Russian perception of the nomadic Turkmen, whom they had conquered during the closing years of the 19th century, set them apart from the sedentary Uzbeks. Similarly, the Kyrgyz of the Issyk-Kul region (whom the Russians of tsarist times had confusingly designated “Kara-Kirgiz,” while applying the name “Kirgiz” to the Kazakhs) were declared to be distinct from their Kazakh neighbours.
The colonial experience and 19th-century Russian ethnological and anthropological fieldwork were, then, when appropriate, enlisted by the Soviets to serve very different ideological ends. Inevitably, the boundaries of these artificial creations willed into being by Soviet fiat did not reflect the ethnic and cultural patterns of Central Asia, and all five republics contained substantial minority populations (among them, immigrants from European Russia), a situation which, with the coming of independence in 1991, was fraught with the likelihood of future conflicts. To ensure the success of this design for stabilizing Central Asia under Soviet rule, school textbooks, scholarly research and publishing, and cultural policies in general were devised to stress, on the one hand, the particular and unique experience of each republic and, on the other, the enduring benefits of the Russian connection, which paradoxically required that the tsarist conquests and their consequences be represented as an overwhelming boon to Central Asians. Great significance was given to language policy, with strenuous efforts being made to emphasize the linguistic differences among the various Turkish languages spoken in the republics, clear evidence of intent to divide and rule.
During the last two decades of Soviet history, the remoteness and economic backwardness of Central Asia meant that this region felt less intensely the winds of change beginning to blow through metropolitan Russia, Ukraine, or the Baltic republics, although from 1979 Soviet intervention in neighbouring Afghanistan produced ripple effects across the frontier. Historians, however, may conclude that the most significant aspects of the history of Central Asia under the Soviets were the extent to which its peoples managed to retain their traditional cultural heritage under the most debilitating circumstances.
Now that all five are independent sovereign states, their future destinies will be of more than regional significance. Central Asia will no longer be the backwater that it became when the age of European maritime discovery brought to an end the centuries-old transcontinental caravan trade. Gavin R.G. Hambly
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Central Asia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 16 November 2017
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Central-Asia
Access Date: August 13, 2019
Additional Reading
René Grousset, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia (1970; originally published in French, 1939), although dated, is still the most comprehensive and basically sound survey in English. Denis Sinor, Inner Asia: History—Civilization—Languages, 2nd rev. ed. (1971), serves as a broad overview. Additional works on the region’s history include Gavin Hambly (ed.), Central Asia (1969; originally published in German, 1966); Geoffrey Wheeler, The Modern History of Soviet Central Asia (1964, reprinted 1975); and A.H. Dani et al. (eds.), History of Civilizations of Central Asia (1992– ). Various topics on Central Asia are treated in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, new ed. (1954– ). The best short sketch on the region’s history is found in Eshan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 5, fascicles 2–3 (1990–91).
Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990), is a detailed survey down to the 13th century. Archaeology and ancient history are discussed in Grégoire Frumkin, Archaeology in Soviet Central Asia (1970); and Philip L. Kohl (ed.), The Bronze Age Civilization in Central Asia: Recent Soviet Discoveries (1981). Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (1975), provides a fine introduction on the coming of the Arabs and Islām. A pioneer study is H.A.L. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (1923, reprinted 1970). Works on the Ṣāmānids and Karakhanids include Richard N. Frye, Bukhara: The Medieval Achievement (1965); and W. Barthold (V.V. Bartold), Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, 4th ed. (1977; originally published in Russian, 2 vol., 1898–1900).
Excellent accounts of the age of Mongol domination include David Morgan, The Mongols (1986); and Bertold Spuler, The Mongols in History (1971; originally published in French, 1961), and History of the Mongols . . . (1972, reissued 1988; originally published in German, 1968). The culminating phase of Mongol rule is discussed in Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism (1987). Much information relating to Central Asia in the Mongol and Timurid periods is found in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5 (1968), and vol. 6 (1986). Beatrice F. Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane (1989), is essential reading on Central Asia during the lifetime of Timur. Information on the Chagataid and Timurid periods can be obtained from W. Barthold (V.V. Bartold), Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, 3 vol., trans. from Russian (1956–62). Audrey Burton, Bukharan Trade, 1558–1718 (1993), details foreign economic links during the Shaybanid and Ashtarkhanid periods. W.H. Abdi et al. (eds.), Interaction Between Indian and Central Asian Science and Technology in Medieval Times, 2 vol. (1990), discusses topics such as music, architecture, astronomy, and mathematics.
The Russian conquest and colonization of Central Asia is fully described in Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia, 1867–1917 (1960). Other useful works include Seymour Becker, Russia’s Protectorates in Central Asia: Bukhara and Khiva, 1865–1924 (1968); Edward Allworth (ed.), Central Asia: 130 Years of Russian Dominance, 3rd ed. (1994); Serge A. Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (1960); and Hélène Carrère D’encausse, Islam and the Russian Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia (1988; originally published in French, 1966). The Soviet period is treated in Michael Rywkin, Russia in Central Asia (1963); Elizabeth E. Bacon, Central Asians Under Russian Rule: A Study in Culture Change (1966, reissued 1980); and Alexandre Bennigsen and Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, Islam in the Soviet Union, trans. from French (1967). Shireen T. Hunter, Central Asia Since Independence (1996), chronicles the evolving republics. Edward Allworth David Roger Smith Gavin R.G. Hambly Denis Sinor
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Southeast Asia
Table of Contents
Introduction
Early society and accomplishments
The classical period
Patterns of a colonial age
Contemporary Southeast Asia
History of Southeast Asia, history of Southeast Asia from prehistoric times to the contemporary period.
Historical map of Southeast AsiaEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Early society and accomplishments
Origins
Knowledge of the early prehistory of Southeast Asia has undergone exceptionally rapid change as a result of archaeological discoveries made since the 1960s, although the interpretation of these findings has remained the subject of extensive debate. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the region has been inhabited from the earliest times. Hominid fossil remains date from approximately 1,500,000 years ago and those of Homo sapiens from approximately 40,000 years ago. Furthermore, until about 7000 bce the seas were some 150 feet (50 metres) lower than they are now, and the area west of Makassar Strait consisted of a web of watered plains that sometimes is called Sundaland. These land connections perhaps account for the coherence of early human development observed in the Hoabinhian culture, which lasted from about 13,000 to 5000 or 4000 bce. The stone tools used by hunting and gathering societies across Southeast Asia during this period show a remarkable degree of similarity in design and development. When the sea level rose to approximately its present level about 6000 bce, conditions were created for a more variegated environment and, therefore, for more extensive differentiation in human development. While migration from outside the region may have taken place, it did not do so in a massive or clearly punctuated fashion; local evolutionary processes and the circulation of peoples were far more powerful forces in shaping the region’s cultural landscape.
Technological developments and population expansion
Perhaps because of a particular combination of geophysical and climatic factors, early Southeast Asia did not develop uniformly in the direction of increasingly complex societies. Not only have significant hunting and gathering populations continued to exist into the 21st century, but the familiar cultural sequences triggered by such events as the discovery of agriculture or metallurgy do not seem to apply. This is not to say that the technological capabilities of early Southeast Asian peoples were negligible, for sophisticated metalworking (bronze) and agriculture (rice) were being practiced by the end of the 3rd millennium bce in northeastern Thailand and northern Vietnam, and sailing vessels of advanced design and sophisticated navigational skills were spread over a wider area by the same time or earlier. Significantly, these technologies do not appear to have been borrowed from elsewhere but were indigenous and distinctive in character.
These technological changes may partially account for two crucial developments in Southeast Asia’s later prehistory. The first is the extraordinary seaborne expansion of speakers of Proto-Austronesian languages and their descendants, speakers of Austronesian (or Malayo-Polynesian) languages, which occurred over a period of 5,000 years or more and came to encompass a vast area and to stretch nearly half the circumference of Earth at the Equator. This outward movement of people and culture was evolutionary rather than revolutionary, the result of societal preference for small groups and a tendency of groups to hive off once a certain population size had been reached. It began as early as 4000 bce, when Taiwan was populated from the Asian mainland, and subsequently it continued southward through the northern Philippines (3rd millennium bce), central Indonesia (2nd millennium bce), and western and eastern Indonesia (2nd and 1st millennia bce). From approximately 1000 bce on the expansion continued both eastward into the Pacific, where that immense region was populated in a process continuing to about 1000 ce as voyagers reached the Hawaiian Islands and New Zealand, and westward, where Malay peoples reached and settled the island of Madagascar sometime between 500 and 700 ce, bringing with them (among other things) bananas, which are native to Southeast Asia. Thus, for a considerable period of time, the Southeast Asian region contributed to world cultural history, rather than merely accepting outside influences, as frequently has been suggested.
Major divisions of the Austronesian languages.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The second development, which began possibly as early as 1000 bce, centred on the production of fine bronze and the fashioning of bronze-and-iron objects, particularly as they have been found at the site in northern Vietnam known as Dong Son. The earliest objects consisted of socketed plowshares and axes, shaft-hole sickles, spearheads, and such small items as fishhooks and personal ornaments. By about 500 bce the Dong Son culture had begun producing the bronze drums for which it is known. The drums are large objects (some weigh more than 150 pounds [70 kg]), and they were produced by the difficult lost-wax casting process and decorated with fine geometric shapes and depictions of animals and humans. This metal industry was not derived from similar industries in China or India. Rather, the Dong Son period offers one of the most powerful—though not necessarily the only or earliest—examples of Southeast Asian societies transforming themselves into more densely populated, hierarchical, and centralized communities. Since typical drums, either originals or local renditions, have been found throughout Southeast Asia and since they are associated with a rich trade in exotics and other goods, the Dong Son culture also suggests that the region as a whole consisted not of isolated, primitive niches of human settlement but of a variety of societies and cultures tied together by broad and long-extant trading patterns. Although none of these societies possessed writing, some displayed considerable sophistication and technological skill, and, although none appears to have constituted a territorial centralized state, new and more complex polities were forming.
Influence of China and India
Between approximately 150 bce and 150 ce, most of Southeast Asia was first influenced by the more mature cultures of its neighbours to the north and west. Thus began a process that lasted for the better part of a millennium and fundamentally changed Southeast Asia. In some ways the circumstances were very different. China, concerned about increasingly powerful chiefdoms in Vietnam disturbing its trade, encroached into the region and by the end of the 1st century bce had incorporated it as a remote province of the Han empire. For generations, the Vietnamese opposed Chinese rule, but they were unable to gain their independence until 939 ce. From India, however, there is no evidence of conquests, colonization, or even extensive migration. Indians came to Southeast Asia, but they did not come to rule, and no Indian power appears to have pursued an interest in controlling a Southeast Asian power from afar, a factor that may help to explain why only the Vietnamese accepted the Chinese model.
ChinaChina under the Han emperor Wudi (c. 100 bce) and (inset) at the end of the Chunqiu (Spring and Autumn) Period (c. 500 bce).Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Yet, in other ways the processes of Indianization and Sinicization were remarkably similar. Southeast Asia already was socially and culturally diverse, making accommodation easy. Furthermore, indigenous peoples shaped the adaption and adoption of outside influences and, indeed, seem to have sought out concepts and practices that enhanced rather than redirected changes already underway in their own societies. They also rejected some components: for example, some of the vocabulary and general theories related to the Indian notions of social hierarchy were borrowed but much of the specific practices were not, and neither Indian nor Chinese views of women as socially and legally inferior were accepted. In the later stages of the assimilation process—particularly in the Indianized areas—local syncretism often produced exuberant variations, which, despite familiar appearances, were expressions of local genius rather than just inspired borrowings.
Sculptures at Borobudur, central Java, Indonesia.© simon gurney/Fotolia
Pagan, MyanmarRuins of ancient Buddhist shrines and pagodas, Pagan, Myanmar.© © hadynyah/iStock.comStill, Chinese and Indian influences were anything but superficial. They provided writing systems and literature, systems of statecraft, and concepts of social hierarchy and religious belief, all of which were both of intrinsic interest and pragmatic significance to Southeast Asians of the day. For elites seeking to gain and retain control over larger and more complex populations, the applications of these ideas were obvious, but it would also seem that the sheer beauty and symbolic power of Hindu and Buddhist arts tapped a responsive vein in the Southeast Asian soul. The result was an imposing array of architectural and other cultural wonders, at first very much in the Indian image and hewing close to current styles and later in more original, indigenous interpretations. The seriousness and profundity with which all this activity was undertaken is unmistakable. By the 7th century ce, Palembang in southern Sumatra was being visited by Chinese and other Buddhist devotees from throughout Asia, who came to study doctrine and to copy manuscripts in institutions that rivaled in importance those in India itself. Later, beginning in the 8th century, temple and court complexes of surpassing grandeur and beauty were constructed in central Java, Myanmar, and Cambodia; the Borobudur of the Śailendra dynasty in Java, the myriad temples of the Burman dynastic capital of Pagan, and the monuments constructed at Angkor during the Khmer empire in Cambodia rank without question among the glories of the ancient world.
Rise of indigenous states
In the realm of politics, Indian influence accompanied the rise of new political entities, which, since they do not readily fall under the Western rubric of “states,” have been called mandalas. The mandala was not so much a territorial unit as a fluid field of power that emanated, in concentric circles, from a central court and depended for its continued authority largely on the court’s ability to balance alliances and to influence the flow of trade and human resources. Such a conception of political organization already had surfaced among Southeast Asians, but Indian civilization provided powerful metaphors for the change underway and for ways of extending it. The mandala was the predominant form of the Southeast Asian state until it was displaced in the 19th century.
Between approximately the 2nd century bce and the 6th century ce, mandala polities appeared throughout Southeast Asia in the major river valleys and at strategic landfalls for sea traffic—generally, locations where routes for local and international trade crossed. These communities took different forms, depending on their physical setting. For example, walled and moated settlements predominated in much of the mainland but do not seem to have been constructed in insular Southeast Asia. Yet they served similar purposes to and frequently shared characteristics with mandalas in the same immediate region. Mandala sites have been located in the Mekong, Chao Phraya, and Irrawaddy river valleys; along the coasts of central Vietnam, western and northern Java, and eastern Borneo; and on the Isthmus of Kra. One of the most intriguing sites, called Oc Eo, is in the Mekong delta region of southern Vietnam. This port settlement, which flourished between the 1st and 6th centuries ce amid a complex of other settlements connected by canals (some up to 60 miles long), was not only an extraordinarily rich emporium dealing in articles from as far as Rome and inner Asia, but it was also a local manufacturing centre producing its own jewelry, pottery, and other trade goods. Almost certainly it also fed itself from wet-rice agriculture practiced in the surrounding delta. Little is known, however, about the nature of state structure in Oc Eo, although it seems to have been one of—and perhaps was prime among—an assemblage of local mandala-type principalities.
After the 6th century there emerged a number of larger and more powerful mandala states, principally in Cambodia, Myanmar, Sumatra, and Java. Often designated kingdoms or empires, these states nevertheless functioned and were structured upon the same principles that had governed their predecessors. They were, in some respects, unstable and prone to fluctuation because of shifting relations with outside powers and constant internal struggles for the position of overlordship, but they also were remarkably durable. No two states were exactly alike, each occupying a particular ecological niche and exploiting a particular combination of opportunities to survive by trade, agriculture, and war. The cultural impact of their courts long outlasted their political grasp and continued to inform their societies until modern times.
Perhaps the outstanding example of this durability is Srivijaya, the great Sumatran trading empire that dominated much of Southeast Asian commerce from about the 7th to the 13th century. Srivijaya does not appear to have been heavily urbanized or to have had a continuously occupied capital during its roughly 700 years of existence, nor does it seem to have possessed boundaries and clearly delineated territories. Its armies, while they could be mustered and quickly dispatched overseas, were weapons of limited use. Instead, Srivijaya maintained its authority in a shifting and extremely varied trading world largely by means of a shrewd brand of cultural and economic politics that involved, among other things, offering a protective and mutually beneficial trading environment to all comers and maintaining a courtly culture from which the idiom of overlordship issued grandly and convincingly. Srivijaya was ruled by a formula supple enough to attract trade from all quarters and to exploit it at the same time.
Ruined temples at the Angkor Thom complex, Angkor, Cambodia.© happystock/Fotolia
Whatever the achievements of Srivijaya, the Khmer (Cambodian) state that flourished in the Tonle Sap region roughly between the 9th and mid-13th centuries is widely regarded as the most impressive of the concentrically arranged ancient Southeast Asian states. This admiration largely stems from the state’s extensive architectural remains, including the renowned Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat temple complexes. In many respects, however, the Angkorian imperial achievement was singular. Though informed by the mandala paradigm, the Khmer carried it further and shaped it more distinctively than other Southeast Asians before or since.
At its zenith, Angkor may have supported a population of one million in a relatively small area, with an elite apparatus and a population of bondsmen far greater than any of Cambodia’s neighbours. In achieving this, however, the Khmer state surrendered the flexibility and balance critical to the mandala pattern and eventually fell victim to its own brittleness. Other concentric states in early Southeast Asia rose and fell; the Khmer proved unable to revive theirs once it had fallen.
Khmer empire c. 1200.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
The classical period
Components of a new age
By about 1300 much of Southeast Asia had entered a period of transition from ancient times. No single factor can account for the disruption, which lasted longer in some places than in others. The Mongol attacks of the second half of the 13th century and the disintegration of Khmer and Srivijayan power undoubtedly were of significance, but less dramatic changes, such as slowly changing trade patterns and political competition, may also have played an important role. Whatever the case, the shifts were not of a type or severity to bring about major disruptions; they instead paved the way for the coalescing of what can best be termed a classical age. In this period the major civilizations of Southeast Asia achieved a broader influence and greater coherence than before. They integrated rival political and cultural forms into their own, and the patterns they established were widely imitated by smaller powers that were drawn into their orbit. Regional and international trade reached a high level of development, bringing greater well-being to larger numbers of Southeast Asians than ever before. It also was an age of great change and challenges—especially in the form of new and often foreign religious, political, and economic influences—and one of constant warfare. But it was a measure of the confidence and balance of the era that these influences were absorbed and digested with little difficulty, leaving more than a millennium of creative synthesis essentially undisturbed until as late as the end of the 18th century. Many Southeast Asian civilizations can be said to have reached their definitive premodern shape during this “golden” age, which also is modern scholarship’s best source of information on the classical cultures of the region before the ravages of 19th- and 20th-century colonialism.
State and society
Ayutthaya (Ayudhya) kingdom, mid-15th century.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Malacca empire in 1500.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.There were five major powers in Southeast Asia between the 14th and 18th centuries: Myanmar under the rulers of Ava (1364–1752), especially the Toungoo dynasty during most of that period; an independent Vietnam under the Later Le dynasty (1428–1788); the Tai state of Ayutthaya, or Ayudhia (1351–1767); Majapahit, centred on Java (1292–c. 1527); and Malacca (Melaka) centred on the Malay Peninsula (c. 1400–1511). Particularly with the waning of Indian influence (the last known Sanskrit inscription dates from the late 13th century), each power had developed in distinctive ways: more than ever, what constituted being “Javanese” or “Burman,” for example, was taking focus, and the Vietnamese, too, sought to clarify what was their own as opposed to what was Chinese. Remarkably enough, the process by which this was accomplished was characterized not by elimination or purification but by absorption. The syncretic powers developed in earlier periods had by no means weakened. The Tai, comparative newcomers, absorbed much of Khmer civilization during this period and, beginning with their written language, shaped it to their requirements. The Burmans absorbed Mon civilization in a similar fashion, and the Javanese of Majapahit could not help but make adjustments with the Malay and other cultures of the archipelago that they came to dominate. Even the Vietnamese, who had decided after several generations of struggle to adopt the outlines of a Confucian state that they had inherited from China, in the late 14th and early 15th centuries not only modified that model but also absorbed important influences from the culture of the Cham, an Indianized people whose kingdom, Champa, they had decisively (though not finally) defeated in 1471. This integrative approach may not have represented a conclusive departure from the behaviour of the ancient mandala states, but it does seem to have sustained larger and more far-reaching states, as well as richer and more complex elite cultures.
At the same time, however, a galaxy of smaller states appeared, some of them very powerful for their size and all of them ambitious. These states were especially numerous in insular Southeast Asia, where Aceh, Bantam (Banten), Makasar (Makassar), and Ternate were only the most prominent of many such Islamic sultanates; on the mainland, Chiang Mai (Chiengmai), Luang Prabang, and Pegu at various times during the period were powerful enough to be taken seriously. They both imitated and contributed to the court cultures of their larger neighbours and made alliances, war, and peace with many powers. Above all, these states participated in a dynamic and prosperous trade, not merely in exotics or high-value goods (such as gems and metal items) but in such relatively mundane goods as salted dried fish, ceramics, and rice. While institutions of servitude were structured somewhat differently from those of the West, there was no mistaking that a lively trade in human beings prized for their labour or craftsmanship took place. The proliferation of states and the rapid growth of an accompanying intricate web of local cultural and commodity exchange laid the foundation for both greater local autonomy and increased regional interdependency.
The dynamics of regional trade brought change to most Southeast Asian societies during this period. These changes were by no means uniform; the effect on hill tribes subject to periodic raiding, for example, was understandably different from that on coastal communities suddenly wealthy from trade. In some instances the alterations must have been dramatic: the native sago diet of many inhabitants of the Moluccas (Maluku) region, for example, was displaced by one based on rice brought from Java, more than 1,500 miles to the west. Yet it does seem that some changes were felt widely, especially in the larger states. Perhaps the most important was that, while old ideas of kingship and sovereignty were cultivated, in reality much power—and in some places critical power—had fallen into the hands of a merchant class. The royal courts themselves often dabbled in trade to an unprecedented degree. It perhaps is not accurate to say that kingship as an institution was weakening, but the courts, particularly in insular Southeast Asia, became more complicated centres of elite power.
Urbanization was another development of importance. Although some societies, notably that of the Javanese, seem not to have been affected, the growth of large and densely populated centres was a widespread phenomenon. By the 16th century some of these rivaled all but the very largest European cities. Malacca, for example, may have had a population of 100,000 (including traders) in the early 16th century; in Europe only Naples, Paris, and perhaps London were larger at that time. Finally, Southeast Asians during the 16th and 17th centuries appear to have enjoyed good health, a varied diet, and a comparatively high standard of living, especially when compared with most of the population of Europe of the same period.
Religion and culture
New religions appeared in Southeast Asia, accompanying the currents of trade and often entwined with social changes already underway. Gradually, in most areas, these religions filled the gaps left by weakening local Hindu-Buddhist establishments and beliefs, and by the mid-18th century the region had assumed something much like its modern religious configuration. On the mainland, Theravada Buddhism, which had been making inroads in Cambodia since the 11th century, underwent revitalization, the result especially of royal patronage and direct contact with Theravada monasteries in Sri Lanka. Both the general idiom and many precepts of Theravada already were familiar in Indianized societies, making this a gentle, nearly silent revolution that despite its subtlety was no less important. In Ayutthaya and the other Tai kingdoms and in the Mon-Burman states, Theravada Buddhism buoyed the kingship and introduced a vigorous intellectual leadership; it also spread broadly among the populace and thus played an important role as a cohesive social and cultural force from which the people of modern Thailand and Myanmar later were to draw much of their sense of identity.
Monk standing at the Kyaiktiyo (Golden Rock) pagoda, a historic Buddhist pilgrimage destination in eastern Myanmar (Burma).© Index Open
Christianity made its appearance in the early 16th century, brought by the Portuguese, Spanish, and, somewhat later, the French. It spread easily in the northern Philippines, where Spanish missionaries did not have to compete with an organized religious tradition and could count on the interested support of a government bent on colonization. Unlike the religions with which Southeast Asia had been familiar, Christianity showed no interest in syncretic accommodation of local animist or other beliefs. The Spanish friars rooted out whatever they could find in the way of indigenous tradition, destroying much of cultural value, including, it appears, a native writing system. By the 18th century, most of the Philippines, except the Muslim south, was Roman Catholic, and a society that was both Filipino and Christian had begun to evolve. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, however—with the exception of Vietnam and parts of the Moluccas island group of eastern Indonesia—Christianity attracted little interest. It did not go unopposed and was resisted, for example, by Buddhist monks in Thailand and Cambodia in the 16th century, but Christian doctrines do not appear to have attracted the general populace. There were few conversions, and rulers were not unduly disturbed by the presence of missionaries, except on occasions when they were accompanied by political and economic adventurers; these people were crushed.
Manila CathedralManila Cathedral.© iStockphoto/Thinkstock
Islam, however, captured the imagination of Southeast Asians in the archipelago. It was proselytized primarily by Malacca and Aceh after 1400 and by the late 17th century was the dominant faith from the western tip of Sumatra to the Philippine island of Mindanao. The conversion process was gradual, for Muslim traders from the Middle East and India long had traveled the sea route to China; it seems likely that they traded and settled in the port cities of Sumatra and Java as early as the 9th or 10th century. Perhaps as a result of weakening of the Hindu-Buddhist courts and the rise of smaller, independently minded trading states and social classes, Islam made important inroads among both ruling elites and others.
World distribution of Islam.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Conversion was comparatively easy and promised certain practical advantages, especially in trade, to members of the Islamic community (the ummah). In addition, Islam was itself diverse, offering a spectrum of approaches from mystical to fundamentalist, and in practice Muslim proselytizers often were tolerant of syncretic behaviour. In addition, Islamic culture, especially poetry and philosophy, was particularly attractive to courts anxious to enhance their status as cultural hubs. While the spread of Islam throughout the archipelago was not entirely peaceful, for the most part it proceeded in evolutionary fashion and without remarkable disturbance. Javanese Muslims, perhaps even members of the court, lived peacefully in the capital of Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit, for example, and Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere continued to trade, enter into alliances, and inhabit the same general cultural world. What change there was tended to occur slowly in the face of robust and deeply rooted tradition. In some societies the cultural response was original and lively. Along the northern coast of Java, for example, architecture, batik cloth-dyeing motifs, and the literature and performance of the wayang (shadow-puppet theatre) were deeply affected by Islamic ideas and produced vital new forms to accompany the old.
Chinese and Western incursions
Southeast Asia, unlike many other parts of the world on the eve of European expansion, long had been a cosmopolitan region acquainted with a diversity of peoples, customs, and trade goods. The arrival of Europeans in force in the early 16th century (others had made visits earlier, beginning with Marco Polo in 1292) caused neither wonderment nor fear. Long-distance travel by then was no novelty, and already there was impressive precedence for the arrival of foreign delegations rather than of individual trading vessels. A century before the Portuguese first arrived at Malacca in 1509, that port and a number of others in Southeast Asia had been visited by a succession of Chinese fleets. Between 1403 and 1433 Ming-dynasty China had sent several enormous flotillas of as many as 63 large vessels and up to 30,000 people on expeditions that carried them as far as Africa. The purpose of these journeys, led by the Muslim court eunuch Zheng He, was to secure diplomatic and trade advantages for the Chinese and to extend the sovereign lustre of the ambitious Yongle emperor. Yet, except for efforts to regain Dai Viet (Vietnam) as a province, these expeditions had no permanent military or colonial ambitions and did not much disturb the Southeast Asian region. Perhaps in part because of the sound defeat the Vietnamese handed a Ming occupying army in 1427, China lost interest in its new and far-flung initiatives, and the voyages came to an abrupt end.
Europeans presented a rather different prospect for Southeast Asia, however, above all because they sought riches and absolute control over the sources of this wealth. The Europeans were few in number and often poorly equipped and generally could not claim great technological superiority over Southeast Asians, but they were also determined, often well-organized and highly disciplined fighters, and utterly ruthless and unprincipled. Except for the Spanish in the Philippines, they were not interested in colonization but rather in the control of trade at the lowest financial cost. These characteristics made Europeans a formidable—though by no means dominant—new force in Southeast Asia. Except in a few locales and special circumstances, for the better part of 250 years Europeans could accomplish little politically or militarily without strong Southeast Asian allies. Individual adventurers often were useful to a particular Southeast Asian ruler or aspirant to the throne, but they were carefully watched and, when necessary, dispatched. Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek advisor to the Siamese court who was executed in 1688 on charges of treason, was only the most dramatic example.
In economic affairs, Europeans soon discovered that they were quite unable, even by the most drastic means, to monopolize the spice trade for which they had come. They generally were forced to engage in commerce by Southeast Asian rules and soon found themselves dependent on the local carrying trade for survival. For these reasons, the celebrated Portuguese conquest of Malacca in 1511 did not signal the dawn of an age of Western dominance in Southeast Asia. The majority of the population and much of the trading activity deserted the port, the sultan moved his court elsewhere, and by the end of the 16th century Malacca was a backwater; the Malay trade flourished elsewhere into the 18th century.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the Western presence represented nothing more than a minor irritant. European commercial tools, especially the ability to amass large amounts of investment capital, were different and, from a capitalistic point of view, more sophisticated and dynamic than those of the Southeast Asians. The Dutch and British East India companies often were able to make inroads on certain markets simply by having a large amount of money available, and it was possible for them to adopt long-term strategies by carrying large deficits and debts. Although company directors in Europe warned against the dangers—and costs—of involvement in local affairs, the representatives on the spot often could see no other course. Thus, soon after permanently establishing themselves on Java in 1618, the Dutch found themselves embroiled in the succession disputes of the court of Mataram and, by the late 1740s, virtual kingmakers and shareholders in the realm. Finally, Europeans did bring with them much that was new. Some items shaped Southeast Asian life in unexpected ways: the chili pepper, which the Spanish introduced from the New World, came to hold such an important place in the region’s diet that today Southeast Asian cuisine can hardly be imagined without it. Another import, however, was coffee, with a more ominous effect. Smuggled into Java in 1695 against Dutch East India Company rules, coffee by the early 18th century had become a company monopoly produced through a unique relationship between the Dutch and the local Javanese elite in a system that prefigured the one adopted by the 19th-century colonial state.
Patterns of a colonial age
Crisis and response
In the last half of the 18th century, all the major states of Southeast Asia were faced with crisis. The great political and social structures of the classical states had begun to decay, and, although the reasons for this disintegration are not altogether clear, the expanded size of the states, the greater complexity of their societies, and the failure of older institutions to cope with change all must have played a part. It is also likely that European efforts to choke and redirect the region’s trade had already done much to destroy the general prosperity that trade previously had provided, though Europeans were neither ubiquitous nor in a position to rule, even in Java. The most serious circumstances were undoubtedly those of Vietnam, where from 1771 to 1802 there raged a struggle—the Tay Son rebellion—over the very nature of the state. This rebellion threatened to sweep away the entire Confucian establishment of Vietnam, and perhaps would have done so if its leader had not attempted to accomplish too much too quickly. Elsewhere, war and confusion held societies in their grip for much shorter periods, but everywhere rulers were compelled to think of changed circumstances around them and what they meant for the future.
In the mainland states three great rulers of three new dynasties came to the fore: Bodawpaya (ruled 1782–1819) in Myanmar, Rama I (1782–1809) in Siam (Thailand), and Gia Long (1802–20) in Vietnam. All three were fully aware of the dangers, internal as well as external, that faced them and their people, and their efforts were directed at meeting these challenges. As their armies extended their reach beyond earlier limits, these rulers vigorously pursued a combination of traditional and new policies designed to strengthen their realms. Of particular importance were efforts to bring villages under closer state control, curb shifting patron-client relationships, and centralize and tighten the state administrative apparatus. The institution of kingship itself seemed to become more dynamic and intimately involved in the direction of the state. In retrospect, some of these policies had a recognizably modern ring to them, and, taken together, they represented, if not a revolution, at least a concerted effort at change. Even Gia Long, whose conscience and circumstance both demanded that he give special attention to reviving the classical Confucian past, quietly incorporated selected Western and Tay Son ideas in his government. Nor were the changes ineffectual, for by 1820 the large mainland states stood at the height of their powers. Nevertheless, it was uncertain whether these efforts would be sufficient to withstand the pressures of the immediate future.
Rama IRama I, statue at Phra Buddha Yodfa (Memorial Bridge), Bangkok.Heinrich Damm
In insular Southeast Asia the Javanese state confronted a similar crisis, but it had far less freedom with which to respond. The Gianti Agreement (1755) had divided the realm and given the Dutch decisive political and economic powers. Though resistance was not impossible, it was difficult, especially since the rulers and their courts were now largely beholden to the Dutch for their positions. The elite’s response to these circumstances generally has been interpreted as a kind of cultural introversion and avoidance of reality, a judgment that probably is too harsh. The Javanese culture and society of earlier days was no longer serviceable, and court intellectuals sought to find a solution in both a revitalization of the past and a clear-eyed examination of the present. Neither effort was successful, though not for want of trying. The idea of opposing Dutch rule, furthermore, was not abandoned entirely, and it was only the devastating Java War (1825–30) that finally tamed the Javanese elite and, oddly enough, left the Dutch to determine the final shape of Javanese culture until the mid-20th century.
Western dominance
Except in Java and much of the Philippines, the expansion of Western colonial rule in most of Southeast Asia was a phenomenon only of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. In the earlier period Europeans tended to acquire territory as a result of complicated and not always desired entanglements with Southeast Asian powers, either in disputes or as a result of alliances. After about 1850, Western forces generally were more invasive, requiring only feeble justification for going on the attack. The most important reasons for the change were a growing Western technological superiority, an increasingly powerful European mercantile community in Southeast Asia, and a competitive scramble for strategic territory. Only Siam remained largely intact and independent. By 1886 the rest of the region had been divided among the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish (who soon were replaced by the Americans), with the Portuguese still clinging to the island of Timor. What were often called “pacification campaigns” were actually colonial wars—notably in Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia—and continued well into the 20th century. More peaceful Western encroachments on local sovereignty also occurred until the 1920s. Full-blown, modern colonial states existed for only a short period, in many cases for not much more than a generation.
British territorial acquisitions in Burma.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
These colonial regimes, however, were not insubstantial, as they put down strong bureaucratic roots and—though often co-opting existing administrative apparatuses—formed centralized disciplined structures of great power. They were backed by the enormous economic resources of the industrialized Western nations, and by the early 20th century, having effectively disarmed the indigenous societies, they possessed a monopoly on the means of violence. There is no mistaking the impact of Western colonial governments on their surroundings, and nowhere is this more evident than in the economic sphere. Production of tin, oil, rubber, sugar, rice, tobacco, coffee, tea, and other commodities burgeoned, driven by both government and private activity. This brought rapid changes to the physical and human landscape and coupled Southeast Asia to a new worldwide capitalist system.
Indeed, colonial domination was only a variant condition in a rapidly changing world. Siam, which through a combination of circumstance and the wise leadership of Mongkut (ruled 1851–68) and Chulalongkorn (1868–1910) avoided Western rule, nevertheless was compelled to adopt policies similar to, and often even modeled on, those of the colonial powers in order to survive. Modernization appeared to require such an approach, and the Thai did not hesitate to embrace it with enthusiasm. Bangkok in the late 1920s surpassed even British Singapore as a centre of such modern amenities as electric lighting and medical facilities, and the state itself had achieved an enviable degree of political and economic viability among its colonial neighbours. The Thai may have “colonized themselves,” as some critics have noted, but in so doing they also escaped or diluted some of the more corrosive characteristics of Western rule, among them racism and cultural destruction. They also do not appear to have experienced the same degree of rural unrest that troubled their colonial neighbours in the 1920s and ’30s. They were unable, however, to avoid other concomitants of state expansion and modernization.
Transformation of state and society
It was not the purpose of the new states to effect rapid or broad social change. Their primary concerns were extending bureaucratic control and creating the conditions for success in a capitalist world economy; the chief necessity was stability or, as the Dutch called it, rust en orde (“tranquility and order”). Boundaries were drawn, villages defined, laws rewritten—all along Western lines of understanding, often completely disregarding indigenous views and practices—and the new structure swiftly replaced the old. Social change was desired only insofar as it might strengthen these activities. Thus, the Thai began early on to send princes to Europe for their education, employing them throughout the government on their return. The Dutch created exclusive schools for the indigenous administrative elite—a kind of petty royalty—and invented ways of reducing social mobility in this group, as, for example, by making important positions hereditary. But the new governments did not provide Western-style learning to most Southeast Asians, primarily because it was an enormous, difficult, and expensive task and also because policymakers worried about the social and political consequences of creating an educated class. Except in the Philippines, by the mid-1930s only a small percentage of indigenous children attended government-run schools, and only a fraction of those studied above the primary-school level. Some Southeast Asian intellectuals soon drew the conclusion that they had better educate themselves, and they began establishing their own schools with modern, secular courses of study. Some, like the Tonkin Free School in Vietnam (1907), were closed by the colonial regimes, their staffs and pupils hounded by police; others, like the many so-called “wild schools” in Indonesia in the 1930s, were much too numerous to do away with altogether, but they were controlled as carefully as possible.
Nevertheless, during the 1920s and ’30s a tiny but thoughtful and active class of Westernized Southeast Asian intellectuals appeared. They were not the first to literally and figuratively speak the language of the colonial rulers and criticize them, for by the turn of the 20th century Java and Luzon, with the longest experience under Western rule, had already produced individuals like the Javanese noblewoman Raden Adjeng Kartini and the Filipino patriot José Rizal. The newer generation, however, was more certain in its opposition to colonial rule (or, in Siam, rule by the monarchy), clearer and far more political in its conception of a nation, and unabashedly determined to seize leadership and initiative in their own societies. In Burma this group called themselves thakin (Burmese: “master”), making both sarcastic and proud use of an indigenous word that had been reserved for Burmese to employ when addressing or describing Europeans. These new intellectuals were not so much anti-Western as they were anticolonial. They accepted the existing state as the foundation of a modern nation, which they, rather than colonial officials, would control. This was the generation that captained the struggles for independence (in Siam, independence from the monarchy) and emerged in the post-World War II era as national leaders. The best-known figures are Sukarno of Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, and U Nu of Burma (subsequently Myanmar).
The chief problem facing the new intellectuals lay in reaching and influencing the wider population. Colonial governments feared this eventuality and worked to prevent it. Another obstacle was that the ordinary people, especially outside cities and towns, inhabited a different social and cultural world from that of the emerging leaders. Communication was difficult, particularly when it came to explaining such concepts as nationalism and modernization. Still, despite Western disbelief, there was considerable resentment of colonial rule at the lower levels of society. This was based largely on perceptions that taxes were too numerous and too high, bureaucratic control too tight and too prone to corruption, and labour too coercively extracted. In many areas there also was a deep-seated hatred of control by foreigners, whether they be the Europeans themselves or the Chinese, Indians, or others who were perceived as creatures of their rule. Most of the new intellectual elite were only vaguely aware of these sentiments, which in any case frequently made them uneasy; in a sense they, too, were foreigners.
In the 1930s, however, a series of anticolonial revolts took place in Burma, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Though they failed in their objectives, these revolts made it clear that among the masses lay considerable dissatisfaction and, therefore, radical potential. The revolts, and the economic disarray of the Great Depression, also suggested that European rule was neither invulnerable nor without flaws. When the outbreak of war in Europe and the Pacific showed that the colonial powers were much weaker militarily than had been imagined, destroying colonial rule and harnessing the power of the masses seemed for the first time to be real possibilities.
Japanese occupation
The arrival of the Japanese armed forces in Southeast Asia in 1941–42 did not, however, occasion independence. A few leaders perhaps had been naive enough to think that it might—and some others clearly admired the Japanese and found it acceptable to work with them—but on the whole the attitude of intellectuals was one of caution and, very quickly, realization that they were now confronted with another, perhaps more formidable and ferocious, version of colonial rule. The Japanese had no plans to radicalize or in any way destabilize Southeast Asia—which, after all, was slated to become part of a Tokyo-centred Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere; in the short term they sought to win the war, and in the long run they hoped to modernize the region on a Japanese model. Continuity served these purposes best, and in Indochina the Japanese even allowed the French to continue to rule in return for their cooperation. Little wonder that before long Southeast Asians began to observe that, despite “Asia for the Asians” propaganda, the new and old colonial rulers had more in common with each other than either had with the indigenous peoples.
Japanese expansion in the late 19th and 20th centuries.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Still, for two distinct reasons the period does represent a break from the past. First, the Japanese attempted to mobilize indigenous populations to support the war effort and to encourage modern cooperative behaviour on a mass scale; such a thing had never been attempted by Western colonial governments. Virtually all of the mobilization efforts, however, were based on Japanese models, and the new rulers were frustrated to discover that Southeast Asians did not behave in the same fashion as Japanese. Frequently the result was disorder, corruption, and, by the end of the war, a seething hatred of the Japanese. It was also the case that, both because the war was going against them and because the response to other approaches was unenthusiastic, the Japanese were compelled before long to utilize local nationalism in their mobilization campaigns, again something quite impossible under European rule. The consequences were to benefit local rather then Japanese causes and, ironically, to contribute handsomely to the building of anti-Japanese sentiments.
A second difference between Western and Japanese colonialism was in the opportunities the occupation provided the new educated elite. The Japanese were wary of these people because of their Western orientation but also favoured them because they represented the most modern element in indigenous society, the best partner for the present, and the best hope for the future. Often dismissed as “pseudo-intellectuals” by the Western colonial governments and prevented from obtaining any real stake in the state, the new intellectuals under the Japanese were accorded positions of real (though not unlimited or unsupervised) authority. Nor could Southeast Asians who found themselves in these positions easily fault the policies they now accepted responsibility for carrying out or at least supporting, since many of these policies were in fact—if not always in spirit—similar to ones they had endorsed in earlier decades. In short, the Western-educated elite emerged from the Japanese occupation stronger in various ways than they had ever been. By August 1945 they stood poised to inherit (or, given the variety of political conditions at the end of the war,to struggle among themselves over inheriting) the mantle of leadership over their own countries.
Southeast Asia was changed in an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, way by the Japanese occupation. Although returning Europeans and even some Southeast Asians themselves complained that Japanese fascism had deeply influenced the region’s societies, there is not much evidence that this was the case. Japanese rule, indeed, had destroyed whatever remained of the mystique of Western supremacy, but the war also had ruined any chances that it might be replaced with a Japanese mystique. There was clearly little clinging to Japanese concepts except where they could be thoroughly indigenized; even the collaboration issue, so important to Europeans and their thinking about the immediate postwar era, failed to move Southeast Asians for long. And, if the general population appeared less docile in 1945 than four years earlier, the reason lay more in the temporary removal of authority at the war’s end than in the tutelage of the Japanese.
Contemporary Southeast Asia
Struggle for independence
The swift conclusion of the war in the Pacific made it impossible for the former colonial masters to return to Southeast Asia for several weeks, in some areas for months. During the interim, the Japanese were obliged by the Allies to keep the peace, but real power passed into the hands of Southeast Asian leaders, some of whom declared independence and attempted with varying degrees of success to establish government structures. For the first time since the establishment of colonial rule, firearms in large numbers were controlled by Southeast Asians. Such was the groundwork for the establishment of new independent states.
Prewar nationalism had been most highly developed in Vietnam and Indonesia, and the colonial powers there were least inclined to see the new realities created by the war, perhaps because of the large numbers of resident French and Dutch and because of extensive investments. The result in both countries was an armed struggle in which the Western power was eventually defeated and independence secured. The Indonesian revolution, for all its internal complexities, was won in little more than four years with a combination of military struggle and civilian diplomacy. The revolution of the Vietnamese, who had defeated the French by 1954, continued much longer because of an internal political struggle and because of the role Vietnam came to play in global geopolitics, which ultimately led to the involvement of other external powers, among them the United States. In both cases, however, independence was sealed in blood, and a mythologized revolution came to serve as a powerful, unifying nationalist symbol. In the rest of Southeast Asia, the achievement of independence was, if not entirely peaceful, at least less violent. Malaysia and the Philippines suffered “emergencies” (as armed insurgencies were euphemistically called), and Burma, too, endured sporadic internal military conflict. For better or worse, these conflicts were no substitutes for a genuine revolutionary experience.
Whether by revolution or otherwise, decolonization proceeded rapidly in Southeast Asia. The newly independent states all aspired toward democratic systems more or less on the Western model, despite the lack of democratic preparation and the impress of nationalist sentiment. None expressed a desire to return to precolonial forms of government, and, although some Western observers professed to see in such leaders as Indonesia’s Sukarno Southeast Asian societies returning to traditional behaviour, their judgment was based more on ephemeral signs than on real evidence. For one thing, societies as a whole had been too much altered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to make it clear what “tradition” really was. For another, the new leadership retained the commitment to modernization that it had developed earlier. They looked forward to a new world, not an old one. The difficulty, however, was that there was as yet little consensus on the precise shape this new world should take, and colonial rule had left indigenous societies with virtually no experience in debating and reaching firm decisions on such important matters. It is hardly surprising that one result of this lack of experience was a great deal of political and intellectual conflict. Often forgotten, however, is another result: an outpouring of new ideas and creativity, particularly in literature. This signaled the beginning of a kind of cultural renaissance, the dimensions and significance of which are still insufficiently understood.
Defining new states and societies
The first two decades of independence constituted a period of trial and error for states and societies attempting to redefine themselves in contemporary form. During this time, religious and ethnic challenges to the states essentially failed to split them, and (except in the states of former Indochina) both communism and Western parliamentary democracy were rejected. Indonesia, the largest and potentially most powerful nation in the region, provided the most spectacular examples of such developments, ending in the tragic events of 1965–66, when between 500,000 and 1,000,000 lives may have been lost in a conflict between the Indonesian Communist Party and its opponents. Even Malaysia, long the darling of Western observers for its apparent success as a showcase of democracy and capitalist growth, was badly shaken by violence between Malays and Chinese in 1969. The turmoil often led Southeast Asia to be viewed as inherently unstable politically, but from a longer perspective—and taking into account both the region’s great diversity and the arbitrary fashion in which boundaries had been set by colonial powers—this perhaps has been a shortsighted conclusion.
The new era that began in the mid-1960s had three main characteristics. First, the military rose as a force in government, not only in Vietnam, Burma, and Indonesia but also in the Philippines and—quietly—in Malaysia. The military establishments viewed themselves as actual or potential saviours of national unity and also as disciplined, effective champions of modernization; at least initially, they frequently had considerable support from the populace. Second, during this period renewed attention was given by all Southeast Asian nations to the question of unifying (secular and national) values and ideology. Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam had been first in this area in the 1940s and ’50s, but the others followed. Even Singapore and Brunei developed ideologies, with the express purpose of defining a national character for their people. Finally, virtually all Southeast Asian states abandoned the effort of utilizing foreign models of government and society—capitalist or communist—and turned to the task of working out a synthesis better suited to their needs and values. Each country arrived at its own solution, with varying degrees of success. By the 1980s what generally had emerged were quasi-military bourgeois regimes willing to live along modified democratic lines—i.e., with what in Western eyes appeared to be comparatively high levels of restriction of personal, political, and intellectual freedom. Whatever their precise political character, these were conservative governments. Even Vietnam, the most revolutionary-minded among them, could not stomach the far-reaching and murderous revolution of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the mid-1970s and by the end of the decade had moved to crush it.
Tempting as it may be to conclude that greater doses of authoritarian rule (some of it seemingly harking back directly to colonial times) merely stabilized Southeast Asia and permitted the region to get on with the business of economic development, this approach was not successful everywhere. In Burma (called Myanmar since 1989) the military’s semi-isolationist, crypto-socialist development schemes came to disaster in the 1980s, revealing the repressive nature of the regime and bringing the country to the brink of civil war by the end of the decade. In the Philippines the assault by Pres. Ferdinand Marcos and his associates on the old ruling elite class brought a similar result, in addition to a spectacular level of corruption and the looting of the national treasury. In Vietnam, where the final achievement of independence in 1975 brought bitter disappointment to many and left the country decades behind the rest of the region in economic development, public and internal Communist Party unrest forced an aging generation of leaders to resign and left the course for the future in doubt as never before.
The states generally thought to be most successful—Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and especially Singapore—followed policies generally regarded as moderate and pragmatic. All were regarded as fundamentally stable and for that reason attracted foreign aid and investment; all achieved high rates of growth since the mid-1970s and enjoyed the highest standards of living in the region. Their very success, however, created unexpected social and cultural changes. Prosperity, education, and increasing access to world media and popular culture all gave rise, for example, to various degrees of dissatisfaction with government-imposed limitations on freedom and to social and environmental criticism. Particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia, there was a noticeable trend toward introspection and discussion of national character, as well as a religious revival in the form of renewed interest in Islam. It appeared that the comparatively small and unified middle class, including a generally bureaucratized military, was becoming larger, more complex, and less easily satisfied. That was undoubtedly not the intent of those who framed governmental policy, but it was a reality with which they had to deal.
Reappearance of regional interests
After the end of the 17th century, the long-developed polities of Southeast Asia were pulled into a Western-dominated world economy, weakening regional trade networks and strengthening ties with distant colonial powers. In the early years of independence these ties often remained strong enough to be called neocolonial by critics, but after the mid-1960s these partnerships could no longer be controlled by former colonial masters, and the new Southeast Asian states sought to industrialize and diversify their markets. On the one hand, this meant a far greater role for Japan in Southeast Asia; that country is by far the most important trading partner of most Southeast Asian nations. On the other, it meant that many countries began to rediscover commonalities and to examine the possibilities within the region for support and markets.
In 1967 the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formed by Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore (Brunei joined in 1985). This group’s initial interest was in security, but it moved cautiously into other fields. It played an important role, for example, in seeking an end to the Vietnam-Cambodia conflict and sought a solution to the civil strife in Cambodia. In economic affairs it worked quietly to discuss such matters as duplication of large industrial projects. Only since the mid-1980s has ASEAN been taken seriously by major powers or even sometimes by Southeast Asians themselves. The formerly Soviet-dominated states of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia became part of ASEAN during the 1990s, as did Myanmar. Such circumstances opened up greater regional markets and gave the region as a whole a more imposing world profile. In July 1994 the inaugural ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) was convened to facilitate talks between ASEAN and its “dialogue partners” across the globe.
At the turn of the 21st century, ASEAN was a major force for promoting regional trade and resolving security issues. In 2015 the ASEAN Economic Community was established to encourage economic integration and liberalization of economic policy among member states. ASEAN worked to end violence in East Timor and advocated on behalf of its members in the dispute with China over the Spratly Islands. It also took a leading role in the response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed at least 225,000 people throughout South and Southeast Asia. In 2017 ASEAN members and China formally endorsed a framework agreement that would govern the conduct of all signatories in the South China Sea. William H. Frederick The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Southeast Asia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 20 July 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Southeast-Asia
Access Date: August 27, 2019
Additional Reading
General
A comprehensive historical overview is Nicholas Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, 2 vol. (1992); while Milton Osborne, Southeast Asia, 5th ed. (1990), is a brief survey. John Frank Cady, Southeast Asia (1964), though older and marred by some factual errors, is well-organized. D.G.E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia, 4th ed. (1981), while thorough, is heavily slanted toward colonial topics and views.
Southeast Asia to c. 1750
Peter Bellwood, Prehistory of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (1985), is detailed and thought-provoking. Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia: From 10,000 bc to the Fall of Angkor (1989), complements Bellwood, with more focus on archaeology. Collections of essays include David G. Marr and A.C. Milner (eds.), Southeast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries (1986); and R.B. Smith and W. Watson (eds.), Early South East Asia (1979). Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, 2 vol. (1988–93), provides a broad-based glimpse of the region that previously had not been available. Donald F. Lach, Southeast Asia in the Eyes of Europe: The Sixteenth Century (1968), contains a selection of travel accounts by Europeans. Anthony Reid and Lance Castles (eds.), Pre-colonial State Systems in Southeast Asia (1975), includes several specific treatments. The classic by M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago Between 1500 and About 1630 (1962), is still useful. Lorraine Gesick (ed.), Centers, Symbols, and Hierarchies (1983), is a collection of essays on the region’s classical states.
Southeast Asia since c. 1750
David Joel Steinberg et al., In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History, rev. ed. (1987), is a sophisticated treatment, but its focus shifts from era to era. John Bastin and Harry J. Benda, A History of Modern Southeast Asia: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Decolonization (1968), although dated, is still worthy of careful attention. Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos, and Javanese From the 16th to the 20th Century and Its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (1977), is a convincing attack by a Southeast Asian intellectual on colonialism and colonial scholarship in the region. D.J.M. Tate, The Making of Modern South-East Asia, 2 vol. (1971–79), treats the middle portion of the colonial age in detail. David K. Wyatt and Alexander Woodside (eds.), Moral Order and the Question of Change (1982), explores social and intellectual history. Fred R. von der Mehden, South-East Asia, 1930–1970: The Legacy of Colonialism and Nationalism (1974), although dated, is a well-illustrated, useful introduction to the postwar region. Ronald D. Palmer and Thomas J. Reckford, Building ASEAN (1987), offers a basic introduction to the organization’s first 20 years. Each essay in Alfred W. McCoy (ed.), Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation (1974), has its own locale and slant, although it cannot substitute for a general history of the occupation. Jan Pluvier, South-East Asia from Colonialism to Independence (1974), is the most thorough treatment of the period 1942–c. 1965. Clark D. Neher, Southeast Asia in the New International Era (1991), has a political-science emphasis. William H. Frederick
Encyclopaedia Britannica Online
History of Latin America
Alternative Title: Hispanic America, Iberoamerica
Table of Contents
Introduction
The background
Early Latin America
The independence of Latin America
The wars of independence, 1808–26
Building new nations, 1826–50
The new order, 1850–1910
New order emerging, 1910–45
Latin America since the mid-20th century
History of Latin America, history of the region from the pre-Columbian period and including colonization by the Spanish and Portuguese beginning in the 15th century, the 19th-century wars of independence, and developments to the end of the 20th century.
Latin America.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language. The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th century as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century. Even since independence, many of the various nations have experienced similar trends, and they have some awareness of a common heritage. However, there are also enormous differences between them. Not only do the people live in a large number of independent units, but the geography and climate of their countries vary immensely. The inhabitants’ social and cultural characteristics differ according to the constitution of the occupants before the Iberian conquest, the timing and nature of European occupation, and their varying material endowments and economic roles.
Since the Spanish and Portuguese element looms so large in the history of the region, it is sometimes proposed that Iberoamerica would be a better term than Latin America. Latin seems to suggest an equal importance of the French and Italian contributions, which is far from being the case. Nevertheless, usage has fastened on Latin America, and it is retained here.
This article treats the history of Latin America from the first occupation by Europeans to the late 20th century, with an initial consideration of the indigenous and Iberian background. For more-detailed coverage of the area prior to European contact, see pre-Columbian civilizations. For additional information about the European exploration and colonization of Latin America, see colonialism. For information about the individual countries of Central America and South America as well as the Romance-language-speaking Caribbean countries, see specific country articles by name: for Central America, seeBelize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama; for South America, see Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana (a départément of France), Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela; and, for the Caribbean, see Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. See also the articles on the dependencies and constituent entities Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Puerto Rico. The physical and human geography of the continents, with some historical overview, are provided in the articles North America and South America. There is also a separate article Latin American literature. For discussion of major cities of Latin America and their histories, see specific articles by name—e.g., Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City.
The background
Though the conditions of pre-Columbian America and 15th-century Iberia are beyond the scope of Latin American history proper, they must be given consideration in that connection. Not only did the geography of precontact America persist, but both the new arrivals and the indigenous inhabitants long retained their respective general characteristics, and it was the fit between them that determined many aspects of Latin American evolution.
The indigenous world and the word “Indian”
From the time of Columbus and the late 15th century forward, the Spaniards and Portuguese called the peoples of the Americas “Indians”—that is, inhabitants of India. Not only is the term erroneous by origin, but it did not correspond to anything in the minds of the indigenous people. They had no word meaning “inhabitant of the Western Hemisphere,” and most of them seem not to have adopted any equivalent even after centuries of contact. Any such word refers to commonalities seen from the outside and not to any unity perceived by the inhabitants of the Americas themselves. The indigenous peoples were greatly varied, far more so than the Europeans; they were spread over a vast area and only faintly aware of each other from one major region to the next.
Nonetheless, the indigenous peoples had several things in common. They were closely related to one another in biological terms, and their languages, though they cannot be shown to have a common origin, tend to share many general features. All shared an isolation from the great mass of humanity inhabiting Eurasia and Africa, who were in some way in contact with one another. The inhabitants of America all lacked immunities to diseases common in Europe and Africa. They had some impressive innovations to their credit, including the domesticated plants of Mesoamerica and the Andes, but all had been kept apart from things that had long since spread over much of the rest of the globe, including steel, firearms, horses, wheeled vehicles, long-distance shipping, and alphabetic writing. As a result, the indigenous peoples, once in contact, were very vulnerable to the outsiders. Epidemics raged wherever intruders appeared; with their materials and techniques the Europeans were able to conquer whenever they felt it imperative to do so. There is, then, at times, a need for a common term, and if one realizes its limitations, “Indian” may do as well as another.
Types of Western Hemisphere societies
The Europeans were sedentary, living in nations and districts with distinct borders, relying on a permanent intensive agriculture to sustain many people in a variety of pursuits who lived in both urban and rural communities. One large section of the indigenous American population, in fact the most numerous, based in Mesoamerica (central and southern Mexico and Guatemala) and the central Andes, was also sedentary. Indeed, these peoples and the Europeans tended to have more in common with each other than either had with other peoples indigenous to the Americas. Another type of indigenous peoples may be called semisedentary. They lacked the permanent-site agriculture and the fixed borders of the sedentary peoples and were apparently far less numerous, but they had shifting agriculture and sizable, if frequently moving, settlements. They were found above all in relatively temperate forested areas. The third category that can be established is that of the nonsedentary peoples, who had little or no agriculture and moved annually in small bands over a large territory, hunting and gathering. They were located primarily in areas that under the then-existing technologies were not propitious for agriculture, especially plains and dense tropical forests.
Sedentary peoples
The sedentary peoples shared with the Europeans not only an agricultural base and dense, quite concentrated populations but also territorial states, hereditary rulers, state religions with priesthoods, specialized craft groups, social classes including a nobility distinct from commoners, and regularized taxes or tributes. Among some sedentary groups, large political structures—confederations or empires—had come into existence, collecting tribute and engaging in trade over long distances. The most famous of these are the Inca empire in the Andean region and what is often called the Aztec empire in Mexico (although the word Aztec was little known at the time). These empires were not nations but had at their centre one small ethnic state (or a few) that exercised dominance over a large number of similar states. The subject states retained their ethnic identity, their own rulerships, and their general way of life despite owing tribute to the imperial power. It was these subject entities that were to survive the conquest and serve as the base of the European presence. They had different names in different places, and indeed their structures varied, but they were everywhere enough like European small principalities, counties, or provinces to be able to function within a European framework.
Among the sedentary indigenous peoples, as in the Iberian system, the household held and worked land and paid taxes. In both, women were in some ways subordinate to men. But in both cultures they could hold and bequeath personal and real property and carry out various kinds of economic transactions, retaining many rights within marriage. In the matter of marriage alliances, crucial to the organization of both kinds of societies, the woman and her property and rank were as important as the man and his.
Semisedentary peoples
Among the semisedentary peoples, much of the above structure was missing. Without well-defined permanent local political units, strong rulers, or tax mechanisms, they did not offer the Europeans the same kind of potential foothold. They lacked social classes, depending on gender and age for their primary social distinctions. Even their household and family structures were different. Settlements or villages shifted over time both in location and in membership; the largest strongly defined unit was a household often containing scores of people related by blood and marriage, headed by the eldest male, and the best-defined duties in the society were internal to the household.
Among the sedentary peoples, men did most of the heavier agricultural work, with help only at times of peak workload from women, who were principally involved in processing and distributing the product, much as in Europe. Among the semisedentary peoples, men mainly hunted, only clearing the fields for the women, who did the bulk of the agricultural work. Warfare was highly developed among both the sedentary and the semisedentary peoples, but the semisedentary were more mobile, were better able to protect themselves in forests and other hazardous environments, and had more effective weapons. Their foods were less attractive to Europeans, and in any case they had less surplus and were fewer in number. They offered Europeans less incentive to invade and more effective resistance when they did.
Nonsedentary peoples
With the fully nonsedentary peoples, these factors were multiplied yet again. No agricultural stores at all were available to an invader, nor was there anyone who could readily be compelled to do agricultural work after conquest. The people were extremely few and spread over an enormous territory, able to move long distances at short notice. Their military potential was much greater than that even of the semisedentary peoples. With so little incentive for the Europeans to subdue them, so few points of contact between their societies, and such great ability and will on the part of the nonsedentary peoples to resist conquest, the main patterns between the two groups became avoidance and long-continuing conflict.
The Iberians
In most ways the Spaniards and Portuguese shared the characteristics of other European peoples. They did, however, have some special features as inhabitants of the Mediterranean region and the southwestern part of Europe.
Cities
In the late 15th century most of Iberia was consolidated into three kingdoms—Portugal, Castile, and Aragon—of which the last two were united through royal marriage. But society itself was still quite provincial. The most important entity for purposes of organization and affiliation was the city and the large territory attached to it. More people were engaged in agricultural and pastoral pursuits than anything else, yet society was urban-centred. Each province focused on a city where not only most governmental, ecclesiastical, professional, commercial, and craft personnel congregated but where even the families who controlled the largest rural estates resided. The town council, or cabildo, united representatives of the most prominent families of the whole province, which was thus not divided along urban and rural lines. Rather, a strong solidarity prevailed, with the less successful flowing to the edges, the more successful back to the centre. The cities that the Iberians established in the Americas had the same characteristics, becoming the means of organizing huge territories around a European settlement.
Family
Some characteristics of the Iberian family differed from those found in the northern European family, and these were to have profound effects on relations between Iberians and indigenous people in the Americas. In the Iberian tradition, families were multilinear and existed at different levels. A marriage did not subordinate the wife’s family to the extent common in the north of Europe. Women kept their maiden names after marriage, and the dowry given with them remained their own property. Some of the children of a given pair might take the name of one parent, some the name of the other, the choice often being determined by who ranked highest socially. Rather than counting only from father to son to grandson, the Iberians kept track of a network of connections, as many made through the female line as the male.
Formal marriage was undertaken only when the partners, and especially the male, considered themselves fully established. Men often married quite late, whereas women, for whom the possibilities of advance were severely limited, tended to marry earlier. Many couples never married at all, so that their children were in the strict legal sense illegitimate. While they were waiting, late-marrying men would have relationships with women of lower rank, and children were born of these informal unions. The result was that, despite the ostensible disapproval of the church, Iberian society was full of informal partners and illegitimate children.
A complex set of practices had grown up for the treatment of the women and children involved in informal unions. When the man finally decided to marry, he would often provide for his informal partner, giving her something as a dowry so that she could herself get married to someone of lower rank. The father might recognize the children of these unions, giving them his name and some sort of protection. They were not at the level of his legitimate children, but they were useful as trusted aides or stewards, and he might arrange marriages between the female children and his subordinates. In the Western Hemisphere, the lower-ranking women with whom Iberians had informal unions were often indigenous or African, and the children were racially mixed, but the Iberian patterns of treatment of those involved in the informal unions remained much the same, allowing for a vast amount of social and cultural contact and mixture.
Ethnic diversity and its results
Christians speaking closely related Romance languages made up the majority of the inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula, but they had long coexisted with a larger element of starkly distinct peoples than most of the other nations of Europe. Not only were the Basques in the northeast of different stock, but Iberia had been largely conquered in the early Middle Ages by Muslim Arabic speakers coming from northern Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. In a long process of reconquest, called the Reconquista, the Iberians had gained back all of the peninsula by the late 15th century, but the Moors, as they called them, were still the majority of the population in several areas along the southern coast, and as servants, slaves, and craftspeople they were to be found in many parts of the peninsula. A substantial number of Jews had also long made Iberia their home. For many decades the Portuguese had been exploring along the coast of Africa, bringing back many Africans as slaves. By the late 15th century Africans were present in considerable numbers in Portugal and also in the south of Spain.
The Iberian Christians’ relations with the other peoples, above all the Moors, were to be the precedent for their treatment of the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere. In the Reconquest (Reconquista) the Christians had pushed their rivals back through military force; those who carried out the conquests often went to settle among the Moors and were rewarded by the government with grants of land and other benefits. But the newly subjugated Muslims retained much of their organization and civilization for long periods, only gradually being Christianized and absorbed. As for the Jews, on the one hand they were resented and sometimes persecuted by Christian Iberians while on the other hand those who converted to Christianity often rose high in professional and political life and married well within Christian Iberian society.
The Africans had become a well-known group especially in the southern part of the peninsula, with accepted roles as house servants, craftspeople, and field workers. Possession of African slaves was part of general economic life and of social ambitions. Also, manumission was possible, and communities of freed Africans, many of them racially mixed, existed on the edges of society.
So much diversity represented a formidable challenge to the movement toward the creation of unified Christian nation-states that was coming to a head in the late 15th century. Those of the Jews and Moors who had refused to convert were in time forcibly expelled, and the Inquisition became active in the attempt to enforce the orthodoxy of those who had accepted conversion. Negative stereotypes concerning the other ethnicities were rife in Iberian culture, but over the centuries Iberia had seen diversity, close contact with different peoples, and their gradual absorption.
The overseas tradition
All Iberia’s coastal peoples had maritime experience. Yet farther inland the occupation of mariner was despised; expansion was deemed a matter of conquering and occupying contiguous territory rather than of far-flung commerce. It was the Italians, above all the Genoese, who brought the lore of overseas activity to the Iberians. From the eastern Mediterranean they carried the sugar industry, the use of foreign slaves in it, and the trinket trade with distant peoples first to Spain and Portugal and then on out into the Atlantic, where they were involved together with the Portuguese on the West African coast and the islands lying off it. By the time of contact with the Americas, the Spaniards had been affected by these developments to the extent that Sevilla (Seville) and some other ports were heavily engaged in overseas commerce, often under Genoese direction, but they still mainly adhered to the tradition of conquest and settlement, reinforced by their final defeat of the Spanish Moors in 1492. The Portuguese, on the other hand, partly because of Italian influence and partly because of their own geographic situation, had gone over thoroughly to the commercial-maritime tradition, emphasizing exploration, commerce, tropical crops, and coastal trading posts rather than full-scale occupation.
It is no accident, then, that Christopher Columbus was a Genoese who had long been in Portugal and had visited the Atlantic islands. His projects were entirely within the Italian tradition.
Early Latin America
Spanish America
The Spaniards were not only the first of the Europeans to reach the Americas in early modern times, but they also quickly located and occupied the areas of greatest indigenous population and mineral resources. They immigrated in force and created a far-flung, permanent network of new settlements.
The Caribbean phase
The islands of the Caribbean would soon become a backwater, but during the first years of Spanish occupation they were the arena of the development of many practices and structures that would long be central to Spanish-American life.
When Columbus returned to Spain from his voyage of 1492, having hit upon the island of Hispaniola (now divided between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) as his base, his concept of what should be done thereafter was in the Italian-Portuguese maritime tradition. He wanted to explore further for trading partners, and he considered all who came along with him to be employees of an enterprise headed by himself. The Spaniards, however, immediately started moving in the direction of their own traditions. The expedition that returned to Hispaniola in 1493 was far more elaborate than it needed to have been for Columbus’ purposes, containing a large number and variety of people, animals, and equipment for a large-scale, permanent occupation of the island. A conflict of purpose between the Spaniards on the one hand and Columbus with his Italian relatives and associates on the other soon ensued. By 1499 the royal government was intervening directly, naming Spaniards to the governorship and sending further large parties of settlers. Spanish ways soon gained the upper hand.
Santo Domingo, founded on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola in 1496, became a real city, with a rash of ephemeral secondary Spanish cities spread over the island. These were oriented to gold-mining sites, which were soon at the base of the Spanish economy. Indigenous demographic loss in this hot, humid area was quick and catastrophic, and placer mines (primarily in streams, where unconsolidated deposits of heavy, valuable minerals settled) also soon began to run out. In the second decade of the 16th century the Spaniards pushed on to the other large islands, where the cycle began to repeat itself, although more quickly; around the same time, expeditions to the mainland began, partly to seek for new assets and partly to try to replace the lost population on the islands.
The city
Santo Domingo became a type of entity that would reappear in every major area of Spanish occupation. The central city formed a stable headquarters for the Spaniards in the midst of a chaos of population loss and economic shifts in the countryside. The majority of all the Spaniards in the country lived there, at least when they could. Everyone of importance was there, with only underlings doing essential tasks located in the country. Governmental offices, churches, large private dwellings, and shops soon materialized around the city’s central square, together with all the people required for them. The urban core was well laid out and well built up. On the city’s edge everything was different. Here were the ranchos, impermanent structures inhabited mainly by Indians temporarily in town for work purposes. The Spanish-American city remained like this for centuries—Spanish in the centre, Indian on the edges, growing indefinitely without changing at the core, the site of an enormous process of cultural change.
Indians and Spaniards
In the Caribbean phase several mechanisms developed, combining indigenous and Spanish elements, that long formed the main structural ties between Indians and Spaniards on the mainland as well. The primary form through which Spaniards attempted to take advantage of the functioning of the indigenous world was what came to be known as the encomienda, a governmental grant of an indigenous sociopolitical unit to an individual Spaniard for him to use in various ways. On the Spanish side, the institution grew out of the Reconquest tradition. Pressure among the Spaniards on the scene led to the arrangement; Columbus, while governor, had opposed it, and Spanish royal authorities tried to restrict it as much as they could. On the indigenous side, the encomienda rested on an already existing unit and the powers of its ruler. The size and benefits of the encomienda thus depended on the local indigenous situation: there could be only as many encomiendas as there were indigenous units; the encomendero (holder of the grant) could at least initially receive only what the ruler had received before him. The larger islands were inhabited by the Arawak, a sedentary if modestly developed people with kingdoms, rulers, nobles, and obligatory labour mechanisms. Their ruler was called a cacique, and the Spaniards adopted the word and carried it with them wherever they went in the Americas. The cacique received labour but not tribute in kind, and the encomendero, in practice, followed suit.
The encomendero used the indigenous labour in various ways: to construct houses in the Spanish city where he lived, to provide servants, to produce agricultural products on properties he acquired, and above all to work in the growing gold-mining industry. The encomienda set up most of the main forms of Spanish-Indian contact. Although based on traditional mechanisms, it involved major movements of people and new types of activity. Through these dislocations and the exposure of the Indians to new diseases, the encomienda was instrumental in the quick virtual disappearance of the indigenous population on the large islands.
The encomienda was primarily a transaction between the encomendero, the cacique, and his people, but it could not stop there. Auxiliaries with European skills were needed to run mining operations and supervise the growing of European crops and livestock. The encomendero would hire some Spaniards in supervisory capacities, augmented by African slaves when possible, but the limits of his resources were soon reached. He needed permanent indigenous employees who could learn needed skills and act as a cadre. The indigenous world already knew the naboría, a person directly and permanently dependent upon the ruler or a noble. This role was appropriated by the Spaniards, who commandeered substantial numbers of Indians for their permanent employ, calling them naborías. On the mainland the permanent indigenous worker was to become an ever-growing element of the equation, the locus of the greatest cultural change, and a channel between the Spanish and indigenous worlds.
In the Reconquest tradition, the Spaniards believed that non-Christians taken in battle could properly be enslaved. Nevertheless, the bulk of the sedentary population in the Caribbean and on the mainland was not enslaved. Only as the population declined seriously did slave-raiding around the edges of the Caribbean become a major factor, the Spaniards attempting in vain to replace the losses. All over Spanish America, Indian slavery was to be a secondary factor, brought into play mainly with less-than-sedentary peoples and under economic pressures—that is, the lack of other assets. The slaves were always, as in this case, employed far from their place and culture of origin.
A new Spanish subculture
Cacique was not the only word and concept incorporated into local Spanish culture in the Caribbean and spread from there wherever the Spaniards went. Some of the new cultural goods were the result of Spanish action, like the encomienda or the ranchos; others were straight out of the indigenous world, including naboría, maíz (corn; maize), canoa (canoe), coa (digging stick), and barbacoa (grill, palisade, anything with pointed sticks, the origin of the English word barbecue). Still others came out of the Portuguese Atlantic tradition, like rescate (literally rescue or redemption), a word for informal trading with indigenous people often involving force and taking place in a setting where conquest had not yet taken place. This whole new overlay on Hispanic culture maintained itself partly because it was adjusted to the new situation but above all because each set of new arrivals from Spain readily adopted it from the old hands already there.
Conquest in the central mainland areas
The Spanish occupation of the larger Caribbean islands did not entail spectacular episodes of military conflict. Yet force was involved, and the Spaniards developed many of the techniques they would use on the mainland. One of the most important was the device of seizing the cacique in a parley, then using his authority as the entering wedge. The Spaniards also learned that the indigenous people were not a solid unit but would often cooperate with the intruders in order to gain advantage against a local enemy.
Also during the Caribbean phase an expeditionary form evolved that was to carry the Spaniards to the far reaches of the hemisphere. Spanish expansion occurred under royal auspices, but expeditions were conceived, financed, manned, and organized locally. The leaders, who invested most, were senior people with local wealth and a following; the ordinary members were men without encomiendas, often recently arrived. The primary leader of an important expedition was often the second-ranking man in the base area, just behind the governor, ambitious to be governor himself but blocked by the incumbent.
There was no permanent organization and no sense of rank. The word “army” was hardly used, and the word “soldier” not at all; still, the possession of steel helmets, steel swords and lances, and horses gave the Spaniards an overwhelming technical advantage over any indigenous force they were likely to meet. On flat, open ground, two or three hundred Spaniards often defeated indigenous armies of many thousands, suffering few casualties themselves. The conquering groups showed a surprising diversity, coming from many different regions of Spain (plus some foreign countries) and representing a broad cross section of Spanish pursuits. It was they who founded and settled in the new cities, and the later stream of immigration initially consisted primarily of their relatives and compatriots. Conquest and settlement were a single process.
Having in about one generation largely exhausted the demographic and mineral potential of the Greater Antilles, the Spaniards began a serious push toward the mainland in two approximately contemporary streams, one from Cuba to central Mexico and surrounding regions and the other from Hispaniola to the Isthmus of Panama region and on to Peru and associated areas. The Peruvian thrust started first, in Tierra Firme (the area of Panama and present northwestern Colombia) in the years 1509–13. The results were appreciable, but the Panamanian occupation was thrown somewhat in the shadow for a time by the spectacular conquest of central Mexico in 1519–21.
Conquest of Mexico
The leader of the Mexican venture, Hernán (Hernando) Cortés, had some university education and was unusually articulate, but he conformed to the general type of the leader, being senior, wealthy, and powerful in Cuba, and the expedition he organized was also of the usual type. Passing by the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula, the Spaniards landed in force on the central coast, almost immediately founding Veracruz, which despite small shifts in location has been the country’s main port ever since. The Aztec empire, or Triple Alliance, of the city-states of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tacuba, centring on the Mexica (Aztec) of Tenochtitlán, dominated central Mexico. The coastal peoples among whom the Spaniards landed, however, had only recently been incorporated in the Aztec tribute system, and they offered the Spaniards no open resistance.
Moving inland, the invaders encountered the second power of the region, the Tlaxcalans. Tlaxcala briefly engaged the Spaniards in battle but, suffering heavy losses, soon decided to ally with them against their traditional enemy, the Aztec. As the Spaniards moved on toward Tenochtitlán, many of the local subordinate states (altepetl) also came to terms. Even in Tenochtitlán itself fighting did not ensue immediately; the Spaniards as usual seized the cacique (that is, the king of Tenochtitlán, often called the Aztec emperor, Montezuma or Moteucçoma) and began to exercise authority through him.
The expected secondary reaction was not long in coming, and fighting broke out in the capital. At this point the most unusual part of the process began, for Tenochtitlán was on an island in the midst of a lake, shot through with canals and extensively built up. Here the Spaniards lost much of their usual advantage. They were forced from Tenochtitlán with severe casualties. Although they retained their superiority in the open country, they had to retire to Tlaxcala, accumulate reinforcements, and then come back to Tenochtitlán to carry out a unique full-scale siege, including the use of European-style vessels with cannon on the lake. After four months the Spaniards captured the Aztec capital and began turning it into their own headquarters as Mexico City.
Other parts of central Mexico came under Spanish control more easily, and several Spanish cities were established in the region. Soon successor conquests were under way, to Guatemala, Yucatán, and the north. Those to the north led to little in the short run because that area was inhabited by less-sedentary peoples. Cortés acted as governor for a time and was given great rewards, but rivalries among the Spaniards soon made it possible for the royal government to replace him, first with an audiencia, or high court, and then also with a viceroy, direct representative of the Spanish king.
Conquest of Peru
The Spanish thrust toward Peru through Panama was diverted for some years by the attractions of nearby Nicaragua. No one knew what lay along the southern coast, which because of contrary winds was very difficult to navigate; the coastal climate was hostile, and little wealth was discovered among the people dwelling there. Attempts in this direction were led by Francisco Pizarro, who despite being illegitimate and illiterate had all the other familiar characteristics of the leader; not only was he the illegitimate son of a prominent family but he also was one of the first captains on the American mainland, by the 1520s a wealthy encomendero and town council member of Panama. At length Pizarro’s group came into contact with central Andean coastal people connected with the Inca and saw evidence of great wealth and development. Acquiring from the crown the governorship of the new region, which now began to be called Peru, Pizarro, in 1530, led an expedition that proceeded into Inca territory. In 1532, at the north-central site of Cajamarca, the Inca emperor Atahuallpa was captured in the usual fashion, a parley and surprise attack. In 1533, after much treasure had been collected, the Spaniards had Atahuallpa executed.
The process of conquest and occupation was much as in Mexico, though Pizarro was not thinking of Mexican precedents. Again, once the Spaniards were in the fully sedentary lands of the Inca, the local people hardly attacked them, allowing them to proceed unhindered into the very presence of the imperial ruler. In addition to a localism similar to that of Mexico, the situation was defined by a large-scale Inca civil war that was just ending as the Spaniards arrived. A faction based in Quito, headed by Atahuallpa, had defeated a faction based in Cuzco, the traditional Inca capital, but the victory had not been entirely consummated, and the parties were still very bitter. After the events at Cajamarca, the Spaniards faced a certain amount of fighting as they advanced to Cuzco, especially from adherents of Atahuallpa, but his enemies, who seem to have been the majority on the ground, tended to acquiesce for the time being.
The Spaniards founded a major Spanish city in Cuzco, but they stopped short of making it their capital as their compatriots had Tenochtitlán in Mexico. Deterred by the rigours and inaccessibility of the southern Peruvian highlands, after a bit of experimentation they established the new settlement of Lima, on the central coast, as capital of Peru. The move was of vast significance. In Mexico the bulk of the Spanish population concentrated in the area of highest indigenous population density, favouring contact, cultural change, and merging. In Peru, the highland centre of indigenous population was separate from the centre of Spanish population on the coast, which, in addition, quickly lost most of its indigenous inhabitants to disease. In consequence, the two peoples and cultures underwent an overall slower and less thorough process of amalgamation.
As in Mexico, conquering expeditions soon went out from central Peru, in all directions: to Quito and on north to Colombia, to Chile and Argentina to the south, and even to the Amazon. Peru proper seemed to be securely conquered, but a countrywide uprising took place in 1536, centring in Cuzco, where the Spaniards were kept surrounded for more than one year, until an expedition returning from Chile lifted the siege. After that, the conquest was definitive, although the successor to the Inca ruler and a group of followers took refuge in a remote region, where they held out for more than a generation.
Peru’s history continued to be less placid than that of Mexico. Peru was much harder to reach from Spain, and travel within the country was extremely difficult. In the conquest period and long after, Peru was far richer in precious metals than Mexico, since the Spaniards profited from the silver mining already developed by the Inca. Thus there was more to fight over, and struggles arose between the Pizarro brothers (Francisco had three) and a faction led by Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s junior partner. Spaniards flooded into the country, eager for encomiendas and ready to rebel in order to get them. Four large-scale civil wars among the Spaniards rocked the country in the time between the late 1530s and early 1550s.
Like Cortés and like most leaders of successful expeditions, Pizarro became governor of the country he had conquered and actually held that position longer than Cortés. In 1541, however, he was assassinated, brought low by the second of the Almagrist rebellions. A royally appointed governor from outside took over, followed in 1544 by a viceroy and audiencia based in Lima; the first viceroy was in turn killed in a civil conflict, but his successors became more firmly established.
Conquest society in the central mainland areas
In the generation or two subsequent to the military phase of the conquest, Spanish immigrants poured by the thousands into Mexico and Peru. Although still a small minority compared with the indigenous population, they constituted the great majority of all Europeans in the hemisphere, so that these two regions could now be doubly called central areas. They combined the largest European and indigenous populations with the liveliest economies, for they proved to be the sites of the richest deposits of precious metals then known. The immigrants continued to come from all parts of Spain, constituting an even broader cross section than had the conquerors, for women were now a standard part of the stream.
The central-area encomienda
Already crucial in the Caribbean, the encomienda now developed even further. The Mexican and Andean indigenous units on which it was based were much larger, with stronger authorities who could collect tribute in kind as well as labour. Moreover, the products could circulate in an economy with a great deal more liquid wealth, and there were now many more non-encomenderos, who soon formed the great majority of all Spaniards. The encomenderos greatly enlarged their staffs and followings, with various levels of stewards and many more African slaves, whom they could now afford. The ecclesiastics who now began serious work with the indigenous people of the countryside operated within the framework of the encomienda and received their remuneration from it. The encomenderos went not only into mining and local agrarian activity on a larger scale than before but also into a large variety of ancillary enterprises. Their establishments in the city centre were often palatial, including shops rented to merchants and artisans, of whom they were the best customers. They married Spanish women, ideally relatives of other encomenderos or of high local officials, if only to have legitimate heirs to inherit the encomienda. They became an interlocking group dominating local Hispanic society and virtually monopolizing the municipal councils of the Spanish cities. The process whereby Hispanic society penetrated into the hinterland was begun by their usually humble rural employees, who combined tax collecting, labour supervision, farming, and livestock growing.
Artisans
The Spanish crafts flourished in the encomenderos’ cities, practiced by artisans who had a far humbler social profile than the encomenderos but were like them in being tied to the locality. They, too, frequently married Spanish women and acquired urban and rural property. To increase their productivity, they bought African slaves, whom they trained in their own trades; the Africans in turn helped train the larger number of Indian apprentices to be found in many shops. In this way the artisans were important in the gradual creation of an ever-growing African, indigenous, and mixed group in the cities, able to speak Spanish and practice the Spanish trades.
Spanish women
Spanish women were an important element in the sedentary urban society growing up in the central areas. The women were above all relatives of Spanish men already present, brought from Spain explicitly to marry some local associate. As wives of encomenderos and artisans, they managed households that included many Spanish guests and employees and even larger numbers of Africans and Indians, whom they attempted to mold to their purposes. They also brought up both their own fully Spanish children and the racially mixed children they often took or were given to raise. As widows and sometimes spinsters, they actively participated in economic life, though women’s independent activity tended to be channeled into certain conventional directions, from indirect investment and owning urban real estate at the higher levels to running bakeries and taverns at the lower. Women were at first a small minority of the Spanish population, but their relative numbers steadily increased, reaching effective parity with men by the second or third generation after conquest.
Africans
Africans also were important to the society. As stated, encomenderos and artisans acquired African slaves, and any Spaniard of means would try to own at least one or two. Thus Africans were soon a significant group numerically; on the Peruvian coast, at least, it is thought that after several decades they equaled the Spaniards in numbers. Spaniards needed auxiliaries serving as intermediaries between themselves and the much larger indigenous population. Africans, who shared the Spaniards’ Old World immunities and much else, survived and adapted well; the main limitation on acquiring them was the great expense involved.
The gender ratio strongly favoured males, but females were present too, usually in household service, food trades, and petty commerce. The women were frequently mistresses of their owners, to whom they bore mulatto children, with the result that mother and children were sometimes freed. Other African slaves bought their freedom, and a mainly urban class of free blacks began to emerge. Their roles were similar to those of the slaves, except for being exercised more independently.
In this society, the slave, or at least the African slave, was not at the bottom of society but ranked in Spanish terms higher than the general Indian population. Africans were more closely associated with the Spaniards than Indians, culturally more like them, given more skilled and responsible tasks, and in cross-ethnic hierarchies were normally in charge of indigenous people.
Indians among Spaniards
Spanish cities, from the very beginning, were full of Indians working for Spaniards in a great number of capacities, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for long periods, but usually at a low level. One of the most important features of life in the first postconquest decades was the prevalence of Indian servant-mistresses of Spaniards, the result of the fact that Spanish women were still much less numerous than men, not to speak of the pattern of men waiting for full success before marrying. These indigenous women retained many aspects of their traditional culture, but they had to learn good Spanish and master skills of Spanish home and family life. They bore the Spaniards mestizo children, who were to become a very important feature of postconquest society.
Commerce
Merchants were present in force and vital to the existence of the overall complex. But as members of a far-flung network that required high geographic mobility, they were at first less a part of local society. Once the wealth of the central areas became apparent, Sevilla-based firms began to dominate the import-export trade—the exchange of American precious metals for European cloth, iron, manufactures, and other goods. The representatives at American ports and capitals were junior partners in transatlantic firms and in time expected to move on; hence they seldom married or bought property locally. The aim was to get silver back to Sevilla in order to pay debts and reinvest in merchandise. Second-rank merchants, however, without direct ties to Sevilla, were more likely to develop local roots.
Commerce in local goods, often but not always of indigenous origin, was carried on by members of a well-defined social type, sometimes called tratantes, with a profile sharply distinct from that of the long-distance merchants. Often illiterate, and furthermore without capital, they were recruited from among the most marginal members of local Hispanic society. They, too, were relatively unstable; they were prone to move to another area or into other kinds of activity because their status was so precarious.
Mining
The mining sector drove the economy of the Spanish world and was an indispensable component of it, yet in several ways it stood apart. It employed only a relatively small proportion of the total Spanish population. Mining complexes were often remote from the main centres of indigenous settlement and hence also from the network of Spanish cities. Turnover was quick, whether in terms of sites, mining enterprises, or individuals.
Gold mining was often virtually an expeditionary activity; a gang of Indians, joined perhaps by some blacks and led by one or two Spanish miners, might spend only days or weeks at a given river site. An encomendero, not himself physically involved, would likely supply the finances and take most of the profit. In many regions gold mining was seasonal, with miners having neither special training nor a full commitment to the industry.
In most regions placer gold was soon exhausted, though Mexico relied on it for a generation, and it eventually became the principal export of New Granada (present-day Colombia). Silver mining was the successor, and it became the main export asset of the central areas until the time of independence. Here too the encomenderos were the greatest investors and mine owners in the beginning, but their dominance was short-lived. Silver mining was the type of technically demanding, capital-intensive enterprise that called for close attention and much expertise on the part of owners. Very soon true silver mining experts began not only to operate the mines but to become the owners as well.
Spanish law granted the crown residual ownership of mineral deposits, giving it the right to levy substantial taxes on the industry. There was always a governmental presence at mining sites, and the silver tax was the crown’s principal source of revenue. Silver mining camps began to resemble ordinary Spanish municipalities, with councils (dominated by local mining entrepreneurs) and strong contingents of merchants, craftspeople, and professionals.
By 1550 strong differences had developed between the Mexican and the Peruvian silver mining industries. In the Andes the great deposits, of which those of Potosí Mountain (in present Bolivia) were overwhelmingly predominant, were within the territory of sedentary indigenous population; moreover, the Andeans had a strong tradition of long-distance labour movements. Thus indigenous labour obligations, channeled first through the encomienda and later through other arrangements, could supply a large stream of temporary workers. In addition, there were a number of permanent indigenous workers, some of whom possessed skills inherited from the preconquest period, and, in an industry as technical as mining, this group was constantly growing. Even so, the Peruvian mines used large numbers of temporary labourers under governmental obligation, and their presence greatly slowed down cultural change among the indigenous mine workers.
In Mexico, most of the largest silver mining sites were discovered well to the north of the zone of sedentary population. Traditional labour obligations could not be used, and the bulk of the labour force consisted from the beginning of sedentary Indians from the centre acting as free agents, naborías, or permanent workers. The Mexican mines also used far fewer people, so that the Hispanic element predominated more than in Peru, and the north of Mexico was soon on its way to having a Hispanized, mobile population very different from that in the central part of the country.
Institutional, legal, and intellectual developments
From early in the Caribbean phase the crown had established the Casa de Contratación, or board of trade, in Sevilla, apparently originally intended to operate the entire overseas enterprise on an Italian model. In fact, it soon became a customs and emigration office, involved also in the organization of Atlantic convoys. Direction of the governmental aspect of overseas life went to a royal council constituted much like others, the Council of the Indies (as the Spaniards continued to call America), which issued decrees, heard appeals, and above all made appointments to high offices. Distances were such that almost everything governmental depended on the officials actually in America.
During the conquest and immediately thereafter, royal government was nominal in the sense that the governor was invariably merely the leader of the conquering expedition. But in the central areas, with the rivalries and wars among the conquerors and continued strong Spanish immigration, the royal government was soon able to install its own institutional network, with the support of many local Spaniards. As stated earlier, before 1550 both Mexico and Peru had a viceroy and an audiencia, based in the respective capitals, and some secondary audiencias followed; there were substantial treasury offices as well, for the crown’s most urgent interest in the new areas was getting silver revenue. A host of lawyers and notaries assembled in the capitals around these nuclei and their branches in the secondary Spanish cities. The viceroys brought with them retinues including an element of high nobility. Marriage alliances and business deals soon brought the officials into connection with the more important encomenderos.
Church organizations, which in the Spanish scheme of things were part of the overall governmental framework (the crown appointed bishops and many other high officials of the church), also came into the central areas in force on the heels of the conquest. Few clerics of any kind were with the actual conquering expeditions, but soon parties of friars arrived. They were followed by bishops and cathedral chapters, established first in the capitals and then in secondary cities; the culmination of the process was the seating of archbishops in Lima and Mexico City. Both the friars and the priests began to penetrate the countryside, operating through the encomiendas, with the ideal (long unrealized) of having one cleric for each encomienda. Like the governmental officials, ecclesiastics were closely connected with the civil society; some were appointed in the first place because of family connections, and many tried to marry female relatives to encomenderos.
These institutions were an important part of the general scheme, but they depended on local Hispanic civil society and reflected its relative strength or weakness. Governmental and ecclesiastical hierarchies were as urban-oriented as all other aspects of Spanish society; they were based in the cities, above all the largest cities, where one could find not only the largest concentrations of personnel but all those of high rank. The religious orders were a partial exception, rotating their members frequently; nevertheless, the most famous figures spent the bulk of their lives in larger centres. As for the government, it hardly existed outside the cities; the local magistrates who gradually came to be appointed in the Indian areas were mainly laymen, often unsuccessful candidates for encomiendas.
In the aftermath of the conquests, as they became integrated into the local situation, some ecclesiastics began to criticize Spanish institutions, especially the encomienda. However, the various representatives of the church were not entirely unified. The secular clergy said little; among the orders, the pragmatic Franciscans wanted a higher moral tone and better treatment of the Indians but were prepared to work through the encomienda; the more doctrinaire Dominicans, of whom Bartolomé de las Casas was the most famous and most persistent, spoke for the total abolition of the encomienda, with the clergy to be in charge of the Indians. At the same time, the Spanish royal government was seeking to find ways to increase its authority and in alliance with the Dominicans passed antiencomienda legislation. Resistance among the settlers and conquerors was fierce (the greatest of the Peruvian civil wars was in direct reaction to the strongest legislation, the New Laws of 1542). But in combination with other factors (of which indigenous population loss and the presence in the central areas of many non-encomenderos were the most essential), in the course of the 16th century the encomienda lost its labour monopoly and had its tribute in kind curtailed, while many encomiendas without legal successors reverted to direct crown administration.
The conquerors and early settlers produced a large number of histories describing and praising their exploits. The ecclesiastics, as they came in, began to write similar documents about their own activities, but they also went much further. Some, with the Franciscans most prominent, showed a strong interest in the study of indigenous history, language, and culture; others, especially the Dominicans, wrote in a more polemical spirit; and sometimes the two currents converged. The arts of literacy were much prized by the upper levels of the Spanish population, and universities, mainly for professional training, were soon established in the viceregal capitals.
Trunk lines
Not only were the central areas different from the fringes in early Latin America, but important distinctions existed within the central areas themselves. In some ways the centre was more a line than a region—that is, a line from Atlantic port to capital to mines, along which European people and products flowed in and silver flowed out. For Mexico, the line went from Veracruz to Mexico City and on to Zacatecas and other mines of the north. In the more complex Peruvian scheme, the line went from the Isthmus of Panama to Lima and on to Potosí. It was along these routes that the Spanish and African populations concentrated, that social, economic, and governmental institutions were first created, then gelled and thickened, and that cultural and social change proceeded most quickly.
Postconquest indigenous society
Although the majority of the indigenous population continued to live in their traditional units across the countryside, their lives were nonetheless profoundly affected by the conquest and its aftermath. The most obvious development was drastic demographic loss; in a process marked by periodic large epidemics, the population declined through the 16th century and on into the 17th century to a small fraction (impossible to determine withprecision) of its precontact size. Only in hot, low-lying areas, such as the Peruvian and Mexican coastal regions, however, were losses as disastrous as those of the Caribbean islands. The peoples of the temperate highlands, however much they may have diminished in numbers, survived in the sense of retaining their local units, their language, much of their cultural heritage, and the essence of their social organization.
The Nahuas of central Mexico are the people whose postconquest experience is best understood because of the voluminous records they produced in their own language. These records reveal that the Nahuas were not overly concerned with the Spaniards or the conquest, which seemed to them at first much like earlier conquests; they remained preoccupied to a large extent with their internal rivalries. The local state, the altepetl, with its rotating constituent parts, remained viable as a functioning autonomous unit and as bearer of all major Spanish structural innovations, not only the encomienda but also the parish and the indigenous municipality. The Nahuas accepted Christianity and built large churches for themselves, but those churches had the same function as preconquest temples, acting as the symbolic centre of the altepetl, and the saints installed in them had the same function as preconquest ethnic gods. The status and duties of the commoners remained distinct from those of the nobles, who manned the local Hispanic-style government of the altepetl as they had filled offices in preconquest times.
The household and land regime remained much the same in its organization despite reductions and losses. Household complexes, for example, continued to be divided into separate dwellings for the constituent nuclear families. The Spanish concept “family” had no equivalent in Nahuatl, and none was ever borrowed. The greatest internal social change was a result of the end of warfare, which had been endemic in preconquest times. Performance in war had provided degrees of social differentiation, avenues of mobility, and a large supply of slaves. Formal slavery among Indians soon disappeared, while internal social mobility tended to take the form of commoners claiming to be nobles or denying specific rights to specific lords. However, the categories themselves were not challenged: the strong distinction between commoner and noble was not soon erased. An entirely new type of mobility had come into existence—movement of Indians away from the whole realm of indigenous society in the direction of the Spanish world to become naborías or city dwellers.
The peoples from central Mexico to Guatemala had forms of recordkeeping on paper in preconquest times, and after the arrival of the Spaniards a remarkable cooperation between Spanish ecclesiastics and indigenous aides led to the adaptation of the Latin alphabet to indigenous languages and subsequently to regular record production. In the case of Nahuatl, the main language of central Mexico, the records have allowed the tracing of some basic lines of cultural and linguistic evolution in three stages. During the first generation, although cataclysmic change was occurring, Nahua concepts changed very little, and their language could hardly be said to have changed at all, using its own resources to describe anything new. In a second stage, beginning about 1540 or 1545 and lasting for nearly 100 years, Nahuatl borrowed many hundreds of Spanish words, each representing a cultural loan as well. But all were grammatically nouns; other innovations in the language were minimal. This was a time of change in a familiar corporate framework, centring on areas of close convergence between the two cultures. A third stage began about the middle of the 17th century, when Spaniards and Nahuas had come into closer contact, and many Nahuas were bilingual. Now there were no limitations on the kinds of things introduced into the language, and change increasingly took place at the level of the individual, with mediation no longer necessary.
The Nahuas had structures perhaps more similar to those of the Spaniards than any other indigenous group, and nowhere else was there such massive interaction of Spanish and indigenous populations, but broadly similar processes were at work across the central areas. Among the Maya of Yucatán, the direction and nature of the evolution was closely similar but much slower, corresponding to the relatively small Spanish presence there. The Yucatec Maya language stayed in something comparable to the second stage of Nahuatl for the entire time up to independence.
In the Andes too the indigenous social configuration was sufficiently close to the Spanish that it could serve as the basis for institutions such as the encomienda and parish. But Andean sociopolitical units were less contiguous territorially than those of central Mexico or Spain, and the population engaged in more seasonal migration. Thus the local ethnic states of the Andes, comparable to the altepetl of the Nahuas (though far less well understood) as the framework of social continuity, may have come under greater challenge of their essential character and identity. The Spaniards tended to reassign noncontiguous parts of one entity to other entities geographically closer, thereby mutilating the original entity. As far back as can be traced, the postconquest Andeans were inclined to migrate permanently from their home entity to another, whether to avoid taxes and labour duties or for other reasons. Such movement occurred in Mexico too, but there the new arrivals tended to melt into the existing entity, whereas in the Andes they remained a large separate group without local land rights or tribute duties, known in Spanish as forasteros. Another challenge to indigenous society came in the later 16th century in the form of attempts by the Spanish government to reorganize sociopolitical units, nucleating the population in so-called reducciones, with consequent social upheaval. Still another apparent disruptive force was the Spanish use of obligatory rotary labour of large groups for relatively long periods at great distances. Yet given the mobility of the Andean peoples from preconquest times, strong continuities may have been involved.
The Andeans had sophisticated recordkeeping systems in preconquest times but did not put records on paper with ink, and after the conquest they did not engage in alphabetic writing on the same scale as the indigenous people of Mesoamerica. Some indigenous-language records are now beginning to come to light, however, and so far cultural-linguistic evolution appears far more similar to that of central Mexico in nature, staging, and timing than one would have expected.
The central areas in the mature period
In the 1570s and ’80s the central areas went through a process of codification and institutionalization marking the beginning of a long time of slow transformation, which can be called the mature period. Among the new institutions were those formalizing functions that had long been evolving, including the consulados, or merchant guilds, of Mexico City and Lima and tribunals of the Inquisition in the same places (plus Cartagena on the Colombian coast). Entirely new was the Jesuit order, which entered in force at the beginning of this time, quickly becoming strong in urban areas. During these decades nunneries inhabited by daughters of substantial Spanish families came to be a normal feature in any thriving city.
Intellectual production began to include not only narrow chronicles but also broad surveys of the entire Spanish-American scene, whether religious, legal, or general in focus. For a time most of the writers were acquainted with both hemispheres, but by the later 17th century locally born Spanish figures were becoming prominent, such as the famous poet, dramatist, and essayist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Jeronymite nun of Mexico. The late 16th and early 17th centuries saw much significant writing by indigenous authors, affected by both Spanish and indigenous traditions. A large corpus appeared in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico. In Peru the indigenous historian and social commentator (don) Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala produced a vast work in Spanish.
An elaborate ecclesiastical art and architecture flourished in the main centres, much of it with a special regional style of its own. Religious devotion became more localized, with the appearance of locally born saints and near-saints, notably St. Rose of Lima (Santa Rosa de Lima), as well as miraculous shrines, of which the most famous came to be that of the Virgin of Guadalupe near Mexico City.
The Hispanic sector continued to grow, still centred in the same cities founded in the conquest period. These cities maintained their dominance because they attracted to them anyone from the countryside who was fully successful in any endeavour. They were usually filled to overflowing, and consequently they ejected large numbers of lower-ranking Hispanics into the surrounding countryside. As a result, new nuclei of Spanish society began to form outside the cities. The process of urban formation repeated itself; a new entity came into being, Spanish at the centre, Indian at the edges, very much a replica of the original city, except that none of the Hispanics rose above a certain rank, and the whole settlement remained dependent on its parent. In time, under the right conditions, tertiary Hispanic-Indian satellites would arise around the secondary centres in turn, until the entire area was honeycombed, and the original pattern of Spanish city and Indian countryside was obscured.
Racial and cultural mixture complicated and blurred society greatly after the conquest period, but many social criteria were still the same under the surface. The intermediary functions were still the province of those ranking lowest in Hispanic society, but that stratum now contained not only the least senior members (new immigrants from Spain and other European countries) and Africans but also large numbers of mestizos as well as mulattoes and increasingly even Indians who had mastered Spanish language and culture. To organize the diversity, the Spaniards resorted to an ethnic hierarchy, ranking each mixed type according to its physical and cultural closeness to a Spanish ideal. As mixture proceeded across the generations, the types proliferated until finally, at the time of independence, the system collapsed under its own weight. The new categorizations were all at the intermediary level; despite them, all these people, often simply called castas, assimilated to each other and intermingled, occupying the lower edge of Hispanic society. The more successful and better connected among them were constantly being recognized as Spaniards, as a result of which the Spanish category grew far beyond simple biological increase and included many people with some recognizably non-European physical traits.
Silver mining in Peru and Mexico continued along the same lines as before, reaching new heights of production in the early 17th century. After that a series of problems reversed the trend for a time. The absolute value of transatlantic trade seems to have fallen during the same period. Scholarly controversies about the existence, nature, and extent of a general economic depression during the 17th century have not been entirely resolved, but it is certain that the expansion of the Hispanic sector of society did not halt.
The most profitable mercantile operations still involved the trade of silver for European products, but some structural changes were occurring. Most of the transatlantic firms of the conquest period had broken up by now. The merchants in the large Spanish-American centres were still mainly born in Spain, but, rather than being members of Spanish firms, they were likely to be agents working on a commission basis or to be operating independently, buying up goods from Spain that arrived in the annual fleets. The change of company structure brought with it a localization of the merchant corps, who now stayed permanently in America, married locally, bought property, and even acted as governmental officials, especially in the treasury and the mint.
This time saw the rise of forms of economic activity not present or not well developed in the conquest period, of which haciendas (landed estates) and obrajes (textile shops) are the most prominent. The social organization of such enterprises, however, was familiar from earlier encomienda operations, consisting of a city-dwelling owner, often somewhat removed from daily operations; one or more majordomos; foremen; skilled permanent workers (functional descendants of the naborías); and less-skilled temporary workers. The owner was usually Spanish, the middle levels poorer Spaniards or castas, and the temporary workers generally still Indians. A powerful trend, corresponding to the growth of city markets and ethnic-cultural changes, was an increase in the proportion of personnel in the middle levels and a decrease in those at the lowest, especially an increase in permanent workers at the expense of temporary ones (though the latter were still very numerous).
All these developments ultimately had an immense effect on society in the indigenous entities of the countryside. In time, many rural Indians were absorbed within Hispanic society, while leading members of local indigenous society would ally and even intermarry with the humble Hispanics who were now beginning to dominate the local economy. Ties to specific local Spaniards and Spanish organizations gained ever greater importance in the lives of the indigenous people, compared with their own corporate society; one result was large-scale fragmentation of indigenous entities. In central Mexico, many altepetl broke into their constituent parts, and in the Andes even many of these constituent parts (ayllus) went out of existence or changed their principles of organization.
The Spanish fringe
From the notion of “centre” as used above it follows that the remaining area of Spanish occupation was, from the Spanish point of view at least, peripheral. Most of the Hispanic territories in the Indies were occupied by groups coming precisely from the central areas. Conquering groups had always consisted largely of people of lesser position in the base area, and, as it grew clearer that the central areas were unequaled in their assets, the marginality of the personnel going elsewhere became even more pronounced. In addition to being new and uprooted, those who went to places like Chile, Tucumán (northwestern Argentina), or New Granada (Colombia) were likely to be estancieros and tratantes in the centre—not well-born, well-educated, or well-connected. Among them were a larger than average share of non-Spanish Europeans and free blacks. Since these movements were posterior to the initial conquests, the first Hispanics arriving often included some mulattoes and mestizos born in the centre.
Even so, the first Spanish groups in the peripheral areas were comparable to the first conquerors of the central areas in being of varied origins and commanding a variety of necessary skills. A greater difference showed itself later. The central-area conquerors, having struck it rich, sent out appeals to Spain that attracted huge numbers of people, especially male and female relatives, as well as fellow townspeople and others. Fringe-area conquerors had not struck it rich. They were less able to pay for the passage of relatives and less able to attract people in general. As a result, subsequent immigration to the periphery was a much thinner stream than to the centre and was sometimes nearly nonexistent for long periods of time, as in Paraguay, and many activities that were profitable in the centre were not viable. Hispanic society on the fringe was characterized then by its relatively small size, slow growth, and lack of characteristic signs of the centre indicating vigorous development—the presence of Spanish women, practicing Spanish artisans, and transatlantic merchants. The institutional overlay was a mere shadow of the complex network of the centre. The silver-mining sector was entirely absent, though some areas maintained gold production as a second-best (Chile for a substantial period and New Granada indefinitely and on quite a large scale).
From the above it is clear that society on the fringe was less differentiated than in the centre. Also, the encomenderos never rose very far above the rest. Here, the indigenous people hardly knew tribute, and their labour could not be turned into large revenue; moreover, there were far fewer of them. More Spanish intervention was needed, and yet there were not many Spaniards available. Encomenderos on the fringe usually lacked a large staff of majordomos and estancieros. Since the Indians of these regions were organized in much smaller units than those of the centre, many more encomiendas had to be granted among a much smaller number of Spaniards, so that the proportion of encomenderos was greater. Encomenderos and others had to fulfill several functions simultaneously.
When any of these societies began to prosper, however, sharper categorization reappeared, along with a general approximation of central-area patterns. Areas that in one way or another were equipped to supply regions on the trunk line (Guatemala, Venezuela, Chile, and northwestern Argentina) moved most quickly in that direction.
On the fringes, even in regions where it proved possible to establish some form of the encomienda, the relationship between Hispanic and indigenous societies was not the same as in the centre. In extreme cases, as in Paraguay, one can hardly speak of two separate worlds at all; there, in order to take advantage of the largest effective structure the indigenous people possessed—the extended household—the Spaniards actually entered into those households as heads. This led to a permanent indigenous influence on Spanish Paraguayan family structure, customs, diet, and language in a way and on a scale without parallel in the centre. Something of the same effect is observable even in situations where indigenous society was somewhat more like that of the centre, as in the central valley of Chile. The Spaniards dealt with the Indians directly, in small groups or as individuals, so that the distinction between encomienda Indians and naborías, so clear in the centre, hardly existed after a time.
Another effect of the nature of the more diffuse indigenous society was that in fringe areas the city, which in the centre was the stable bulwark of Hispanic society, was often notably unstable, shifting from one site to another because no location was predetermined by indigenous settlement. Similarly, rural church activity in the central areas was built squarely on existing territorial and sociopolitical units, using indigenous organization and customs. On the fringe the church for Indians, which here can be called a mission, was founded on a site more arbitrarily chosen, to which indigenous people were attracted, changing their settlement pattern and way of life. The late-arriving Jesuits, who had missed out in the ecclesiastical occupation of the hinterland in the central areas, took a large part in this movement, with especially prominent theatres of activity in the north of Mexico and in Paraguay. The fringe also saw of necessity the building of forts and the creation of standing military forces, paid, if poorly, by the royal government.
Interpenetration of the two societies occurred mainly when the Indians were semisedentary; where they were truly nonsedentary, another pattern emerged. Here the relationship between Spaniards and Indians was of long-standing hostility, with a minimum of social intercourse. Indigenous society remained quite radically separate from Hispanic as long as it survived, whereas the local Spanish societies, though often little developed, were more purely European than in any other kind of situation; the only indigenous people there were usually uprooted sedentary Indians from neighbouring regions. The far north of Mexico and the far south of Chile are two such areas.
In general, one notes a slow tempo on the fringe, with the result that eventually many forms on the periphery seem archaic. The fringe areas tended to maintain some form of the encomienda far into the 18th century, when it was forgotten in the centre; likewise Indian slavery, as well as parish activity among Indians by members of the religious orders, persisted indefinitely. The use of titles was conservative, and many of the social complexities evolving in the centre were slow to reach the periphery.
Brazil
The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) between Spain and Portugal, dividing the non-European world between them, gave the Portuguese a legal claim to a large part of the area to be called Brazil. The Portuguese came upon the Brazilian coast in 1500 on the way to India and would doubtless have acted much as they did with or without the treaty. For decades Brazil was doubly a fringe area. In the Portuguese scheme, it was far behind longer-established and more profitable overseas ventures in Africa and India. In the context of the Western Hemisphere, it was an area lacking known large deposits of precious metals and possessing a semisedentary Tupian population similar and related to the Guaraní the Spaniards were to find in Paraguay; thus it had much in common with the Spanish-American periphery.
The early period
The Portuguese at first thought of Brazil as an area analogous to Africa—that is, an area on the route to India where they would stop for trade or barter in indigenous products and slaves but not establish permanent settlements beyond an occasional trading post. The most commercially viable resource of Brazil in the first decades proved to be the item that gave the country its name, brazilwood, a tropical hardwood useful as a textile dye. As with Africa, the Portuguese government let out contracts for the trade to private individuals.
The brazilwood industry did not bring about the founding of cities or other marks of full development, but its bulk was considerable for a time, and it was not a pure trade in natural products but involved some intervention on the part of the Portuguese. Though indigenous men of the region were accustomed to cutting down forest trees to clear fields, they did not have a tradition of commerce in trees, nor were they able to cut them on a large scale. The Portuguese therefore had to provide European axes and saws as well as product specifications. A Portuguese factor, or trading agent, would acquire the logs and have them ready when the ships came. Trading posts were often on islands, as in Africa, and a little later the first formal Portuguese settlements were also founded on islands. The only Portuguese who could be said to be actually settled in Brazil were some outcasts living among the Indians, who sometimes helped acquire useful Indian alliances.
About 1530 the Portuguese began to feel pressures to intensify their involvement with Brazil. Interlopers, especially the French, had begun to appear; the India trade was in a slump; and the great successes in Spanish America represented both an incentive and a threat. In response to such stimuli, the Portuguese sent an expedition to drive out the French and assert their authority. A number of settlers accompanied the expedition, which established the first formal Portuguese settlement—São Vicente—in 1532 on an island near present São Paulo.
The Portuguese had thus far acted entirely within their maritime-commercial tradition, and they continued for some time to do so, adopting measures quite different from those of the Spaniards. Whereas the Spaniards expanded from one area to the next in relay fashion, the Portuguese crown, in the mid-1530s, divided the entire Brazilian coast into strips of donatary captaincies, of which there were eventually 15. It granted them to donatários, prominent people presumed to have the personal resources to carry out the occupation and exploitation of their regions. The office was hereditary, with extensive judicial and administrative powers. The Portuguese had previously used this type of concession for their Atlantic island possessions. The encomienda, the master institution of 16th-century Spanish America, was not employed. From the first, though, leading Portuguese acquired large sesmarias, or land grants.
In the event, several of the captaincies were never occupied at all, and others survived only for a short time. However, four of them led to permanent settlements, and two of these, São Vicente in the south and Pernambuco in the north, proved distinctly viable and profitable.
As on much of the Spanish fringe, the first Portuguese settlements in Brazil had to be fortified against Indian attacks. Provisioning was difficult, and for a time the Portuguese got much of their food through trade with the indigenous people, becoming accustomed to manioc (cassava) as their staple rather than wheat, which grew poorly in much of the region. Two types of agricultural establishments emerged: roças, which were food farms or truck gardens near towns, and fazendas, or export enterprises. The last were mainly sugar plantations, which were not yet very prosperous, even though conditions for sugar growing and transport were ideal in many places, because of lack of capital to build mills and buy African slave labour. The Portuguese at first tried to extract labour from the indigenous people in exchange for European products, but the effort failed, in part because the men of these semisedentary societies were not accustomed to agricultural labour. As had happened in Spanish America, the Brazilian settlers soon turned to Indian slavery for workers; slaves were acquired through raiding or through purchase from other Indians. A minority of more expensive African slaves formed a labour elite, much as in Spanish America.
In 1548, still in response to much the same pressures and incentives as in 1530, the Portuguese decided to set up direct royal government in Brazil. The crown named a governor-general who took an expedition of a thousand people to Brazil, establishing a capital for the entire country in Bahia on the northeastern coast. In 1551 a bishopric was created. Thus it was not until 50 years after contact that Brazil achieved the level of institutionalization characteristic of the Spanish-American central areas almost from the beginning. The pace of development was much more comparable to that on the Spanish-American fringe.
At about this same time the Jesuits began to arrive, soon becoming the strongest arm of the church, as opposed to in Spanish America, where they arrived long after the other orders. They were prominent in the attempt to deal with the indigenous population, founding villages (aldeias) on new sites much in the manner of the missions on the Spanish-American fringe. Thus the main forms of European-Indian contact in Brazil—war, trade, slavery, and missions—were the same as on the periphery of Spanish America.
The Portuguese population in 16th-century Brazil remained sparse. Moreover, by all indications, including the Portuguese practice of exiling convicts to Brazil, one can imagine that it was as acutely marginal socially as were the settlers of Spanish-American fringe areas.
The sugar age
Starting in the last decades of the 16th century, the Brazilian sugar industry began an upswing that led to its being in the 17th century the world’s largest producer of sugar for the ever-growing European market. The main structural changes had occurred by 1600, though the strongest growth came thereafter.
The more the industry prospered, the more it attracted Portuguese immigration, and the more it could afford African slaves as workers. Both movements resulted in the diminution of the indigenous role; by the third decade of the 17th century, through death and flight to the interior, Indians had become a negligible factor on the northeastern coast, where sugar growing concentrated. The Portuguese coming into the area were not only more numerous but represented a much broader cross section of society, including enough women for prominent men to marry. The northeastern cities were beginning to look more like their Spanish-American counterparts. In a word, the northeast was becoming a new central area, with some noticeable differences from those of Spanish America: it was built on bulk export rather than precious metals, with an Afro-European base rather than Indo-European, oriented to the sea rather than to an indigenous hinterland.
Sugar production was almost as industrial an enterprise as silver mining. The dominant feature was the engenho, the mill. So expensive were the mill, technicians’ salaries, and the force of African slaves to work there that mill owners normally depended on cane growers called lavradores to produce cane for the mill. Under various kinds of leasing arrangements, the lavradores used their own African slave crews to cultivate the land, grow the cane, and transport it to the mill. Some of the cane growers were from mill-owning families, while others were more humble, and some even were racially mixed.
The sugar industry required a large number of Portuguese. Although Africans came to constitute the majority of the local population, the Portuguese sector was also large. Instead of a sprinkling of masters among great masses of slaves, the predominant pattern was the use of slaves in relatively small units, each in contact with some Portuguese. The mill owners had rural residences, but, as with the Spaniards, their main seats were in the nearest city, where their group tended to dominate the senado da câmara, the equivalent of the Spanish cabildo. Portuguese with less capital went into growing tobacco for export or roças for provisioning the cities and mills, and they employed relatively fewer slaves. In the backland (sertão), ranches grew up to supply the coast with meat and work animals. Society was varied and complex.
The rural-urban continuum was strong, and the Africans took part in it as well as the Portuguese, so that the most skilled and acculturated of them tended to end up in the cities, where there came to be an African population, increasingly racially mixed and in part free, much as in Spanish America. With so many more Africans present than in the Spanish central areas, groups based on African ethnicity could retain their language and cohesiveness longer. Christian lay organizations with an African ethnic base were very strong, and many African cultural elements were preserved, especially in the areas of music, dance, and popular religion. The same sort of strength allowed for the flourishing of independent communities of runaway slaves to an extent not known in Spanish America, though the phenomenon occurred there too in some forested areas.
An elaborate scaled status system recognizing racial and cultural mixture and legal status, comparable to the Spanish-American ethnic hierarchy, grew up in the Brazilian northeast, but it was different in being overwhelmingly bipolar—European and African—with the indigenous factor hardly counting. It is not by chance that in Mexico and Peru the top category remained Spaniard, while in Brazil it came to be white as well as Portuguese. If in the Spanish central areas the Africans were intermediaries, here they had a more complex function, replacing the Indians at the bottom of the functional ladder as well as filling many intermediate niches.
The northeast now assumed many of the other characteristics of a central area. The mercantile interest grew strong, localizing the form of men of business (homens de negócios) who both invested in merchandise and owned sugar mills. They intermarried with the planters and served on the town councils. Not only did a governor-general, later a viceroy, reside in Bahia, but there was (most of the time) a high court of appeal, or relação, like the Spanish-American audiencia, with the associated network of lawyers and notaries. Monasteries and convents became part of the picture, and authors writing on local topics appeared, some of the most prominent of them Jesuits.
Institutionalization stopped short of what was seen in the Spanish-American central areas, however. Transatlantic contact remained more essential to local society than in Spanish America. Universities and printing presses were not established; students went to Portugal for advanced education, and books were printed there. Transatlantic careers spanning not only Portugal and Brazil but also including Africa were common. So much a part of the Atlantic world was the northeast of Brazil that Europe continued to make itself felt strongly. It was perhaps a somewhat secondary phenomenon that the king of Spain was also the king of Portugal from 1580 to 1640, but the impact of the Netherlands was more directly felt, for the Dutch seized Bahia in 1624, holding it to 1625, and controlled the important captaincy of Pernambuco from 1630 to 1654.
The south
Only the northeast of Brazil was thoroughly transformed by the sugar industry. The remainder long stayed much as it had been before, a sparsely inhabited fringe with a weak economy, more indigenous and European in composition than African. São Paulo, the dominant centre of the south, had a small Portuguese population, and much if not most of it was racially mixed. Not unlike the Paraguayan Spaniards, the Paulistas (citizens of São Paulo) lived in large households and estates among numbers of Indian slaves, freedmen, and dependents, strongly affected by indigenous language, customs, diet, and family structure.
The products of the estates being in little demand elsewhere, much attention went into the area’s most negotiable commodity, indigenous slaves. Desired at first to work on coastal plantations, Indian slaves lost marketability as the sugar industry was able to make the transition to Africans. But when the Dutch seized a part of the northeast and disrupted the African slave supply in the first half of the 17th century, the Paulistas’ Indian slaves were more salable until the African supply lines were once again secured after mid-century. Thereafter the Paulistas turned more to exploring the interior, establishing new settlements there and searching for precious metals.
The Paulistas are known for an expeditionary form, the bandeira (“banner”), which, though by origin related to the conquering and exploring expeditions seen elsewhere, evolved almost beyond recognition and became a key element of Paulista culture. As time went on, it was necessary to go farther and farther for slaving, eventually to the areas of the Paraguayan Spaniards and even beyond. The bandeirantes, as the participants were called, might spend many months or even years in the backlands. Although led by Portuguese or people of mixed heritage passing for Portuguese, the highly mobile columns were mainly indigenous, being made up of direct dependents or slaves of the leaders or members of allied Indian groups. Though possessing some European weapons and cultural elements, they were highly adapted to the surroundings, using indigenous food, language, transportation, and much else. It was they above all who were responsible for making Brazil more than a coastal strip.
Spanish America in the age of the Bourbons
A series of important changes occurring in Spanish America in the 18th century is often associated with dynastic changes in Spain—the replacement of the Habsburgs, who had ruled Spain since the early 16th century, by a branch of the French Bourbons in 1700. Little altered in the Spanish territories until more than 50 years later, however, especially during the reign of Charles III (1759–88). Internal evolution and worldwide developments were doubtless more important in bringing about the new phenomena than the policy of a particular dynasty or ruler.
Spanish viceroyalties and Portuguese territoriesSpanish viceroyalties and Portuguese territories in the Western Hemisphere, 1780.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Economy and society
Demographic growth picked up sharply after about the mid-18th century in all areas about which information is available and in all sectors of the population. At the same time, economic activity increased in bulk, and prices rose steadily instead of fluctuating as they had been doing for centuries. Silver production, which was still at the base of the export economy of the old central areas, increased sharply, especially in Mexico, and so did the scale of operations and the input of capital, with strong participation by merchant-financiers. At the same time, local textile production had grown in size and economic importance, as demand rose in its market—humble Hispanized people in the city and countryside.
The large merchants had continued the process of localization to the point where only their birth was foreign; large firms tended to pass from a Spanish immigrant owner to his immigrant nephew. In every other way—marriage, investment, and residence pattern—the merchants were part of the local milieu, and, since export-import commerce was so important to the economy, they had risen to the top on the local scene; the wealthiest of them owned strings of haciendas in addition to their commercial and mining interests, and they acquired titles of high nobility.
Racial and cultural fusion had advanced so far that the categorization embodied in the ethnic hierarchy could no longer capture it. Labels proliferated to designate complex mixtures, but the new terms sat lightly on those so labeled and often had no legal status. In everyday life, people who were able to function within a Hispanic context were often not labeled at all; many others changed almost at will from one category to another. One reaction to the excessive categorization was simplification, with only three categories—Spaniards, castas, and Indians—and often only two—Indians and others. The people of mixed descent were now so fully acculturated and so deeply embedded in local Hispanic society that they were qualified for and began to compete for nearly all positions except the very highest. There was, naturally, a reaction on the part of those most highly placed. With mulattoes entering the universities in numbers, ordinances began to declare that they were not eligible. With the children of wealthy Spaniards, humbler and racially mixed Spaniards, and castas all intermarrying widely, government and the church began to resist, declaring marriages between those differently labeled to be illegal and reinforcing the authority of parents in disallowing matches.
Such reactions did little to change the basic reality: the intermediate groups had grown and were continuing to grow to the extent that they could no longer be confined to their traditional intermediary functions. There were too many of them for all to become majordomos and artisans, and, in any case, many people called Indians by now could speak Spanish and handle tasks very well themselves for which intermediaries had previously been required. Since the people in the middle were no longer at a premium, their remuneration often decreased. If some pressed on into the higher strata, others were reduced to positions traditionally belonging to Indians, such as permanent labourer. In many areas the mixed groups were pouring into indigenous settlements at such a rate as to disrupt them and change their character.
Transformation of the east coast
Well into the 18th century, the perception that Mexico and Peru formed the centre and all the rest the periphery was still valid. By the last decades of the century, however, things were moving quickly in a different direction, favouring the Atlantic seaboard. European demand for tropical crops and even for temperate products, especially hides, increased substantially. At the same time, ships grew larger and faster. As a result, transatlantic shipment of bulk products became more viable, and trade routes shifted.
Argentina
The Río de La Plata region had been very much on the edges of the Latin American world since the conquest. The first founding of Buenos Aires in the early 16th century had failed, the survivors having taken refuge in the lands of the semisedentary Guaraní of Paraguay. The most developed area was the northwest interior, closest to the Potosí mining region, which supplied the mines with various products. Paraguay remained in relative isolation and poverty, participating in the money economy by sending its yerba maté (a tealike beverage) toward Peru. Buenos Aires was eventually refounded but remained a tiny, struggling port. The plains were inhabited by wild cattle (descendants of domestic animals introduced into the region earlier), nonsedentary Indians, and some highly localized mestizos later to be called gauchos.
Starting in the 1770s, improved transatlantic navigation, combined with liberalization of the imperial trading system, transformed the region. Buenos Aires began to be able to compete with the older route through Panama and Peru in importing European goods for the mining region and exporting silver. The immigration of merchants and others increased. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the crown created the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata based in Buenos Aires (1776), including the Potosí mining region, which was taken from Peru. Buenos Aires became a capital with all the institutions associated with Lima or Mexico City. The city’s population, including a substantial number of Africans because of its location on a slave route and its new wealth, grew explosively, and it began to exercise dominance over the interior, reversing the older scheme.
Yet Buenos Aires was not quite like Lima or Mexico City; it showed its newness, and traces of peripherality remained. The merchants of Buenos Aires had the same Spanish origins as their counterparts in Mexico City, but they were more closely tied to Spain, much like central-area merchants in the conquest period. They were more dominant locally, for there were no long-established families to compete with, and they came close to monopolizing the capital’s municipal council. But they were far less wealthy than the largest Mexico City merchants, established no noble titles, and owned few or no rural estates. Indeed, there were no estates to buy: haciendas existed in the older northwestern region, but on the plains or pampas around Buenos Aires estate development had hardly begun. The hide export industry that now began to become prominent rested at first mainly on hunting wild animals; the merchants who exported hides were still secondary to those importing merchandise and exporting silver. Only in the last years before independence did merchants and others finally begin to build up estates and raise cattle in the more customary manner.
Venezuela
With its Caribbean coast, Venezuela had long been in a relatively favourable position in regard to potential availability of markets. By the 17th century the Caracas region was exporting cacao to Mexico, where most of the market for that product was then located, enabling it to begin buying African slaves for labour. As Europe joined the market and absorbed larger quantities of cacao by the late 18th century, Caracas became an urban centre comparable in size and institutionalization to Buenos Aires (though without a viceroy), and it had a better-developed hinterland of secondary settlements. The population along the coast was mainly European, African, and mixtures thereof. The situation, then, bore some similarity to that in Brazil.
The Caribbean islands
The Spaniards from the first had concentrated on the Greater Antilles, leaving the smaller islands virtually unoccupied. As developments passed the Spanish Caribbean by, even portions of the larger islands were left under-occupied. Thus, in the course of the 17th century, the French and English, aided by buccaneers of their respective nationalities, were able to take over the small islands, Jamaica, and the western end of Hispaniola to grow tropical crops, above all sugar, for themselves. The societies that grew up there were not exactly Latin American in the usual sense; though in a way comparable to the society of northeastern Brazil, they were different in that the African slave population vastly outnumbered the Europeans, who were not only very few but also not well rooted, retaining intimate connections with the home countries. By the late 18th century the non-Spanish Caribbean islands had replaced Brazil as the world’s greatest sugar producers.
The Spanish Caribbean islands (primarily Cuba and Puerto Rico) did not participate in the sugar boom, which was predicated on the notion of self-supply by the northern European nations. The population was more balanced between European and African than in the French and English possessions. In the second half of the 18th century the Cuban economy grew rapidly on the basis of tobacco export and provisioning of fleets and Spanish Caribbean ports. Only after the slave revolt in French Haiti in 1791, with great loss of French production, did Cuba begin to move in the direction of large-scale sugar export.
The Bourbon reforms
The Enlightenment, emanating to a large extent from France, penetrated both Spain (aided by the French origin of the Bourbons) and Spanish America in the 18th century. By the late part of the century individuals and organized societies in many of the American territories were producing journals and books in the manner of the work of the French Encyclopédistes, promoting reason, universality, science, modernity, and efficiency. Most Spanish-American writers, while staying in close touch with European currents, were concerned with the development, in practical terms, of their own regions.
Enlightenment philosophy bore importantly on government, which was called on to be more rationally unified, efficient, and free of church influence. Such ideas affected policy makers for the Spanish crown, and a series of activist royal measures of the 18th century were carried out in that spirit. Yet the timing and the nature of these moves had at least as much to do with changing conditions as with ideology. Most reforms came in a bundle in the late 18th century, the creation in 1739 of the Viceroyalty of New Granada based in Santa Fé (Bogotá) being an exception.
A major Bourbon reform, taking place mainly in the 1780s, was the creation of large districts called intendancies (the word and model were French). Each was headed by an official with extensive powers called an intendant, who was directly responsible to the crown in Spain. The measure was meaningful because royal government in the provinces, outside the seats of the viceroy (the province ruler) and the captains general, had hardly existed. It was as though a host of provincial cities received their own viceroy. One result, and indeed the one most intended, was an increase in revenue collection; another, not intended, was decentralization and bickering. The intendancy seats were not arbitrarily created or chosen but were mainly large cities that had once been encomendero centres and were still bishoprics, or long-lasting, large-scale mining centres. The change was realistic in that it recognized the immense growth and consolidation of provincial Hispanic centres that had occurred in the centuries since the first establishment of the viceroyalties, and for that reason it took hold. Less successful was the attempt to introduce similar officials at a lower level in the Indian countryside.
Military affairs were a second target of reform. Spanish America had long been defended by a patchwork of viceregal guards, port garrisons, half-fictional militias, and some forts and paid soldiers on frontiers with hostile Indians, but it had not had a formal military organization. In the late 18th century it acquired one, partly because of an increased foreign threat (Havana was occupied by the British in 1762–63), partly because the Bourbons imagined the army to be the most responsive branch available to them, and partly because professionalization of the military was an international trend of the time. A relatively small number of regular units formed the backbone for a larger, more rigorously organized militia. At first the regulars were brought in from Spain, but before long the lower ranks were mainly locals, and locals found entry even into the officer ranks, though the top commanders were usually Spaniards born. The military was primarily Hispanic, with Indians taking part only under exceptional circumstances, and it reflected local society, with officers drawn from prominent families and many persons of mixed descent and Africans among the enlisted men. Organized in local districts, the units’ loyalties were above all local as well.
Government in Bourbon times was not antireligious, but it was sufficiently affected by the spirit of the times to be quite anticlerical. The most decisive of the measures taken was the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spanish America and Spain in 1767. Preceded by similar actions in Portugal and France, the move was part of an international wave, but it also made excellent sense in purely Spanish-American terms. Although the Jesuits were the wealthiest of the orders, they had arrived last, had fierce rivals in other branches of the church, and counted few locals among their members. Thus their expulsion was greeted with (usually hidden) approval by many. The crown in general tried to further the secular clergy over the religious orders (imagined to be more independent-minded), but the policy had little effect except in areas where the secular clergy, which grew with the expansion of civil society, was already on the rise. Almost on the eve of independence, the crown attempted to confiscate church property, but the measure proved hard to enforce.
The late Bourbons favoured more active encouragement of the economy and even intervention in it. They provided tax reductions and technical aid for the silver mining industry; they expanded state monopolies beyond the mercury needed for mining to some other commodities, of which tobacco was the most successful. Their largest reform, however, went in the opposite direction, consisting in the declaration of free trade within the Spanish empire, so that any port could trade with any other at will.
In earlier times the bulk of transatlantic trade had been directed at Mexico and Peru, and annual convoys sponsored by the Spanish government were an efficient way not only to organize the traffic but also to protect it from pirates, who were the main threat. By the 18th century the northern European powers had naval superiority and could easily have destroyed any convoy. Moreover, in Spanish America new central areas had arisen, with a consequent diversification of destinations, and in Spain the north had revived at the expense of the south, where Sevilla and Cádiz had monopolized Indies navigation. Under these changed circumstances, the best arrangement was to allow individual ships to travel between any Spanish port and any American port. The fleet system gradually fell apart in the 18th century. Imperial free trade was introduced between 1765 and 1789, first affecting Cuba and spreading to all Spanish possessions. The measure coincided with a marked increase in commercial volume; to what extent free trade caused the increase, as opposed to demographic growth in the Indies and industrial growth in Europe, is not clear. Nor are the effects entirely clear. The deluge of goods made it harder for the largest American merchants to be as dominant as previously, and for the first time local textile producers had real competition for the lower end of the market. Even so, the large firms of Mexico City were not destroyed, and the Puebla textile industry continued to grow.
Brazil after 1700
In the late 17th century the explorations of the Paulistas finally led to the discovery of major gold deposits in a large district inland from Rio de Janeiro that became known as Minas Gerais. As the news spread, outsiders poured into the area. A time of turbulence, with the frontier Paulistas trying to assert their rights, ended after a few decades with the victory of the newcomers and the entry of royal authority. The south-centre, both the coast and the near interior, now took on the essential characteristics of the northeast—of a land living on European exports and inhabited by a population mainly Portuguese, African, and mulatto, with a large sector of slaves, along with many recently freed persons. The mining district flourished during the time of the boom, generating a network of settlements where none had been before and a local culture that included the now-renowned architectural style of its small churches.
More importantly for Brazil as a whole, Rio de Janeiro began to become an important urban centre in the usual mold, and the institutional component thickened, just as it had earlier on the basis of mineral wealth in the old Spanish-American central areas. By 1763 Rio had become the capital of Brazil, replacing Salvador in the northeast. Although the northeastern sugar industry continued to export more by value than the gold region, the latter had newer wealth and perhaps a higher profitability, and distant regions began to orient themselves to it in important ways. Stock-raising regions both in the northern interior and on the southern plains sent their animals to the mines, thereby both growing and helping unify the country.
The chronology of Brazil does not mesh closely with that of Spanish America in the late period. The gold boom was a type of development that had occurred much earlier in the Spanish territories; moreover, it did not last into the second half of the 18th century, when the most marked economic growth was occurring elsewhere, but began to decline by mid-century. Brazil had already experienced the bulk export revolution in the 17th century with sugar, and in the later 18th century exports were actually declining much of the time. Some growth, however, occurred late in the century in response to the decline of the French sugar industry in the Caribbean after the slave revolt in Haiti and some experimentation with new crops that were beginning to be of interest in Europe. Thus, though the Portuguese were as much affected by the Enlightenment as the Spaniards and had their time of active reform under the marquês de Pombal, prime minister and in effect ruler of Portugal in the period 1750–77, the context was hardly comparable. Outstanding among the actions taken under his ministry was a wave of expulsions of the Jesuits, in 1759. During his long rule Pombal instituted numerous fiscal and administrative reforms and even attempted social legislation. He gave much attention to the far north of Brazil, attempting to develop the region, and a time of considerable local development and change did in fact coincide with his activity.
Preindependence phenomena
The position of the locally born Spaniards, often called Creoles or criollos (though they were slow to call themselves that), had been growing stronger all across the postconquest centuries. From an early time they owned most of the rural estates and dominated most of the cabildos. By the 17th century they were a large majority among the secular clergy and prominent in the orders, and as time went on they received more and more of the bishoprics. In the course of the 17th century they achieved appointments as audiencia judges in various centres, and by the second half of the 18th century they were dominating, sometimes virtually monopolizing, the membership of audiencias all over Spanish America. As the military came into existence, they found prominent places in it. Large mining producers might be either born locally or Spanish-born. Large merchants remained predominantly born in Spain, but they married into local families, whose interests they often served. Each major local Spanish family had members placed strategically across the whole system, creating a strong informal network. Only the viceroys and usually the archbishops were normally recruited from the outside, and even they had local entourages.
As the Bourbon government in Spain became more active late in the 18th century, it wanted a larger place for its own Spanish-born associates and began to view the extent of local American dominance with alarm. The audiencias were gradually filled predominantly with Spanish-born judges; nearly all the intendants were outsiders and so were the highest military officers. Yet the basic situation hardly changed, for the Spanish-born appointees had to function in a local milieu, into which they were rapidly absorbed. As independence approached, the local Spaniards or Creoles had influence and experience at all levels of society, economy, and government, but they had been under challenge for a generation or more and were correspondingly resentful.
Consciousness of separateness of various kinds had been growing for a long time. In Mexico, starting as early as the mid-17th century, the illustrious indigenous past and the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe had become a basis for national pride, promoted above all by Creole priests and scholars. Other areas had approximate equivalents, if not as well-defined. Awareness of ethnic distinctions within the Spanish category increased in the 18th century along with the proliferation of ethnic terminology in general. The Creoles were still mainly called Spaniards, but the new arrivals from Spain, now a small minority, were distinguished from the rest as peninsular or European Spaniards, and in Mexico they received the insulting nickname gachupín.
The middle groups, whether humble Spaniards or people in the racially mixed categories, had much reason for discontent. The expansion of the middle left a large segment of the population without employment corresponding to its expectations and capacities. Corporately organized indigenous groups, however, though not in an admirable state economically or in many other respects, were generally little concerned about conditions at a countrywide level. It is not that they were apathetic; all through the intervening centuries they had stood up for themselves, through litigation and sometimes through disturbances and revolts, but they had done so as individual communities. On the nonsedentary fringe, wars and rebellions continued, but this was not different from earlier times. The most volatile element were Spanish-speaking Indians in and around Hispanic communities, who had mobility and broad awareness and whose profile no longer corresponded to the implications and duties of the label “Indian.”
Two large manifestations of the late 18th century can be seen as foreshadowing independence, though it is possible that they did as much to retard it. In 1780–81 the Andean highlands experienced the Túpac Amaru II revolt, which wrested control of much of the region from the ordinary authorities for many months until it was forcibly put down. Although references were made to the Inca heritage and the rebellion was indeed based in the indigenous countryside, its leaders were largely provincial mestizos (as was in fact Túpac Amaru himself), and some were even Creoles from the middle levels of local society. The Comunero Rebellion in Colombia began in 1780 in the provincial town of Socorro, a tobacco and textile producing centre. From there it spread widely before disbanding a year later largely as a result of negotiations.
Both movements were in immediate response to Bourbon fiscal measures, and both proclaimed ultimate loyalty to the Spanish crown. In Peru especially, there was a strong reaction afterward against both dissent and the indigenous population. The impetus for independence in Spanish South America would eventually come from the newly thriving Atlantic seaboard regions—the former fringes, Venezuela and Argentina—which had mobile Hispanized populations and lacked large groups of sedentary Indians. In Mexico too, things would start in the very similar near north of the country.
In Brazil, the local Portuguese population had a position quite comparable to that of the Spanish-American Creoles, but it was not so far advanced, and the situation had not become polarized. Transatlantic mobility still made itself felt, with many leading Brazilian Portuguese having been educated in Portugal. Locally born Portuguese had long participated in the Brazilian high court system, but they had never been a majority as in Spanish America. Two well-known rebellious incidents occurring in the 1780s and ’90s, in Minas Gerais and Bahia, did not have full support even locally.
Latin America approached independence after a thoroughgoing ethnic and cultural transformation across a period of over three centuries. That process did not destroy the indigenous component, which was still very much alive corporately and culturally in the old central areas and some other regions and had also affected and entered into the mixed Iberian societies that had come to dominance. Even where it almost disappeared, the indigenous factor was important, for its weakness or absence was what allowed certain regions to become more European and African. Most of the independent countries that arose in the early 19th century went back to indigenous culture areas that had been re-formed into functional units under Iberian management in the 16th century. James Lockhart
The independence of Latin America
After three centuries of colonial rule, independence came rather suddenly to most of Spanish and Portuguese America. Between 1808 and 1826 all of Latin America except the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Puerto Rico slipped out of the hands of the Iberian powers who had ruled the region since the conquest. The rapidity and timing of that dramatic change were the result of a combination of long-building tensions in colonial rule and a series of external events.
The reforms imposed by the Spanish Bourbons in the 18th century provoked great instability in the relations between the rulers and their colonial subjects in the Americas. Many Creoles (those of Spanish parentage but who were born in America) felt Bourbon policy to be an unfair attack on their wealth, political power, and social status. Others did not suffer during the second half of the 18th century; indeed, the gradual loosening of trade restrictions actually benefited some Creoles in Venezuela and certain areas that had moved from the periphery to the centre during the late colonial era. However, those profits merely whetted those Creoles’ appetites for greater free trade than the Bourbons were willing to grant. More generally, Creoles reacted angrily against the crown’s preference for peninsulars in administrative positions and its declining support of the caste system and the Creoles’ privileged status within it. After hundreds of years of proven service to Spain, the American-born elites felt that the Bourbons were now treating them like a recently conquered nation.
In cities throughout the region, Creole frustrations increasingly found expression in ideas derived from the Enlightenment. Imperial prohibitions proved unable to stop the flow of potentially subversive English, French, and North American works into the colonies of Latin America. Creole participants in conspiracies against Portugal and Spain at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century showed familiarity with such European Enlightenment thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Enlightenment clearly informed the aims of dissident Creoles and inspired some of the later, great leaders of the independence movements across Latin America.
Still, these ideas were not, strictly speaking, causes of independence. Creoles selectively adapted rather than simply embraced the thought that had informed revolutions in North America and France. Leaders in Latin America tended to shy away from the more socially radical European doctrines. Moreover, the influence of those ideologies was sharply restricted; with few exceptions only small circles of educated, urban elites had access to Enlightenment thought. At most, foreign ideas helped foster a more questioning attitude toward traditional institutions and authority.
European diplomatic and military events provided the final catalyst that turned Creole discontent into full-fledged movements for Latin American independence. When the Spanish crown entered into an alliance with France in 1795, it set off a series of developments that opened up economic and political distance between the Iberian countries and their American colonies. By siding with France, Spain pitted itself against England, the dominant sea power of the period, which used its naval forces to reduce and eventually cut communications between Spain and the Americas. Unable to preserve any sort of monopoly on trade, the Spanish crown was forced to loosen the restrictions on its colonies’ commerce. Spanish Americans now found themselves able to trade legally with other colonies, as well as with any neutral countries such as the United States. Spain’s wartime liberalization of colonial trade sharpened Creoles’ desires for greater economic self-determination.
Occurrences in Europe in the early 19th century created a deep political divide between Spain and its American colonies. In 1807 the Spanish king, Charles IV, granted passage through Spanish territory to Napoleon’s forces on their way to invade Portugal. The immediate effect of that concession was to send the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John, fleeing in British ships to Brazil. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro with some 15,000 officials, nobles, and other members of his court, John transformed the Brazilian colony into the administrative centre of his empire. When Napoleon turned on his Spanish allies in 1808, events took a disastrous turn for Spain and its dominion in the Americas. Shortly after Charles had abdicated in favour of his son Ferdinand, Napoleon had them both imprisoned. With these figures of legitimate authority in his power, the French ruler tried to shatter Spanish independence. In the process he set off a political crisis that swept across both Spain and its possessions. The Spanish political tradition centred on the figure of the monarch, yet, with Charles and Ferdinand removed from the scene, the hub of all political authority was missing.
In 1810 a Cortes (Parliament) emerged in Cádiz to represent both Spain and Spanish America. Two years later it produced a new, liberal constitution that proclaimed Spain’s American possessions to be full members of the kingdom and not mere colonies. Yet the Creoles who participated in the new Cortes were denied equal representation. Moreover, the Cortes would not concede permanent free trade to the Americans and obstinately refused to grant any degree of meaningful autonomy to the overseas dominions. Having had a taste of freedom during their political and economic isolation from the mother country, Spanish Americans did not easily consent to a reduction of their power and autonomy.
Two other European developments further dashed the hopes of Creoles, pushing them more decisively toward independence. The year 1814 saw the restoration of Ferdinand to the throne and with it the energetic attempt to reestablish Spanish imperial power in the Americas. Rejecting compromise and reform, Ferdinand resorted to military force to bring wayward Spanish-American regions back into the empire as colonies. The effort only served to harden the position of Creole rebels. In 1820 troops waiting in Cádiz to be sent as part of the crown’s military campaigns revolted, forcing Ferdinand to agree to a series of liberal measures. That concession divided and weakened loyalist opposition to independence in the Americas. Many supporters of the crown now had doubts about the monarchy for which they were fighting.
The wars of independence, 1808–26
The final victory of Latin American patriots over Spain and the fading loyalist factions began in 1808 with the political crisis in Spain. With the Spanish king and his son Ferdinand taken hostage by Napoleon, Creoles and peninsulars began to jockey for power across Spanish America. During 1808–10 juntas emerged to rule in the name of Ferdinand VII. In Mexico City and Montevideo caretaker governments were the work of loyal peninsular Spaniards eager to head off Creole threats. In Santiago, Caracas, Bogotá, and other cities, by contrast, it was Creoles who controlled the provisional juntas. Not all of these governments lasted very long; loyalist troops quickly put down Creole-dominated juntas in La Paz and Quito. By 1810, however, the trend was clear. Without denouncing Ferdinand, Creoles throughout most of the region were moving toward the establishment of their own autonomous governments. Transforming these early initiatives into a break with Spanish control required tremendous sacrifice. Over the next decade and a half, Spanish Americans had to defend with arms their movement toward independence.
Spanish America
The southern movement in South America
The movements that liberated Spanish South America arose from opposite ends of the continent. From the north came the movement led most famously by Simón Bolívar, a dynamic figure known as the Liberator. From the south proceeded another powerful force, this one directed by the more circumspect José de San Martín. After difficult conquests of their home regions, the two movements spread the cause of independence through other territories, finally meeting on the central Pacific coast. From there, troops under northern generals finally stamped out the last vestiges of loyalist resistance in Peru and Bolivia by 1826.
Simón Bolívar.Bettmann/Corbis
The struggles that produced independence in the south began even before Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal and Spain. In 1806 a British expeditionary force captured Buenos Aires. When the Spanish colonial officials proved ineffective against the invasion, a volunteer militia of Creoles and peninsulars organized resistance and pushed the British out. In May 1810 prominent Creoles in Buenos Aires, having vied with peninsulars for power in the intervening years, forced the last Spanish viceroy there to consent to a cabildo abierto, an extraordinary open meeting of the municipal council and local notables. Although shielding itself with a pretense of loyalty to Ferdinand, the junta produced by that session marked the end of Spanish rule in Buenos Aires and its hinterland. After its revolution of May 1810, the region was the only one to resist reconquest by loyalist troops throughout the period of the independence wars.
Independence in the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, however, encountered grave difficulties in the years after 1810. Central authority proved unstable in the capital city of Buenos Aires. An early radical liberal government dominated by Mariano Moreno gave way to a series of triumvirates and supreme directors. More troubling still were the bitter rivalries emerging between Buenos Aires and other provinces. From the start Buenos Aires’ intention of bringing all the former viceregal territories under its control set off waves of discord in the outlying provinces. At stake was not only political autonomy per se but also economic interest; the Creole merchants of Buenos Aires, who initially sought the liberalization of colonial restraints on commerce in the region, subsequently tried to maintain their economic dominance over the interior. A constituent assembly meeting in 1813 adopted a flag, anthem, and other symbols of national identity, but the apparent unity disintegrated soon afterward. This was evident in the assembly that finally proclaimed independence in 1816; that body received no delegates from several provinces, even though it was held outside Buenos Aires, in the interior city of Tucumán (in full, San Miguel de Tucumán).
Distinct interests and long-standing resentment of the viceregal capital led different regions in the south to pursue separate destinies. Across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aires, Montevideo and its surroundings became the separate Estado Oriental (“Eastern State,” later Uruguay). Caught between the loyalism of Spanish officers and the imperialist intentions of Buenos Aires and Portuguese Brazil, the regional leader José Gervasio Artigas formed an army of thousands of gauchos. By 1815 Artigas and this force dominated Uruguay and had allied with other provinces to oppose Buenos Aires.
Buenos Aires achieved similarly mixed results in other neighbouring regions, losing control of many while spreading independence from Spain. Paraguay resisted Buenos Aires’ military and set out on a path of relative isolation from the outside world. Other expeditions took the cause to Upper Peru, the region that would become Bolivia. After initial victories there, the forces from Buenos Aires retreated, leaving the battle in the hands of local Creole, mestizo, and Indian guerrillas. By the time Bolívar’s armies finally completed the liberation of Upper Peru (then renamed in the Liberator’s honour), the region had long since separated itself from Buenos Aires.
The main thrust of the southern independence forces met much greater success on the Pacific coast. In 1817 San Martín, a Latin American-born former officer in the Spanish military, directed 5,000 men in a dramatic crossing of the Andes and struck at a point in Chile where loyalist forces had not expected an invasion. In alliance with Chilean patriots under the command of Bernardo O’Higgins, San Martín’s army restored independence to a region whose highly factionalized junta had been defeated byroyalists in 1814. With Chile as his base, San Martín then faced the task of freeing the Spanish stronghold of Peru. After establishing naval dominance in the region, the southern movement made its way northward. Its task, however, was formidable. Having benefited from colonial monopolies and fearful of the kind of social violence that the late 18th-century revolt had threatened, many Peruvian Creoles were not anxious to break with Spain. Consequently, the forces under San Martín managed only a shaky hold on Lima and the coast. Final destruction of loyalist resistance in the highlands required the entrance of northern armies.
The north and the culmination of independence
Independence movements in the northern regions of Spanish South America had an inauspicious beginning in 1806. The small group of foreign volunteers that the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda brought to his homeland failed to incite the populace to rise against Spanish rule. Creoles in the region wanted an expansion of the free trade that was benefiting their plantation economy. At the same time, however, they feared that the removal of Spanish control might bring about a revolution that would destroy their own power.
Creole elites in Venezuela had good reason to fear such a possibility, for a massive revolution had recently exploded in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue. Beginning in 1791, a massive slave revolt sparked a general insurrection against the plantation system and French colonial power. The rebellion developed into both a civil war, pitting blacks and mulattos against whites, and an international conflict, as England and Spain supported the white plantation owners and rebels, respectively. By the first years of the 19th century, the rebels had shattered what had been a model colony and forged the independent nation of Haiti. Partly inspired by those Caribbean events, slaves in Venezuela carried out their own uprisings in the 1790s. Just as it served as a beacon of hope for the enslaved, Haiti was a warning of everything that might go wrong for elites in the cacao-growing areas of Venezuela and throughout slave societies in the Americas.
Creole anxieties contributed to the persistence of strong loyalist factions in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but they did not prevent the rise of an independence struggle there. Creoles organized revolutionary governments that proclaimed some social and economic reforms in 1810, and in Venezuela they openly declared a break with Spain the following year. Forces loyal to Spain fought the Venezuelan patriots from the start, leading to a pattern in which patriot rebels held the capital city and its surroundings but could not dominate large areas of the countryside. Some saw the earthquake that wreaked particular destruction in patriot-held areas in 1812 as a sign of divine displeasure with the revolution. That year certainly was the onset of a difficult period for the independence cause. Loyalist forces crushed the rebels’ military, driving Bolívar and others to seek refuge in New Granada proper (the heart of the viceroyalty).
Bolívar soon returned to Venezuela with a new army in 1813 and waged a campaign with a ferocity that is captured perfectly by the army’s motto, “Guerra a muerte” (“War to the death”). With loyalists displaying the same passion and violence, as well as obtaining significant support from the common people of mixed ethnicity, the revolutionists achieved only short-lived victories. The army led by loyalist José Tomás Boves demonstrated the key military role that the llaneros (cowboys) came to play in the region’s struggle. Turning the tide against independence, these highly mobile, ferocious fighters made up a formidable military force that pushed Bolívar out of his home country once more.
By 1815 the independence movements in Venezuela and almost all across Spanish South America seemed moribund. A large military expedition sent by Ferdinand VII in that year reconquered Venezuela and most of New Granada. Yet another invasion led by Bolívar in 1816 failed miserably.
The following year a larger and revitalized independence movement emerged, winning the struggle in the north and taking it into the Andean highlands. The mercurial Bolívar, the scion of an old aristocratic Creole family in Caracas, galvanized this initiative. Hero and symbol of South American independence, Bolívar did not produce victory by himself, of course; still, he was of fundamental importance to the movement as an ideologue, military leader, and political catalyst. In his most famous writing, the “Jamaica Letter” (composed during one of his periods of exile, in 1815), Bolívar affirmed his undying faith in the cause of independence, even in the face of the patriots’ repeated defeats. While laying out sharp criticisms of Spanish colonialism, the document also looked toward the future. For Bolívar, the only path for the former colonies was the establishment of autonomous, centralized republican government.
Although liberal in some respects, in the Jamaica Letter and elsewhere, he expressed strong doubts about the capacity of his fellow Latin Americans for self-government, revealing his socially conservative and politically authoritarian side. “Do not adopt the best system of government,” he wrote, “but the one most likely to succeed.” Thus, the type of republic that he eventually espoused was very much an oligarchic one, with socioeconomic and literacy qualifications for suffrage and with power centred in the hands of a strong executive. And though he favoured the granting of civil liberties to all male citizens and the abolition of slavery, Bolívar also worried that the death of so many peninsular soldiers during the wars would condemn Latin America to a system of “pardocracy,” or rule by pardos (people of mixed ethnicity), an outcome he deemed threatening. He believed that a virtuous governing system would not be possible if the nation was divided by ethnicity.
The Liberator emerged as a strong military and political force in the struggles that began in 1817. At this point he expanded the focus of the movement, shifting his attention to New Granada and courting supporters among the casta majority. A group of llaneros of mixed ethnicity led by José Antonio Páez proved crucial to the patriots’ military victories in 1818–19. A major step in that success came in the subduing of the loyalist defenders of Bogotá in 1819. After leading his army up the face of the eastern Andes, Bolívar dealt a crushing defeat to his enemies in the Battle of Boyacá.
Consolidating victory in the north proved difficult. A congress that Bolívar had convened in Angostura in 1819 named the Liberator president of Gran Colombia, a union of what are today Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador. In reality, sharp divisions permeated the region even before Angostura; these ultimately dashed Bolívar’s hopes of uniting the former Spanish colonies into a single new nation. The Bogotá area, for example, had previously refused to join in a confederation with the rest of revolutionary New Granada. Furthermore, loyalist supporters still held much of Venezuela, parts of the Colombian Andes, and all of Ecuador. Still, the tide had turned in favour of independence, and further energetic military campaigns liberated New Granada and Venezuela by 1821. A constituent congress held that year in Cúcuta chose Bolívar president of a now much more centralized Gran Colombia.
Gran Colombia, 1830.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Leaving his trusted right-hand man, Francisco de Paula Santander, in Bogotá to rule the new government, Bolívar then pushed on into Ecuador and the central Andes. There the southern and northern armies came together in a pincer movement to quash the remaining loyalist strength. In 1822 San Martín and Bolívar came face-to-face in a celebrated but somewhat mysterious encounter in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Accounts of their meeting vary widely, but apparently San Martín made the realistic evaluation that only Bolívar and his supporters could complete the liberation of the Andes. From that point on, the northerners took charge of the struggle in Peru and Bolivia. After standing by while Spanish forces threatened to recapture the lands that San Martín’s armies had emancipated, Bolívar responded to the calls of Peruvian Creoles and guided his soldiers to victory in Lima. While he organized the government there, his lieutenants set out to win the highlands of Peru and Upper Peru. One of them, the Venezuelan Antonio José de Sucre, directed the patriots’ triumph at Ayacucho in 1824, which turned out to be the last major battle of the war. Within two years independence fighters mopped up the last of loyalist resistance, and South America was free of Spanish control.
Mexico and Central America
The independence of Mexico, like that of Peru, the other major central area of Spain’s American empire, came late. As was the case in Lima, Mexican cities had a powerful segment of Creoles and peninsular Spaniards whom the old imperial system had served well. Mexican Creoles, like those in Peru, had the spectre of a major social uprising to persuade them to cling to Spain and stability for a while longer. For many of the powerful in Mexican society, a break with Spain promised mainly a loss of traditional status and power and possibly social revolution.
What was unique to the Mexican case was that the popular rebellion that exploded in 1810 was actually the first major call for independence in the region. Between 1808 and 1810, peninsulars had acted aggressively to preserve Spain’s power in the region. Rejecting the notion of a congress that would address the question of governance in the absence of the Spanish king, leading peninsulars in Mexico City deposed the viceroy and persecuted Creoles. They then welcomed weaker viceroys whom they knew they could dominate. Peninsulars’ efforts could not, however, prevent the emergence of an independence struggle. In 1810 the Bajío region produced a unique movement led by a radical priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. When officials discovered the conspiracy that Hidalgo and other Creoles had been planning in Querétaro, the priest appealed directly to the indigenous and mestizo populace. A rich agricultural and mining zone, the Bajío had recently undergone difficult economic times that hit those rural and urban workers particularly hard. Thus many of them responded eagerly to Hidalgo’s famous Grito de Dolores (“Cry of Dolores”). Although framed as an appeal for resistance to the peninsulars, the Grito was in effect a call for independence.
The enthusiasm that Hidalgo stirred among Indians and mestizos shocked and frightened both Creole and peninsular elites. Under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the movement’s ranks swelled rapidly. Hidalgo’s untrained army grew to have some 80,000 members as it conquered towns and larger cities and ultimately threatened Mexico City itself. During their campaign the members of this force attacked the persons and property of peninsular and Creole elites. The movement for independence was becoming a race and class war.
Perhaps fearing the atrocities his troops might commit there, Hidalgo prevented the movement from entering Mexico City. Shortly afterward troops of the viceregal government caught up with the rebels. After a dramatic military defeat, Hidalgo was captured in early 1811 and executed.
The death of its first leader did not mean the end of Mexico’s first independence campaign. Soon another priest, the mestizo José María Morelos y Pavón, took over the reins of the movement. Under Morelos the rebellion gained clearer objectives of independence and social and economic reform as well as greater organization and a wider social base. With the defeat and death of Morelos in 1815, the potential national scope of the movement came to an effective end. Although smaller forces under leaders like Vicente Guerrero and Guadalupe Victoria (Manuel Félix Fernández) continued to harass the powerful through guerrilla warfare in several regions, the popular movement for independence in Mexico was no longer a grave threat to elite power.
Final independence, in fact, was not the result of the efforts of Hidalgo, Morelos, or the forces that had made up their independence drive. It came instead as a conservative initiative led by military officers, merchants, and the Roman Catholic Church. The liberals who carried out the 1820 revolt in Spain intended to eliminate the special privileges of the church and the military. Anxious over that threat to the strength of two of the pillars of the Mexican government and newly confident in their ability to keep popular forces in check, Creoles turned against Spanish rule in 1820–21.
Two figures from the early rebellion played central roles in liberating Mexico. One, Guerrero, had been an insurgent chief; the other, Agustín de Iturbide, had been an officer in the campaign against the popular independence movement. The two came together behind an agreement known as the Iguala Plan. Centred on provisions of independence, respect for the church, and equality between Mexicans and peninsulars, the plan gained the support of many Creoles, Spaniards, and former rebels. As royal troops defected to Iturbide’s cause, the new Spanish administrator was soon forced to accept the inevitability of Mexican independence. A year later, in 1822, Iturbide engineered his own coronation as Agustín I, Emperor of Mexico.
The following year, a revolt that included the former insurgent Guadalupe Victoria (who, like Guerrero, had abandoned the cause of a popular independence) cut short Iturbide’s tenure as monarch. The consequences of that overthrow extended from Mexico through Central America. In Mexico the rebellion ushered in a republic and introduced Antonio López de Santa Anna, who occupied a central place in the nation’s politics for several decades. The provinces of the Kingdom of Guatemala—which included what are today the Mexican state of Chiapas and the nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—had adhered to Iturbide’s Mexico by 1822. With the exception of Chiapas, these Central American provinces split off from Mexico in the wake of Iturbide’s fall. They formed a federation, the United Provinces of Central America, which held together only until 1838, when regionalism led to the creation of separate countries in the region.
Brazil
Brazil gained its independence with little of the violence that marked similar transitions in Spanish America. Conspiracies against Portuguese rule during 1788–98 showed that some groups in Brazil had already been contemplating the idea of independence in the late 18th century. Moreover, the Pombaline reforms of the second half of the 18th century, Portugal’s attempt to overhaul the administration of its overseas possessions, were an inconvenience to many in the colony. Still, the impulse toward independence was less powerful in Brazil than in Spanish America. Portugal, with more limited financial, human, and military resources than Spain, had never ruled its American subjects with as heavy a hand as its Iberian neighbour. Portugal neither enforced commercial monopolies as strictly nor excluded the American-born from high administrative positions as widely as did Spain. Many Brazilian-born and Portuguese elites had received the same education, especially at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Their economic interests also tended to overlap. The reliance of the Brazilian upper classes on African slavery, finally, favoured their continued ties to Portugal. Plantation owners depended on the African slave trade, which Portugal controlled, to provide workers for the colony’s main economic activities. The size of the resulting slave population—approximately half the total Brazilian population in 1800—also meant that Creoles shied away from political initiatives that might mean a loss of control over their social inferiors.
The key step in the relatively bloodless end of colonial rule in Brazil was the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The arrival of the court transformed Brazil in ways that made its return to colony status impossible. The unprecedented concentration of economic and administrative power in Rio de Janeiro brought a new integration to Brazil. The emergence of that capital as a large and increasingly sophisticated urban centre also expanded markets for Brazilian manufactures and other goods. Even more important to the development of manufacturing in Brazil was one of the first acts undertaken there by the Portuguese ruler, Prince Regent John: the removal of old restrictions on manufacturing. Another of his enactments, the opening of Brazilian ports to direct trade with friendly countries, was less helpful to local manufacturers, but it further contributed to Brazil’s emergence as a metropolis.
Brazil headed into a political crisis when groups in Portugal tried to reverse the metropolitanization of their former colony. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars came calls for John to return to Lisbon. At first he demurred and in 1815 even raised Brazil to the status of kingdom, legally equal to Portugal within the empire that he ruled. The situation was a difficult one for John (after 1816 King John VI). If he moved back to Lisbon, he might lose Brazil, but if he remained in Rio, he might well lose Portugal. Finally, after liberal revolts in Lisbon and Oporto in 1820, the Portuguese demands became too strong for him to resist. In a move that ultimately facilitated Brazil’s break with Portugal, John sailed for Lisbon in 1821 but left his son Dom Pedro behind as prince regent. It was Dom Pedro who, at the urging of local elites, oversaw the final emergence of an independent Brazil.
Matters were pushed toward that end by Portuguese reaction against the rising power of their former colony. Although the government constituted by the liberals after 1820 allowed Brazilian representation in a Cortes, it was clear that Portugal now wanted to reduce Brazil to its previous colonial condition, endangering all the concessions and powers the Brazilian elite had won. By late 1821 the situation was becoming unbearable. The Cortes now demanded that Dom Pedro return to Portugal. As his father had advised him to do, the prince instead declared his intention to stay in Brazil in a speech known as the “Fico” (“I am staying”). When Pedro proclaimed its independence on Sept. 7, 1822, and subsequently became its first emperor, Brazil’s progression from Portuguese colony to autonomous country was complete. There was some armed resistance from Portuguese garrisons in Brazil, but the struggle was brief.
Independence still did not come without a price. Over the next 25 years Brazil suffered a series of regional revolts, some lasting as long as a decade and costing tens of thousands of lives. Dom Pedro I was forced from his throne in 1831, to be succeeded by his son, Dom Pedro II. The break with Portugal did not itself, however, produce the kind of disruption and devastation that plagued much of the former Spanish America. With its territory and economy largely intact, its government headed by a prince of the traditional royal family, and its society little changed, Brazil enjoyed continuities that made it extraordinarily stable in comparison with most of the other new states in the region.
Building new nations, 1826–50
While Brazil maintained its territorial integrity after independence, the former Spanish America split into more than a dozen separate countries, following the administrative divisions of the colonial system. The difficulty for the inhabitants of these units was not, however, as simple as the demarcation of geographic boundaries. Rather, the recently emancipated countries of Latin America faced the much more daunting challenge of defining and consolidating new nations. With the structures of the old system removed, the inhabitants of each country set out on programs to create a postcolonial political, economic, and social order. The obstacles confronting them were myriad and imposing. As Bolívar himself exclaimed in a final cry of despair, “America is ungovernable for us…; he who serves a revolution ploughs the sea.” Indeed, it was only toward 1850, at the end of a 25-year period sometimes known as “the long wait,” that the outlines of that new order began to take their definitive form across the region.
Political models and the search for authority
One of the most pressing and also most enduring problems that leaders of Latin American nations faced in the decades after independence was establishing the legitimacy of their new governments. In this regard the break with the colonial system proved traumatic. In Iberian political traditions, power and authority resided to a great extent in the figure of the monarch. Only the monarch had the ability to dominate the church, the military, and other powerful corporate groups in Iberian and colonial Latin American societies. Representative government and the concept of popular sovereignty, as a corollary, had a weak presence in Iberian political culture. With the Spanish king removed—and with him the ultimate source of political legitimacy—Creole elites had to find new foundations on which to construct systems of governance that their compatriots would accept and respect.
Although in practice they were unable to abandon the legacies of three centuries of Iberian colonial rule, leaders in Latin America turned generally to other political traditions for solutions to the problem of legitimacy. Adapting models from northern Europe and the United States, they set up republics across the region. Doing so not only helped justify their separation from Spain but also enabled Latin American elites to try to follow the example of countries they most admired, particularly Great Britain, the United States, and France. Many in the upper classes of Latin American societies identified political institutions as sources of the economic progress those countries were enjoying. At the same time, efforts to implement those political systems in Latin America brought to the region’s new countries Enlightenment conceptions of politics based on rationality and a vision of politics as an interaction of individuals who enjoyed specific, definable rights and duties.
Constitutions
Particularly in the first, heady years of independence, elites throughout Latin America exhibited the influence of the Enlightenment in their propensity for producing constitutions. Those documents demonstrated not only attempts to impose rational plans on new nations but also the changing attitudes of elites toward their societies.
The earliest constitutions appeared in Venezuela, Chile, and New Granada in the years 1811–12. The authors of those founding documents rather optimistically intended to create representative government in independent Latin America and to declare inalienable natural rights of liberty, security, property, and equality. To implement those ideas, these constitutions set up a division of power in which the executive was comparatively weak.
From the mid-1810s to mid-century the overwhelming tendency was to move away from those early schemes. With different regions and elite factions battling against each other, the first liberal constitutional governments had failed. Now leaders in the region sought to erect stronger and more highly centralized states, again carefully laying out their programs in constitutions. This shift was not a rejection of foreign models. On the contrary, this change followed the evolution of European political thought; Latin American elites were now basing their ideas on different foreign theories, turning away from those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and toward those of more conservative thinkers like Montesquieu and Jeremy Bentham. At the same time, the movement toward stronger executives and more centralized states reflected specific circumstances of these emerging new nations. At first, elites wanted a more powerful state to complete the victory over Spain and then to gain recognition from a Europe by this time dominated by antirepublican attitudes. As political order proved difficult to achieve, many Latin American leaders also looked to a more centralized state as an instrument against political and civil unrest.
Hopes for a new and stronger government only rarely centred on the idea of monarchy. Leaders in Argentina and Chile discussed the possibility of introducing a constitutional monarchy with a European king at its head. Mexico had emperors, first with Iturbide and then in 1864–67 with the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph’s brother Maximilian, and Brazil enjoyed relative stability in a constitutional monarchy that lasted from independence until 1889. Still, such initiatives were temporary and exceptional. Latin Americans encountered a great deal of difficulty in finding suitable European princes to rule their countries. Local figures, furthermore, lacked the necessary authority to be accepted as monarchs. Thus, for practical as well as ideological reasons, republics were the rule during the 19th century. As leaders sought greater centralization, they adopted new forms of republicanism. Some, particularly military leaders such as Bolívar and the generals who had served under him, followed the model of a Napoleonic state. Bolívar’s recommendation of a powerful president-for-life and a hereditary or life senate, resembling the structures of constitutional monarchy with republican ornamentation, was never followed. The predominant model was that of the regime that Spanish liberals had set up in 1812. Not all new constitutions after 1815 jettisoned federalism; Mexico in 1824, for instance, embraced that ideal. Overall, Latin America moved toward stronger, more-centralized republican governments by the mid-19th century.
Disorder and caudillismo
Written constitutions were not, however, sufficient to enforce order in the new countries of the region. Particularly in the 1825–50 period, Latin America experienced a high degree of political instability. National governments changed hands rapidly in most areas, which only prolonged the weakness and ineffectiveness of the emerging political systems. In Mexico, to take but one example, the years 1825–55 saw 48 turnovers in the national executive. Neither those in power nor those seeking office evinced consistent respect for the often idealistic provisions of constitutions. In some cases the very authors of constitutions broke the rules laid out in them to gain or preserve control over governments. Like any other member of their society, they knew better than to expect their fellow political actors to stay within the strictures of the law. Extralegal maneuvers and the use of force became common elements of politics.
Much of the conflict that characterized these years consisted of simple disputes over power. Still, by the end of the 1830s and into the 1840s, politics in many areas coalesced around two ideological poles, usually known as liberal and conservative. These groupings were not mass-based political parties in the 20th-century sense but rather factions of the elite; believing the majority of society to be ill-prepared for democracy, both liberals and conservatives intended to construct governments for the people but not by the people. Nonetheless, at times groups of artisans or peasant villagers took sides in the factional battles, hoping thus to press their own interests.
The precise definition of the sides in those fights is very difficult, owing to variations between countries and time periods. Urban merchants, rural landowners, and other economic interest groups overlapped so frequently—often within a single family—that it is impossible to generalize about the different origins of political factions. Moreover, the positions taken by one group could be surprising; in Venezuela in the 1840s, for instance, it was conservatives who supported free trade with the exterior, a stance that elsewhere was one of the classic tenets of liberalism. In general, however, one can say that liberals pressed harder for free trade and the rationalization and modernization of their societies—which essentially meant the adoption of European and North American liberal understandings of society as a collection of autonomous individuals. Conservatives, on the other hand, proved more favourable to old institutions, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, and to traditional visions of society as grounded in corporate groups. Indeed, in many contexts the question of whether or not to curtail the power of the church was the key point of divergence between otherwise similar liberal and conservative factions.
To an extent, the role that violence or the threat of violence played in politics reflected a militarization brought about by the long period of the wars of independence. Only in Peru and even more so in Mexico did this phenomenon involve the continued influence of a regular, professional military class. Elsewhere the professional military failed to form a coherent interest group, and in many countries civilian politicians managed to control or even reduce the size of their national armies. It was rather in the power of militias and individual military leaders that the militarization of society was most visible. Throughout the region such forces grew to influence or even head national governments.
The military men who rose to positions of dominance were examples of the caudillo, a figure that epitomized this unstable period. Often coming to power through the use of violence, these leaders imposed themselves through the force of their own personalities, their control over armed followers, and their strategic alliances with elite groups. Some caudillos rose to power from humble beginnings, while others came from wealthy, landowning sectors and used their dependent workers as the core of their support. The stereotype of the caudillo as charismatic enough to win the enduring loyalty of his men and skilled enough to ride or fight better than any of them did not, of course, apply to all, but these were domineering and macho leaders. Whatever their social origins, caudillos in the postcolonial period became key political actors, working in alliance with, and at times under the control of, the economically powerful and civilian political leaders of the new nations of Latin America.
In a few cases caudillos contributed to political order. In Chile in the 1830s, for instance, the caudillo Diego Portales was a key figure in the establishment of a comparatively stable government. Allying with conservative elements, Portales helped found a political order that survived his death in 1837. It was an order based, as he put it, on “the weight of the night,” meaning the ignorance and passivity of the popular majority—something he made little effort to change. Juan Manuel de Rosas, a caudillo who is said to have been able to outrope and outride his gaucho supporters, imposed a brutal political regime in Argentina from 1829 to 1852. Seeing his homeland split into partisan factions, Rosas sought to ensure a kind of peace by achieving the ultimate victory of one side. His iron-fisted administration, which made use of propaganda and a secret police force, pursued the interests of Rosas and his fellow Buenos Aires ranchers; still, caudillos from other provinces repeatedly tried to oust this violent leader. Indeed, the very foundation of their power in personal relations and in violence meant that the legitimacy of caudillos’ rule was always in doubt. Few were able to set up networks of alliances that could withstand the challenges of new leaders who emerged with their own armed supporters and wealthy allies. The system of caudillismo was a volatile one. Although the general type continued to exist throughout the 19th century, it was the postindependence period that represented the golden age of the caudillos.
Economic obstacles
Complicating the construction of stable, constitutional governments in the decades after independence were the economic circumstances that prevailed in the period. Creoles who had expected the dismantling of colonial restraints on Latin American economies to produce a wave of new wealth found their hopes dashed in the 1820s. In many ways the region’s economies were poorer and less integrated in the first decades after independence than they had been in the late colonial period. Political disorder was both a cause and result of this situation. Unable to rely on old taxes for revenue and faced with military and bureaucratic expenses greater than those of the colonial regime, new governments commonly found themselves in tight financial straits. Their resulting weakness contributed to political instability, which at the same time impeded the reorganization of economic systems.
The wars of independence contributed to the disappointing postwar economic picture. In some areas, such as Venezuela, damage from the wars was extensive. Even where the destruction of human life and economic resources was less widespread, disruptions in financial arrangements and systems of labour relations provoked a decline in important economic sectors. Mining suffered particularly in many countries. The richest mineral producer, Mexico, needed roughly half a century to regain its preindependence levels of production.
As they emerged from their battles for emancipation, the new nations encountered other difficulties. The mere fact of political independence did not eliminate long-standing problems of transportation, but it did break down some traditional commercial networks. The entrance of foreign merchants and imported goods, although on a much more limited scale than would later be the case, led to competition with, and in some areas the displacement of, local traders and producers. Apart from loans that left most countries in debt, the region received little capital from foreign sources. The departure of, or discrimination against, peninsular Spaniards reduced what had been a major source of skilled labour and administrative know-how, as well as capital for investment. Relatively few exports, such as coffee, sugar, and cattle products, found world markets favourable enough to stimulate the expansion of their production in Latin America. Colonial patterns had been destroyed, but the economies of the region had not yet found a consistent new orientation.
Social change
Mobility and hierarchy
The Creole elites who had headed the independence cause throughout Latin America had no intention of losing their social, economic, and political power in the construction of new nations. Managing to solidify and even expand their influence after the removal of colonial administration, these elites emerged as the great beneficiaries of independence.
The situation of other social groups and institutions was more mixed. Leaders across the region quickly eliminated the system of separate ethnic castes. Persons of mixed race were, in theory, to have the same legal rights as members of the white upper classes. Indeed, the period of independence saw the ascension of individual mestizos and castas to positions of prominence. Service in the wars was particularly useful in this regard. Men such as the mulattoes Manuel Piar in Venezuela and José Padilla in New Granada rose to the rank of general and admiral, respectively, in Bolívar’s forces. In practice, however, the old hierarchies did not fall so easily and continued on informally. Those nonwhites who managed to achieve the status of elites were clearly exceptions to the general rule. The destruction of the caste system allowed for only limited loosening of racial and class hierarchies. Indeed, both Piar and Padilla were executed under rather questionable circumstances.
The position of Indians changed rather slowly in the postindependence era, despite some early and energetic initiatives. Spain had ended Indian tribute in 1810, and in the years after that several Latin American nations saw fit to repeat that measure with abolitions of their own. More generally, leaders frequently spoke of breaking down the barriers between the indigenous and more Hispanized sectors of their societies. Still, in the aftermath of independence, governments tended to reverse their positions toward Amerindian populations. The countries of the Andes, for example, reinstated Indian tribute, albeit under different names. Bolivian governments derived as much as 80 percent of their revenues from that source through mid-century. Full-scale attacks on indigenous communities’ lands came later in the century.
Strong measures against African slavery similarly appeared in many areas by the late 1820s. Lawmakers declared the children of slaves to be free, banned the slave trade, or even ended slavery itself. Once again, however, there was a pattern of backsliding, so that, where slave labour played a significant economic role, the final abolition of the institution of slavery came about in most countries only about 1850. The growth of sugar production in Cuba and coffee production in Brazil, furthermore, meant that those two slave societies continued to flourish. Both areas continued to receive large numbers of new enslaved workers from Africa until after mid-century (1865 in Cuba, 1851 in Brazil) and only abolished slavery in the 1880s (1886 in Cuba, 1888 in Brazil).
Social institutions
Both as part of their ideological commitment to liberal individualism and as a means of increasing the power of their new states, leaders in the postindependence years tried to establish their control over the formidable colonial institutions of the Roman Catholic Church and the military. Success came more easily in the case of the military. Only in Mexico and to a lesser extent in Peru did professional armies form fairly coherent interest groups pressing for the maintenance of their traditional privileges. After mid-century, however, those special privileges were lost even in these countries. The church, on the other hand, though losing a great deal of power, held on to a position of influence in much of the region. Armies of independence and some subsequent governments took over church properties and resources to meet their financial needs. In Buenos Aires and Montevideo, liberals were also able to trim the privileges of the church; elsewhere, however, attempts to do so either appeared later or, as in Mexico and Guatemala, provoked serious conflicts.
The new order, 1850–1910
Political and economic transitions, 1850–70
The first decades of the second half of the 19th century represented the beginnings of a fundamental shift in the still-young nations of Latin America. At the heart of this transition was a growing orientation of the economies of the region to world markets. As Europe and North America experienced a second wave of industrialization, they began to reevaluate the economic potential of Latin America; the region looked to them increasingly like a vital source of raw materials for the expanding economies of the North Atlantic. To take advantage of the possibilities that this conjuncture opened, elites in Latin America directed their countries ever more toward export economies. That change also entailed a series of social and political developments that, especially from the 1870s on, constituted a new order in Latin America. The 1850s and ’60s were merely a transitional period, however, as political conflicts and civil wars broke out in Mexico, Venezuela, and elsewhere, postponing the consolidation of the general shift.
The liberal oligarchic age, 1870–1910
The order that took shape in the last decades of the 19th century is often called neocolonial, as a way of suggesting that the internal and external structures characterizing the region maintained overall similarities to those of the period of Iberian colonial rule. To a great extent this is a useful description. As in the colonial period, the region was tremendously vulnerable to outside events and foreign nations. Although many Latin American elites profited from the new order, they ceded a degree of control over their countries to the industrializing economies of the North Atlantic. For much of the 19th century Britain was the predominant power in the region, followed by the United States, France, and Germany. By the end of the 1870–1910 period the United States managed to supplant Britain. As in colonial times, Latin America continued to be largely an exporter of raw materials and an importer of manufactures. Furthermore, despite some legal changes, social relations had not undergone revolutionary change. Broad hierarchies of race and class continued to define social relations. In the countryside in particular the figure of the patrón (boss or patron) maintained dominance over both physical resources and persons of lower status. The role of such men as patriarchs in their households demonstrates further that the relative positions of men and women had not become noticeably more equal; although not accepted by all, definitions of women as weaker than men and fit primarily for domesticity were still the norm.
The patterns of 1870–1910 were not, however, mere copies or repetitions of colonial trends. Along with the similarities to earlier conditions came profound economic, social, and political changes. In this regard the term “neocolonial” does not capture the complexity and dynamism of this period in Latin American history.
Export economies
Through the mid-19th century many interests in Latin America had doubts about the wisdom of opening their economies to the world. In countries like Peru and Colombia, artisans and other producers, as well as some merchants, persuaded their governments to set up barriers against the entrance of foreign competition. By the 1860s and ’70s, however, such protectionism was swept away by a wave of free-trade liberalism. Domestic production of textiles and other goods proved incapable of doing more than merely surviving. When the great impulses toward direct links to Europe and the United States emerged, elites across Latin America turned their backs on the artisans and weavers in their countries and enthusiastically welcomed in manufactures from England, the United States, and other nations. The doctrines of liberalism—from free trade internationally to open markets domestically—became hegemonic.
Besides the upsurge in international demand for Latin American primary goods, the factors fueling the rise of export economies included foreign investment and technological innovations brought from the industrializing countries. A wide range of products were affected by the increase in demand, from consumer goods such as sugar, coffee, wheat, and beef to industrial products like rubber and minerals. Old products such as silver recovered and surpassed earlier levels of production, while other new products appeared. One spectacularly successful new export from mid-century to the 1870s was guano, or seabird dung, which was mined on the islands off the Peruvian coast and sold to Europe as a fertilizer. When new chemical fertilizers shut down foreign markets for guano, nitrates and copper from the arid regions of northern Chile entered the scene as profitable new mining products for export.
The lack of capital that had plagued Latin America in the immediate postindependence period was resolved now by injections of foreign capital on a scale previously unknown. Investments from Europe provided much of the financial support for infrastructural improvements. British and other foreign firms constructed railways, streetcar systems, and electric networks, often getting guarantees of profits on their investments and other favourable concessions from local authorities. At the same time, some ominous signs appeared; often borrowing against projected export earnings, the Peruvian and other governments ran up large foreign debts in the late 19th century.
Along with financial capital came technology, in such forms as barbed-wire fencing, refrigeration, steam engines, and mining equipment. With access to credit, both foreign and domestic producers were now able to adopt such technologies, thereby increasing the size and efficiency of their production for export markets. The Cuban sugar economy, for example, underwent major changes linked to the creation of highly capitalized central mills that used new processing machinery to increase refining capacity and benefited from new transportation technology to ease the sale to export markets. Indeed, perhaps the single most important technological advance was the railroad; in this bold age of construction, railroads thrust out across much of Latin America, speeding transportation between productive zones and urban centres and ports. The spread of rail lines brought year-round transportation to regions that had lacked it. Moreover, by reducing freight costs, railways fostered the production of bulk commodities like beef and coffee. Together with the introduction of steamship lines in the Magdalena, Orinoco, La Plata–Paraná, and other river systems, the railroad thus opened up the possibilities for exports of primary goods. Communications also improved with the introduction of telegraph lines, which by the 1870s linked parts of Latin America directly with Europe. Both the new investments and technology transfers served to facilitate production and export of the primary goods that industrializing economies sought. Latin America underwent a thorough integration into the world economy.
Even as it opened up areas of lucrative production, this new orientation of Latin American economies imposed certain limits. The concentration on exports of primary goods and the competition of imported manufactures with domestic products served as powerful disincentives to economic diversification. Some areas, like Cuba with sugar and Central America with coffee, fell into patterns of monoculture, in which an entire national economy was dependent on the health of one particular crop. Even where more than one product was central to a country, the reliance on these exports made Latin American economies vulnerable to shifts in demand and prices on the world market, as well as to local conditions influencing production.
Although the new order favoured a focus on raw materials production, some areas experienced the beginnings of industrialization. Particularly in capitals that served as commercial as well as administrative centres, such as Buenos Aires, the late 19th and early 20th centuries witnessed the rise of tertiary sectors as well. The increased volume of production and trade spawned a wide range of services that created jobs in manual labour in docks and processing plants and white-collar work in both the government and private firms. Manufacturing sprang up in countries like Chile and Brazil, often starting with the production of cheap textiles and other relatively simple goods that could compete with low-end imports. Some of the financing for such ventures came from abroad. A significant and often underestimated portion of the capital that the new systems of banking and finance provided for early manufacturing efforts, however, consisted of local capital. Groups that had grown wealthy and powerful in the export economy began to diversify into manufacturing in areas like São Paulo. Still, the transition from exporters of primary goods to producers of manufactures was a difficult one in which the region participated unevenly. Most notably in Central America and in the Caribbean, the local elites’ activities were largely restricted to the production of primary export goods, and economies retained more of a neocolonial orientation.
Capitalism and social transitions
The social ramifications of the rise of export economies were vast. The acceleration of the export economies and related commerce fostered a tendency toward urbanization. The period was one of general population growth in much of Latin America, most spectacularly in the temperate, staple-producing zones of South America. Within the overall increase, the rise of cities was particularly noteworthy. More than simple size was involved; cities like Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City became sophisticated, cosmopolitan urban centres. Urban reforms, many inspired by the sweeping transformation of the French capital under Napoleon III and his city planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, allowed cities to vie with each other for the title of “Paris of South America.” At the same time, incipient industrialization brought conflicts between urban workers and capitalists. Workers had for decades been organizing themselves into mutual aid societies and other nonideological associations. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, new groups began to emerge. At times with the special participation of recent European immigrants, workers established trade unions, pressing their interests with strikes and other activities. In this early phase, ideologies of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism had particular influence in many areas. By the early 20th century, moreover, the growth of government and service sectors had created urban middle classes that were ready to enter politics.
In the countryside, social relations underwent greater change over a short period than at any time since the conquest. Increasing ties to the capitalist world economy did not always lead to wage labour but rather fed the diversification of work relations. In fact, one tendency of the period was the strengthening—or even extension—of certain nonwage forms of labour. In parts of Peru, Mexico, Central America, and other areas, debt peonage was often used in export agriculture. In this system, employers or labour agents advanced a sum to workers, who would then have to labour on a ranch or plantation to pay off their debt. Because of manipulations by the owners, the workers often found that their indebtedness only grew the longer they toiled, so that debt peonage became a form of de facto slavery. The nature of this system is controversial, however, as it was possible that the debt simply represented an advance payment as an incentive, which the worker was seldom forced to repay if he left the job. So-called vagrancy laws, by which authorities could force unattached gauchos or peasants to work on large rural estates, were also enacted in countries such as Argentina and Guatemala. In the Central Valley of Chile, existing tenancy arrangements suffered modifications that cut back the rights and privileges of poor rural workers. Brazil and Argentina, on the other hand, experienced the emergence of unique systems of farming by European immigrants, which brought modern wage systems to important areas of their economies. Indeed, in those countries, immigration of Italians, Spaniards, and other Europeans transformed the ethnic composition and habits of whole regions. Argentina alone received almost 2.5 million people in this period.
Throughout Latin America the position of rural workers came under attack from the large plantations, ranches, and estates that were expanding to take advantage of potential profits from the export economies. In south-central Brazil coffee plantations spread westward, pushing back small foodstuff production; in Argentina the ranching frontier pressed southward, displacing indigenous groups. Peasants and indigenous communities had resisted encroachment by neighbouring estates throughout the early national period and continued to do so into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the balance of power was shifting in favour of the large landowners. Early liberal moves to break up communal landholding paled beside the more energetic initiatives of the later 19th century. Although indigenous communities survived in the Andes, Mexico, and Central America, they commonly lost land, access to water and other resources, and some of the limited autonomy they had enjoyed.
The Roman Catholic Church also was the target of ever more aggressive liberal attacks after mid-century. In much of Latin America the church had been the preeminent source of capital and a major property owner. As in the case of indigenous communities, the justification for those assaults was based in liberal ideology; politicians argued that property had to be placed into the hands of individuals because they would be more likely to develop it efficiently and thus contribute to economic progress. In Mexico, governments began large-scale appropriations of church holdings. This inspired the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29), in which communities rose up in violent defense of the church without the support of the bishops.
Oligarchies in power
Along with the export economies came political transitions. The increased revenues that burgeoning commerce provided allowed elites to consolidate more orderly political systems in some countries. Political unrest continued, however, in others; Colombia, for instance, experienced a series of civil wars toward the end of the 19th century.
Across the region, groups tied to the export economies came to dominate politics in this era. In 1871 Guatemalan liberals linked to the rising coffee sector ousted the conservative regime that had controlled the country since 1838. The years 1876–1911 in Mexico, meanwhile, marked the iron-fisted rule of Porfirio Díaz, who began his career as a liberal fighting under a banner of election for one term only and ended up as a dictator who customarily manipulated his country’s political structures to ensure that he and his allies would remain in power. That regime, known as the Porfiriato, was a particularly clear example of the late 19th-century regimes’ ties to the new economic order. The Díaz government, like other progressive dictatorships in Latin America, worked to promote railroad construction, to force reluctant peasants and indigenous groups to work on rural estates, to repress popular organizing, and in other ways to benefit the dominant elites. Through such initiatives the governments of the day diverged from pure liberal tenets according to which the market alone determines the shape and nature of economic change. In many countries ruling groups began to adopt the ideas of positivism, an ideology stressing a scientific analysis of human history and efforts to accelerate progress. In Brazil the decentralized old republic, dominated by rural elites, replaced constitutional monarchy in 1889 and took as its motto the positivist slogan “Ordem e progresso” (“Order and progress”). That phrase summed up what the ruling groups in Brazil and across Latin America sought in the mature age of export-oriented transformation—the maintenance of the hierarchies that they dominated and the achievement of prosperity and a “civilization” that represented an approximation of North Atlantic models. Thus both oligarchic republics and liberal dictatorships evolved as part of the new order of the 1870–1910 period. Roger A. Kittleson David Bushnell
New order emerging, 1910–45
The advances in economic growth and political stabilization that were evident in most of Latin America by the early 20th century came up against an array of challenges as the century wore on. The forward momentum was not necessarily lost—although Mexico experienced negative economic growth along with great political turmoil during the first decade of the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910—but some partial changes of direction occurred, and new problems kept emerging. The challenges were of both internal and external origin, ranging from steady population increase for the region as a whole to the consequences of Latin America’s ever-closer incorporation into the world economy. The external factors are generally easier to identify, if only because of the suddenness of their impact.
Economic and social developments
World war and world trade
Few Latin Americans felt strong emotional identification with either of the contending alliances in World War I (1914–18), except for the immigrant communities in southern South America and the ranks of generally Francophile liberal intellectuals. Of the major countries, only Brazil followed the example of the United States in declaring war on Germany, while Mexico and Argentina, which respectively saw the United States as a bullying neighbour and a hemispheric rival, vied for a leadership role in behalf of Latin American neutrality. Yet all countries were affected by the wartime disruption of trade and capital flows, particularly those that had in recent years most successfully penetrated European markets with their own exports and become important consumers of European goods and financial services. Argentina was an obvious example. The outbreak of war brought a sharp decline in its trade as the Allied powers diverted shipping elsewhere and Germany became inaccessible. Although exports soon recovered, mainly in the form of meat to feed Allied troops, imported manufactures were scarce because overseas factories were devoted to war production, and scarcity drove up prices.
Wartime disruptions were only temporary, and they gave way to a frenzied boom in the immediate postwar period as Latin American exporters cashed in on pent-up demand in the former warring powers. An extreme case was the “dance of the millions” in Cuba, where the price of sugar reached a peak of 23 cents per pound in 1920, only to fall back to 3.5 cents within the space of a few months, as European production of beet sugar returned to normal. Similar postwar booms and busts occurred elsewhere, even if less sharply, and demonstrated some of the hazards of Latin America’s increasing dependence on the world economy. Those hazards were underscored again by the costly program Brazil felt compelled to undertake to support the price of coffee, buying up surplus production and keeping it off the market. First tried in 1906 and briefly repeated during the war, this “valorization” policy was reinstated during the 1920s in the face of persistent weakness of the world coffee price. Yet one reason for the latter was the expansion of cultivation in other Latin American countries, above all Colombia, which by the end of World War I had emerged as the second leading producer—encouraged by, among other things, the Brazilian price support efforts.
Conditions in the world market were in the last analysis unfavourable for Latin America’s terms of trade, since demand for most of the primary commodities that the region specialized in was not keeping pace with the growth of production. Nevertheless, the decade of the 1920s was generally a period of economic growth and renewed optimism. All countries continued to pursue an outward-directed growth strategy insofar as they pursued a conscious strategy at all, placing few impediments in the way of import-export trade. Foreign investment also resumed on a massive scale and now came chiefly from the United States, whose stake rose to $5.4 billion in 1929 as against $1.6 billion in 1914. New capital flowed both into productive activities, like the Venezuelan petroleum industry (controlled by U.S., British, and Dutch interests and by the late 1920s the world’s leading exporter though not producer), and into loans made by Wall Street bankers to Latin American governments.
The emerging force of nationalism
The growing importance of foreign capital inevitably provoked a nationalist backlash, which reinforced the cultural nationalism already strong among groups of intellectuals and the anti-imperialist sentiment provoked by U.S. intervention around the Caribbean and in Mexico. Cultural nationalism was associated above all with conservatives who cherished the Iberian heritage as a shield against corrupting Anglo-Saxon influences, while the leading anti-imperialist spokesmen tended to be leftist. Incipient left-wing parties and labour unions were also in the forefront of economic nationalism, because, among other reasons, foreign-owned firms provided a more popular target than local enterprises. British nitrate investors in Chile thus faced serious labour unrest, as did the Boston-based United Fruit Company, hit by a violent strike in late 1928 in the Colombian banana zone. Petroleum investors in Mexico faced serious labour unrest in addition to a simmering conflict with the government itself over the control of subsoil resources, which the new constitution of 1917 had declared exclusive property of the nation.
A further escalation of economic nationalism came with the world economic depression of 1929 and after, though more as a defensive reaction than as a conscious policy. For Latin America, the depression put an abrupt end to the inflow of foreign capital and at the same time brought a drastic decline in the price of the region’s exports, which in turn reduced the capacity to import and the governments’ revenues from customs duties. At one point, a pound of Cuban sugar was selling for less than the U.S. tariff on the sugar. In response to the crisis, Latin American countries raised their own tariffs and imposed other restrictions on foreign trade. Even if the immediate purpose was conservation of scarce foreign exchange rather than the theoretical goal of increasing economic independence, the result was a decided impetus to domestic manufacturing, whose beneficiaries later appealed to nationalist sentiments to preserve the gains made. In Colombia, textile production increased during the 1930s at a faster rate than in England during the Industrial Revolution, despite the fact that the government continued to see protection of the coffee industry as its primary economic mission. But manufacturing made important gains in almost all the larger Latin American nations, which already before the depression had begun the development of an industrial base. It remains to be said, however, that, except for Mexico with its well-established iron and steel industry, manufacturing still consisted almost wholly of consumer goods production.
On another front, to save available jobs for native inhabitants, numerous countries adopted measures during the depression that required a given percentage of a company’s employees to be citizens. In Brazil, for similar reasons, tight restrictions were imposed on the flow of immigrants. Even without restrictions, however, and despite the fact that some countries recovered quickly from the effects of the depression, Latin America in the 1930s was simply not as attractive to immigrants as before.
Population and social change
In some countries the life of most inhabitants seemed little changed in 1945, at the end of World War II, from what it had been in 1910. This was the case in Paraguay, still overwhelmingly rural and isolated, and Honduras, except for its coastal banana enclave. Even in Brazil, the sertão, or semiarid backcountry, was barely affected by changes in the coastal cities or in the fast-growing industrial complex of São Paulo. But in Latin America as a whole more people were becoming linked to the national and world economies, introduced to rudimentary public education, and exposed to emerging mass media.
Even in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba, where the number of immigrants had been significant up to the depression—in Cuba’s case, from the neighbouring West Indies and, above all, from Spain—population growth was mainly from natural increase. It was still not explosive, for, while birth rates in most countries remained high, death rates had not yet been sharply reduced by advances in public health. But it was steady, the total Latin American population rising from roughly 60 million in 1900 to 155 million at mid-century. The urban proportion had reached about 40 percent, though with great differences among countries. The Argentine population was approximately half urban by the eve of World War I, fewer hands being required to produce the nation’s wealth in the countryside than to process it in the cities and provide other essential urban services. In the Andean countries and Central America, however, urban dwellers were a decided minority even at the end of World War II. Moreover, the usual pattern was that of a single primate city vastly overshadowing lesser urban centres. In Uruguay in the early 1940s, Montevideo alone had 800,000 inhabitants, or over one-third of the nation’s total, while its closest rival contained about 50,000. Yet even that was as many as lived in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras.
Latin America’s population is less easy to classify in terms of social composition. Rural workers still made up the largest single group, but those loosely referred to as “peasants” could be anything from minifundistas, or independent owners of small private parcels, to seasonal hired hands of large plantations; with different degrees of autonomy and different linkages to national and world markets, they were far from a cohesive social sector. What such rural workers most clearly had in common was grossly inadequate access to health and education services and a low material standard of living. A socioeconomic and cultural gulf separated them from traditional large landowners as well as from the owners or managers of commercial agribusinesses.
In the cities an industrial working class was more and more in evidence, at least in the larger countries, where the size of the internal market made industrialization feasible even with low average purchasing power. However, factory workers did not necessarily form the most important urban sector, to some extent because the growth of cities had been more rapid than that of the manufacturing industry. São Paulo in Brazil and Monterrey in Mexico won fame chiefly as centres of industry, but more typical was the case of Montevideo, a commercial and administrative centre first and foremost that attracted the lion’s share of the country’s industry because of its preexisting leadership in population and services rather than the other way around. Moreover, port, transportation, and service workers—or miners, as in the Chilean nitrate fields—rather than factory workers usually led the way in union organization and strike actions. One reason was the high proportion of women workers in early factories, who, though even more exploited than male workers, were perceived by radical activists as less-promising recruits than stevedores or locomotive firemen.
In urban settings the most important social development in the short run was the steady expansion of middling white-collar and professional groups. The extent to which these can be termed a “middle class” is open to question, for, while “middle” by the economic indicators of property and income, they were often ambivalent about their place in society—uncertain whether to embrace the work and savings ethic conventionally associated with the middle class of the Western world (or, later, of East Asia) or to try to emulate traditional elites. The middle sectors were, in any case, the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of educational facilities, which they strongly supported and used as means of upward mobility. Urban workers, for their part, had access to primary education but rarely secondary; at least they were now mainly literate, whereas most rural Latin Americans still were not.
Lack of formal education had long reinforced the relative isolation of the peasantry from political currents at their nations’ centres, not to mention from new fads and notions from abroad. Yet, starting in the 1920s, the rapid spread of the new medium of radio throughout Latin America exposed even illiterate people to an emerging mass culture. Additions to transportation infrastructure also contributed to greater integration of isolated population clusters. The most essential rail lines had already taken shape by 1910, but the coming of automotive transport led to a major upgrading and extension of highways, and the airplane introduced an entirely new mode of transportation. One of the oldest airlines in the world is Colombia’s Avianca, whose founding (under a different name) in 1919 was of particular importance for a country where railroad and highway building had lagged because of difficult topography. Air travel similarly played a key role in knitting together far-flung sections of Brazil previously connected by coastal steamer. Transport improvements of all kinds favoured the creation not only of national markets but of shared national cultures, in the latter respect reinforcing the effects of popular education and radio.
Challenges to the political order
The economic and social changes taking place in Latin America inevitably triggered demands for political change as well; political change in turn affected the course of socioeconomic development. As the 20th century opened, the most prevalent regime types were military dictatorship—exemplified by that of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and after 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela—and civilian oligarchy—as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia. Even in Díaz’s Mexico the constitution was not entirely meaningless, while civilian governments commonly used some combination of electoral manipulation and restricted suffrage to keep control in the hands of a small minority of political leaders allied with landed and commercial elites. Neither dictatorial nor oligarchic regimes gave due representation to the majority of inhabitants.
Porfirio Díaz.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The Mexican Revolution
The immediate challenge to existing regimes in country after country usually came from disaffected members of the traditional ruling groups and from the expanding middle sectors resentful of their exclusion from a fair share of power and privilege. This was evident at the outset of Latin America’s bloodiest 20th-century civil conflict, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when a dissident member of the large landowning class, Francisco Madero, challenged Díaz for reelection, lost, and rose in rebellion, promising to bring genuine political democracy to Mexico. The dictatorship, decaying from within, collapsed, but it was many years before the country settled down, since Madero’s uprising unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control. Miners, urban workers, and peasants saw an opportunity to seek redress of their own grievances, while rival revolutionaries bitterly fought against each other. The end result was a system built around an all-powerful political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), as it ultimately called itself—that skillfully co-opted labour and peasant organizations. More benefits accrued to labour leaders than to the rank and file, and implementation of the land reform proclaimed by the new constitution of 1917 was mostly halfhearted until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). But it superficially appeared that almost everybody received something, and after Cárdenas Mexico became a model of political stability in Latin America.
Broadening of political participation
The Mexican Revolution evoked widespread admiration elsewhere in Latin America, especially for its commitment to socioeconomic reform, but the Mexican political system had few imitators. In the Southern Cone, a common pattern was the broadening of participation within a more conventional democratic system where at least the middle sectors gained a meaningful share of power and benefits. This happened in Argentina following an electoral reform of 1912 that made universal male suffrage effective for the first time and paved the way for the Radical Civic Union party, with strong middle-class support, to take power four years later. In Chile a reformist coalition won the election of 1920, but strife between president and parliament brought a relapse into instability and short-lived military dictatorship. By the time Chile returned to stable political life in 1932, it had been equipped with a new constitution that was less susceptible to oligarchic obstructionism and an apparatus of social legislation that benefited both the middle class and urban workers, though it largely ignored the peasantry. However, Uruguay outstripped all others both in political democratization and as a pioneer welfare state, with minimum-wage legislation, an advanced social security system, and much else, even before 1930.
Elsewhere the record was mixed. Costa Rica came close to approximating the pattern of the Southern Cone, and in Colombia the Liberal Party, after its return to power in 1930, went partway toward incorporating labour as an actor on the national scene. Ecuador in 1929 became the first Latin American nation to adopt woman suffrage, though it still required literacy to vote (and far fewer women than men could read). Within four years Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba—of which only the first retained a similar literacy test—had followed suit. But in Peru a president who flirted too far with social and political reform at the time of World War I was ousted by military coup. In the following decade the banner of reformism in Peru was taken up by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder of the Aprista party and heavily influenced by the example of the Mexican Revolution. The Apristas’ program combined economic nationalism with Latin American solidarity and called for incorporation of the Indians into the mainstream of national life, but the party never gained control of government until the 1980s, by which time it had lost much of its original character. In Venezuela, thanks to oil revenue and effective use of the military, Juan Vicente Gómez stayed firmly in control as dictator until his final illness in 1935; and in Brazil the oligarchic regime of the so-called Old Republic held on until the economic crisis of the Great Depression through careful sharing of power among political factions of the largest states.
The world depression—which saw governments changed by irregular means in every Latin American country except Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Honduras—temporarily ended the progress being made toward political democracy. Even where constitutional rule was not interrupted, chief executives felt the need (as also in the United States) to take emergency measures, and the enlargement of government functions in dealing with the economy outlasted the emergency itself. At the same time, leaders everywhere were coming to the conclusion that social ills must be ameliorated, if only to ward off revolutionary threats from below. Various countries (such as Colombia in 1936 and Cuba in 1940) adopted constitutional reforms incorporating the principle already enshrined in Mexico’s constitution of 1917, of expressly subordinating property rights to social need.
Brazil had actually pioneered large-scale state intervention in the economy with its coffee “valorization” program, which was finally abandoned during the depression as too expensive; but between 1930 and 1945, under President Getúlio Vargas, the national government for the first time actively sponsored social legislation, encouraged labour unions while tying them closely to the state, and began construction of a major iron and steel complex under state auspices. Vargas was an authoritarian ruler but a constructive one. Nor was he the only military or civilian strongman who moved to expand the functions of the state both to take the edge off worker discontent and, if possible, to strengthen the national economy against new emergencies. A paradoxical but instructive example was Cuba’s notoriously corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who in 1933 staged a military coup to overthrow a government of the reformist Authentic Party, then preserved most of its social and labour reforms and added some more. After sponsoring the liberal Cuban constitution of 1940, he managed to become a democratically elected president.
Socialism, communism, fascism
Latin America in the first half of the 20th century was feeling the impact of outside events not only on its economy but also politically, by the spread of imported ideologies and through the examples both of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States and of emerging totalitarianisms of the left and right in Europe. The European anarcho-syndicalism that had provided a model for many of Latin America’s earliest radical cadres declined sharply in importance after World War I. Henceforth, the left consisted of socialist parties of generally moderate bent, inspired in large part by European social democracy; breakaway socialists who admired the Russian Revolution of 1917 and proceeded to found communist parties in their own countries; and, not least, such strictly Latin American expressions as the Mexican agrarian reform movement. Socialist parties were strongest in the Southern Cone, the Chilean briefly gaining a share of national power as a member of a Popular Front government elected in 1938. The communists were also strong in Chile but first entered a national administration in Cuba, after Batista had been elected president with their support in 1940. Once the Soviet Union entered World War II in 1941, communist parties in several other countries, including Brazil and Nicaragua, formed alliances with local strongmen, but they nowhere became a true mass party, and an exaggerated fear of Bolshevism on the part of Latin American elites meant that the communist parties were subject to widespread repression except during the war itself.
Some other political organizations were frankly influenced by European fascism, but in most countries their membership was numerically insignificant. The chief exception was Brazil, whose green-shirted Integralistas (Ação Integralista Brasileira) emerged as the largest single national party in the mid-1930s until involvement in a foolhardy coup attempt led to their suppression. Hence the influence of fascism was more often exercised through homegrown authoritarians who were attracted to certain aspects of it but carefully avoided any open embrace. Vargas was one such leader, who, after suppressing the Integralistas, put the finishing touches on his own dictatorial regime, officially dubbed Estado Novo or “New State.”
Good Neighbor Policy and World War II
One reason Latin American nations avoided an overly close association with fascism was a desire not to offend the dominant power of the hemisphere, the United States. During the 1920s it had already begun a retreat from the policy of active intervention in Latin America. This policy, adopted in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the United States’ open support of Panamanian secession from Colombia, had featured the creation of formal and informal protectorates over many Caribbean and Central American states. Franklin D. Roosevelt completed the shift. His domestic policies were much admired in Latin America and in some cases copied by moderate reformists, but his Good Neighbor Policy won the warm approval of almost all Latin American rulers, since it entailed formal renunciation of the right of intervention in favour of peaceful cajoling and assorted economic, military, and technical aid programs. These programs were launched on the eve of World War II to help hemispheric neighbours prepare for the emergency. They were expanded after the start of the conflict, whose economic impact on Latin America was generally comparable to that of World War I but more intense because of the earlier and deeper involvement of the United States. The war emergency naturally gave still further impetus to the development of national industries to replace scarce imports.
The Good Neighbor approach proved far more effective in promoting U.S. hegemony than the occasional dispatch of gunboats. In 1938 Roosevelt calmly accepted Mexico’s expropriation of the petroleum installations of U.S. and British companies, and he was rewarded several times over when Mexico loyally cooperated with the United States in World War II, even sending an air force squadron to serve in the Philippines. The one other Latin American country to send forces overseas was Brazil, which put an expeditionary force in Italy. In general Latin America’s wartime collaboration left little to be desired. In the end all countries not only broke relations with the Axis powers but declared war, though Argentina took the latter step only at the last possible moment, in March 1945.
Latin America since the mid-20th century
The postwar world, 1945–80
In Latin America as elsewhere, the close of World War II was accompanied by expectations, only partly fulfilled, of steady economic development and democratic consolidation. Economies grew, but at a slower rate than in most of Europe or East Asia, so that Latin America’s relative share of world production and trade declined and the gap in personal income per capita separating it from the leading industrial democracies increased. Popular education also increased, as did exposure to the mass media and mass culture—which in light of the economic lag served to feed dissatisfaction. Military dictatorships and Marxist revolution were among the solutions put forward, but none were truly successful.
Economic agenda and patterns of growth
The economic shocks delivered by the depression and two world wars, in combination with the strength of nationalism, tilted economic policy after 1945 strongly toward internal development as against the outward orientation that had predominated since independence. The outward policy had been partially undermined by the trade controls and industrial promotion schemes adopted essentially as defensive measures in the aftermath of the depression and during World War II. Now, however, a reorientation of policy was explicitly called for by some of Latin America’s most influential figures, such as the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. Prebisch and his followers insisted that the terms of trade and investment in the contemporary world were stacked in favour of the developed industrial nations of the “centre” as against the developing nations of the “periphery.” Their strategy therefore included emphasis on economic diversification and import substitution industrialization (ISI) for the sake of greater economic autonomy. They called for economic integration among the Latin American countries themselves, with a view to attaining economies of scale. And they recommended internal structural reforms to improve the economic performance of their countries, including land reform both to eliminate underutilized latifundios and to lessen the stark inequality of income distribution that was an obstacle to growth of the domestic market.
In the small Caribbean and Central American republics and also some of the smaller and poorer South American nations, the prospects for ISI were sorely limited by market size and other constraints, and governments still hesitated to promote manufacturing at the expense of traditional primary commodities. But in countries accounting for a disproportionate share of Latin America’s population and gross domestic product (GDP), the new approach received full play through protective tariffs, subsidies, and official preferences. Overvalued exchange rates, which hurt traditional exports, made it easier to import industrial machinery and equipment. Manufacturing costs generally remained high, and factories were overly dependent on imported inputs of all kinds (including foreign capital), but advances were not limited to consumer goods production. In all major countries the output of intermediate and capital goods rose appreciably too. For example, in Argentina the state undertook construction of a steel industry, and in numerous other ways national governments further expanded their economic role. Brazil nationalized its incipient oil industry in 1953, creating the state firm Petrobrás that eventually ranked alongside Mexico’s PEMEX (outcome of the 1938 oil expropriation) and Venezuela’s PETROVEN (1975) as one of Latin America’s three largest economic enterprises, all state-run.
Starting in 1960 with agreements fostering economic union, such as the Latin American Free Trade Association and Central American Common Market, and continuing with the Andean Pact of 1969, some progress was made toward regional economic integration, but the commitment to eliminate trade barriers was not as strong as in postwar Europe. Intra-Latin American trade increased, but probably not much more than would have happened without special agreements. In any case, quantitative economic growth was visible almost everywhere. It was evident even when expressed as per capita GDP—that is, factoring in a population growth that in most countries was accelerating, because death rates had finally begun to fall sharply while birth rates remained high. (In the 1960s in much of Latin America the annual rate of population increase came to exceed 3 percent.) But there were clear differences in economic performance among countries. Brazil, with a diversified economic base and much the largest internal market, and Panama, with its canal-based service economy, posted the best records, their GDP per capita doubling between 1950 and 1970; Mexico and Venezuela did almost as well, as did Costa Rica. But the Argentine economy seemed to stagnate, and few countries scored significant gains. Moreover, the conviction eventually grew in countries where ISI had been vigorously pushed that the easy gains in replacement of imports were coming to an end and that, to maintain adequate growth, it would be necessary to renew emphasis on exports as well. World market conditions were favourable for a revival of export promotion; indeed, international trade had begun a rapid expansion at the very time that inward-directed growth was gaining converts in Latin America.
The promotion of industrial exports was slow to appear. Brazil was the most successful, selling automobiles and automotive parts mainly to other less-developed countries but at times even to the industrial world. A slightly less satisfactory alternative was the setting up of plants to assemble imported parts or semifinished materials into consumer goods that were immediately exported, thus taking advantage of Latin America’s low labour costs, particularly for women workers. Such plants proliferated along Mexico’s northern border (where they were known as maquiladoras) but sprang up also in Central America and around the Caribbean.
In other instances Latin Americans tried to develop new, nontraditional primary commodity exports. Colombian cut flowers were a highly successful example, promoted from the late 1960s through special incentives such as tax rebates; Colombia became the world’s second leading flower exporter. It also assumed a leading role in the illicit narcotics trade. It enjoyed a brief boom of marijuana exports in the 1970s and in the following decade became the world’s leading supplier of cocaine, which was processed in clandestine Colombian laboratories from leaf paste that at first came mostly from Bolivia and Peru, though eventually Colombia displaced them as producers of the raw material.
Developments in social policy
Continued advances in public health were the principal basis for the explosion of population growth, which in turn made more difficult the provision of other social services. Nevertheless, educational coverage continued to expand, and state schools increased their share of students at the expense of private (often church-affiliated) institutions. Social security systems were introduced in countries that previously had none and expanded where they already existed. Yet such benefits chiefly went to organized urban workers and members of the middle sectors so that the net effect was often to increase, rather than lessen, social inequality.
Moreover, structural land reform received more lip service than actual implementation. Extensive land distribution did occur in Bolivia following that country’s 1952 revolution, and in Cuba large private estates were eliminated after 1959; but Mexico, which had been the leader in this area, now tended to favour capitalist agribusinesses rather than peasant communities. The poor were also hurt by the high inflation that in the 1950s and after became endemic in Brazil and the Southern Cone and was intermittently a problem elsewhere, resulting in considerable part from an inability or unwillingness to generate by taxation the fiscal resources needed for economic and social development programs.
The United States and Latin America in the Cold War era
Whatever policies Latin American countries adopted in the postwar era, they had to take into account the probable reaction of the United States, now more than ever the dominant power in the hemisphere. It was the principal trading partner and source of loans, grants, and private investment for almost all countries, and Latin American leaders considered its favour worth having. Policy makers in Washington, on their part, were unenthusiastic about ISI and state-owned enterprises, but, as long as North American investors were not hindered in their own activities, the inward-directed policy orientation did not pose major problems. Moreover, as the Cold War developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, the great majority of Latin American governments sided willingly with the former, even though they complained of being neglected by Washington’s preoccupation with the threat of communism in Europe and Asia.
A threat developed in Central America when the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz (1951–54), which frankly accepted the support of local communists, attacked the holdings of the United Fruit Company as part of an ambitious though ultimately abortive land reform. This combined political and economic challenge caused the United States to assist Guatemalan counterrevolutionaries and neighbouring Central American rulers in overthrowing Arbenz. The reversion to interventionist tactics featured use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than landing of military forces. But it foreshadowed later CIA assistance to the Chilean military in ousting their country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973, not to mention the U.S. vendetta against the Sandinista revolutionary government that took power in Nicaragua in 1979, only to be worn down by covert action and economic harassment to the point that it peacefully accepted defeat in a free election in 1990.
Impact of the Cuban Revolution
By most social and economic indicators, Cuba by mid-century was among Latin America’s most highly developed countries. However, in the postwar period it was afflicted with lacklustre economic growth and a corrupt political dictatorship set up in 1952 by the same Batista who earlier had helped put his country on a seemingly democratic path. It was also a country whose long history of economic and other dependence on the United States had fed nationalist resentment, although control of the sugar industry and other economic sectors by U.S. interests was gradually declining. While conditions for revolutionary change were thus present, the particular direction that Cuba took owed much to the idiosyncratic genius of Fidel Castro, who, after ousting Batista at the beginning of 1959, proceeded by stages to turn the island into the hemisphere’s first communist state, in close alliance with the Soviet Union.
Fidel Castro, 1960.© Bettmann/Corbis
The Cuban Revolution achieved major advances in health and education, though frankly sacrificing economic efficiency to social objectives. Expropriation of most private enterprise together with Castro’s highly personalistic dictatorship drove many members of the middle and upper classes into exile, but a serious decline in productivity was offset for a time by Soviet subsidies. At the same time, thanks to its successful defiance of the United States—which tried and failed to overthrow it by backing a Cuban exiles’ invasion in April 1961—and its evident social advances, Castro’s Cuba was looked to as a model throughout Latin America, not only by established leftist parties but also by disaffected students and intellectuals of mainly middle-class origin.
Over the following years much of Latin America saw an upsurge of rural guerrilla conflict and urban terrorism, in response to the persistence of stark social inequality and political repression. But this upsurge drew additional inspiration from the Cuban example, and in many cases Cuba provided training and material support to guerrillas. The response of Latin American establishments was twofold and eagerly supported by the United States. On one hand, governments strengthened their armed forces, with U.S. military aid preferentially geared to counterguerrilla operations. On the other hand, emphasis was placed on land reform and other measures designed to eliminate the root causes of insurgency, all generously aided by the United States through the Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy.
Even though much of the reactive social reformism was cosmetic or superficial, the counterrevolutionary thrust was nonetheless generally successful. A Marxist, Salvador Allende, became president of Chile in 1970, but he did so by democratic election, not violent revolution, and he was overthrown three years later. The only country that appeared to be following the Cuban pattern was Nicaragua under the Sandinista revolutionary government, which in the end could not withstand the onslaughts of its domestic and foreign foes. Moreover, the Cuban Revolution ultimately lost much of its lustre even in the eyes of the Latin American left, once the collapse of the Soviet Union caused Cuba to lose its chief foreign ally. Although the U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba had been a handicap all along, shortages of all kinds became acute only as Russian aid was cut back, clearly revealing the dysfunctional nature of Castro’s economic management.
Political alternatives
Movement toward democracy
The Latin American countries that did not opt for the Cuban model followed widely varying political paths. Mexico’s unique system of limited democracy built around the Institutional Revolutionary Party was shaken by a wave of riots in the summer of 1968 on the eve of the Olympic Games held in Mexico City, but political stability was never seriously in doubt. A somewhat analogous regime was devised in Colombia as a means of restoring civilian constitutional rule after a brief relapse in the mid-1950s into military dictatorship: the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties chose to bury the hatchet, creating a bipartisan coalition (called the National Front) whereby they shared power equally between themselves while formally shutting out any minor parties. Once this arrangement expired in 1974, Colombia became again a more conventional political democracy, such as Costa Rica had been since before 1950 and Venezuela became in 1958 after the overthrow of its last military dictator.
In Latin America generally, the practice of democracy was somewhat sporadic, but, wherever regular elections took place, they involved an enlarged electorate. The last Latin American countries adopted woman suffrage in the 1950s, and literacy test requirements continued to fall (as did illiteracy itself). Women also began to occupy high political office, including the presidency in Argentina (1974–76), Bolivia (1979–80), and Chile (2006–10). Moreover, Violeta Chamorro won the Nicaraguan vote of 1990 that put a temporary end to Sandinista rule (in 2006 the Sandinistas took power once again when former president Daniel Ortega was reelected).
The advent of populism
The amorphous phenomenon of populism was another feature of the mid-20th-century political scene. Its consummate practitioner was Juan Perón of Argentina, who as a member of a military regime that seized power in 1943 took a special interest in social policy. Perón wooed Argentine labour by means of wage increases and bonuses, pensions and fringe benefits, while also exploiting widespread resentment of an oligarchy that in the 1930s had reasserted its political as well as economic dominance. He promised social justice without violent class struggle and national greatness on the basis of industrial and military strength. His message, delivered in popular language, won Perón a clearcut victory when he ran for president in 1946.
Perón was not the first Latin American leader to reward his followers with social benefits or to rail against native oligarchs and foreign imperialists, but he established a personal, charismatic link with ordinary citizens in a way that no one before him had done as successfully. “In the Argentina of Perón,” he boasted, “the only privileged ones are the children.” Yet Perón did not even pretend to be heading a revolution. As president, aided by his wife Evita until her death in 1952, he continued to cultivate mass support while signally neglecting to lay a sound basis for long-term economic growth. Perón nevertheless did not lack imitators and counterparts in other countries of Latin America.
The leading party of postdictatorial Venezuela, Democratic Action (Acción Democrática; AD), was basically reformist in orientation but with populist overtones. Rómulo Betancourt and other AD leaders were less personalistic in style than Perón, who was finally overthown in 1955, but like him they stood for the granting of lavish benefits to the working and middle classes within a general framework of capitalism. In Venezuela oil wealth ultimately encouraged the national government to squander resources without adequate regard for the future. A similar charge was leveled against Juscelino Kubitschek, who became president of Brazil (1956–61) through his skill at old-style machine politics. He was technically not a populist but had the same bent for extravagant promises and freewheeling expenditure. Kubitschek’s best-known achievement was the building of Brasília, the architecturally striking but fabulously expensive new capital city. Its construction aggravated inflationary woes but nicely epitomized his pledge to bring “fifty years’ progress in five.”
Christian Democracy
A new feature since World War II was the appearance of a number of Christian Democratic parties, which offered a program of moderate reform inspired by Roman Catholic social teachings. Most were small splinter groups, but Christian Democrats eventually achieved power in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Chile. In Venezuela they alternated with the social democratic AD and in their policies became almost indistinguishable from it. In El Salvador in the 1980s they were enmeshed in a preexisting struggle against leftist guerrillas. In Chile, where they came to power first, under President Eduardo Frei (1964–70), they launched an ambitious land reform and partially nationalized the copper industry. They received enthusiastic support from the United States via the Alliance for Progress as presenting a promising alternative to Cuban-style revolution, but they failed to extend their mandate, going down to narrow defeat in a three-way contest won by Salvador Allende.
Bureaucratic authoritarianism
Allende as president combined Marxist assault on the owners of the means of production with populist lavishing of short-term benefits on his working-class followers, and on both counts he stirred violent resentment among upper- and middle-class Chileans as well as attracting the adamant hostility of the United States. In September 1973 he was ousted in favour of General Augusto Pinochet, who proved the most successful exponent of a new style of military dictatorship defined by political scientists as bureaucratic authoritarianism. It was not, of course, a complete novelty. It reflected the 20th-century Latin America-wide phenomenon whereby the leadership of increasingly professionalized armies passed to sons of the middle class who had a commitment to modernizing the infrastructure of their societies. Such earlier dictatorships as that of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–31) during another Chilean relapse from constitutional rule had shown marked developmentalist tendencies. Bureaucratic authoritarianism, however, as practiced in Brazil after the coup of 1964, in Argentina by officers dedicated to keeping the Peronistas from regaining power, or in Chile under Pinochet, was a response to the perceived mismanagement of the economy by populists and other demagogues. It rested on the conviction that no democratically elected regime could afford to take the harsh measures needed to curb inflation, reassure foreign and domestic investors, and thereby quicken economic growth to the point that untrammeled democracy could be safely practiced. While military men kept order with varying degrees of harshness and human rights violations, civilian economists and technocrats would direct most other policy—whence the term “bureaucratic authoritarianism.”
Under Pinochet, the guiding voice in Chilean economic matters was assigned to a group of economists, some of whom had been trained at the University of Chicago and who were strongly influenced by the monetarist school of Milton Friedman, according to which money supply and interest rates rather than governmental fiscal policy primarily determine the business cycle. Political authoritarianism stood in apparent contradiction to the generally free-market, laissez-faire policies prescribed in economic and social affairs; and, though inflation fell sharply, industrial production also dropped with the decline in the level of official protection. A similar combination of approaches arose under the military governments in Argentina in the 1960s and again from 1976 to 1983 and in Uruguay after 1973, again with mixed economic results. In Brazil from 1964 to 1985 military presidents and their technocratic advisers assigned a larger role in economic affairs to the state, while a Peruvian military regime that took power in 1968 undertook a radical program of social and economic reforms, giving way to a more typical bureaucratic-authoritarian regime only after running into serious economic difficulties. In these countries, political repression fell lightly on most of the population, but anyone suspected of engaging in—or simply encouraging—active resistance was liable to arrest, torture, and in extreme cases forced “disappearance”; this was a notable feature of the last Argentine military regime. Moreover, military rule of one sort or another did spread until by 1980 democratically elected civilian governments could be found only in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and (by stretching the definition just a bit) Mexico.
Latin America at the end of the 20th century
The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed a generalized economic crisis in Latin America, triggered in large part by external factors but aggravated by domestic mismanagement; in search of a way out, countries put their trust in neoliberal approaches favouring a free flow of trade and investment and reduction of the role of the state, all as recommended by the International Monetary Fund or other lending and advisory agencies. Even Castro’s Cuba hesitantly embarked on the neoliberal economic path—to the extent of inviting foreign investment and enlarging the scope of permitted private enterprise by Cubans—though Castro did not show equal enthusiasm for the parallel political tendency, which was a turn to democratic procedures.
Debt crisis
The ingredient of economic crisis that attracted widest attention was Latin America’s inability to maintain full service on its foreign debt, which had grown to dangerously high levels. Both Mexico and Venezuela, as major petroleum exporters, benefited from rising international oil prices during the 1970s, but, instead of concluding that foreign credit was no longer necessary, they assumed that any amount of indebtedness would be easy to pay back. Brazil’s generals drew a similar conclusion from their country’s better-than-average economic growth. Even where no such circumstances were present, foreign private and institutional lenders had lost their depression-induced caution in lending to Latin America, and they had at their disposal an ever-greater flood of dollars to be placed in world financial markets. Bankers used often aggressive tactics in pressuring Latin American governments to borrow, and the region’s total foreign debt increased from 1970 to 1980 by more than 1,000 percent.
Developments in the world economy soon brought Latin America a rude awakening. Whereas commodity prices were generally favourable in the 1970s, a world recession in the following decade caused them to fall sharply. At the same time, interest rates rose in the United States and western Europe as governments sought to curb inflationary pressures and make other difficult adjustments. Latin America thus faced an increased debt bill, with fewer resources to pay it. Colombia alone managed to avoid default or compulsory rescheduling, and all countries faced severe fiscal problems. Domestic expenditures had to be cut back or financed through unsupported issues of paper money. Most of Latin America experienced slow or negative economic growth, together with inflation; indeed, hyperinflation was the rule in Argentina and Brazil and in some smaller countries. Real wages fell everywhere except Colombia and Chile.
Return to democracy
Latin America’s democracies, and quasi-democratic Mexico, were politically less vulnerable to economic hard times than the dictatorships: their governments could be and were changed by regular electoral procedures, whereas dictatorial regimes that encountered similar problems had to be removed by other means. Armed force, however, was seldom necessary, and in Argentina change came from outside, in the form of Great Britain’s embarrassing defeat of the Argentine military government’s 1982 attempt to reoccupy the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands that Britain had seized a century and a half before. That fiasco completed the discrediting of the Argentine regime and forced it to reinstate elective civilian government sooner than intended. A return to overt U.S. intervention assisted in the 1989 overthrow of General Manuel Noriega in Panama, who had run afoul of the new U.S. obsession with curbing drug trafficking. The United States also helped remove the military regime of Haiti in 1994, where the institutions of civil society were particularly weak. Elsewhere, the force of domestic opinion—aided by foreign disapproval, internecine squabbling, and sheer discouragement on the part of ruling military officers—was usually enough to bring about a transition to democracy. Cuba’s Fidel Castro was the longest serving dictatorial ruler in Latin America, and today Cuba remains the only country in the region under dictatorship.
Even democratically elected presidents were sometimes high-handed in their style of ruling, and in three major countries—Peru, Argentina, and Brazil—they pushed through constitutional amendments to allow their immediate reelection, which would otherwise have been illegal. Significantly, in each case the incumbent’s success in taming inflation helped make it possible to win the additional term without recourse to force or fraud. (Peru’s Alberto Fujimori later obtained still another reelection but by slightly more-questionable tactics.) At the turn of the millennium, the most troubled country, politically, was Colombia, where a democratic regime had lost control over much of the national territory to illegal drug traffickers, leftist guerrillas, and counterguerrilla paramilitaries. The most important of the guerrilla organizations was the FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, which enjoyed scant popular support but profited greatly from the sale of protection to drug producers and dealers.
A shift to neoliberalism
One of the last countries to return to democracy was Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship had been more successful than most in economic management. After first imposing harsh readjustments and committing its share of mistakes, it had launched the country on a steady course of economic growth that made it a much-admired model in Latin America and continued even after the dictator finally turned over the presidency (though not control of the armed forces) to an elected Christian Democrat in 1990. The Chilean model was based, in any event, on the application of neoliberal policies—reduction of trade barriers, privatization of state companies, encouragement of foreign as well as domestic private investment, and lessening of regulation generally—that to one degree or another were ultimately adopted by all countries, including (within limits) the surviving communist dictatorship of Cuba.
A clear example of the new approach to economic affairs was Mexico’s joining Canada and the United States in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994. Intra-Latin American free-trade arrangements moved forward too, with Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur, “Common Market of the South”)—which was organized in 1995 by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay—easily the most important. Country after country sought private buyers for inefficient state-owned firms, and several countries, led by Chile, moved to privatize social security systems. There were nevertheless certain limits to neoliberal reforms: in Mexico and Venezuela, for example, state oil firms were exempt from the privatization process (though not in Argentina, a second-string oil producer). Neither did bureaucracies and government expenditures shrink very rapidly, if they shrank at all.
Results of the new economic policies were, not surprisingly, mixed. Latin America remained vulnerable to the vagaries of world markets, and the greater opening to international trade often led to a dangerous upsurge in nonessential imports. At the end of the 20th century, the region’s share of world exports hovered around 6 percent, less than half what it had been in 1950. In the final decade of the century, most countries experienced a resumption of modest economic growth after the disastrous 1980s, an often dramatic fall in inflation, and a strengthening of the private sector of the economy. Social changes, however, impacted different groups within each country. In the short term at least, efforts to become more competitive in capitalist markets contributed to record levels of formal unemployment in many countries and, at the same time, widespread subcontracting of operations to home workers, chiefly women, who laboured for subsistence income. In Mexico, for instance, the reorientation of economic policy aggravated the plight of Indian peasants in the southern state of Chiapas, who unleashed a renewal of guerrilla insurgency just as the country was entering NAFTA. Yet Latin America’s revitalized commitment to political democracy—which did not mean sudden elimination of all human rights abuses and other deficiencies any more than in the rest of the world—appeared to face few serious challenges.
Religious trends
Roman Catholicism continued to be a powerful force in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence could be seen in the continuing prohibition, almost everywhere, of abortion and in the tendency to play down official support (which nevertheless existed) for birth control campaigns. Relations of the Roman Catholic Church with the state and with society at large were meanwhile affected, however, by new currents within the church itself. The movement of renewal and reform undertaken by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) favoured mainstream Catholic teaching and practice at the expense of popular “folk Catholicism” yet led to a somewhat more tolerant approach toward other denominations. In addition, coinciding as it did with the impetus given to leftist movements by the Cuban Revolution, the call for renewal inspired an influential minority of priests and nuns to seek a synthesis of religious faith and political commitment under the banner of liberation theology. Some priests actually joined guerrilla bands, while others laboured to “raise the consciousness” of their flocks concerning social injustice. This brand of activism met with general disapproval from Latin American governments, especially military regimes, some of which brutally persecuted the clergy involved. It also divided the church, and without gaining the widespread popular allegiance that “liberationist” clergy had hoped for.
In the late 20th century the principal religious development was a rapid expansion of Protestantism, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. With a primary emphasis on individual spiritual improvement and salvation and a closeness between ministers and laity that neither traditional nor renewed Catholicism could match, the Protestants rapidly increased their numbers throughout Latin America. In countries as diverse as Brazil and Guatemala there were by the end of the century more Protestants than actively churchgoing Roman Catholics. Protestantism was not strong among traditional elites or in intellectual circles, but its adherents were beginning to attain positions of influence. One of them, General Efraín Ríos Montt, briefly served as military dictator of Guatemala (1982–83).
A changing society
Despite the expansion (sometimes impressive, sometimes not) of the middle strata of Latin American society, by the late 20th century, progress toward reducing historically high levels of social inequality was disappointing almost everywhere save in communist Cuba. Also, the poorest countries of western Europe enjoyed greater per capita income than the wealthiest in Latin America. Yet, with regard to such social indicators as literacy and life expectancy, Costa Rica, Cuba, and the nations of the Southern Cone approximated the standards of the industrialized world, and, for Latin America as a whole, the lag was substantially less than in 1900 or 1950.
The rate of population growth, having peaked in the third quarter of the century, fell significantly with wide variations among countries. In parts of northern Latin America, a factor contributing to this decline was emigration to the more prosperous and politically stable United States, where large metropolitan centres—such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami—were home to large and growing Latin American communities. By the beginning of the 21st century, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean was more than 550 million, with about four-fifths of the population residing in urban areas. Latin America also contained two of the world’s largest metropolitan areas—Mexico City and São Paulo. The region’s principal cities grew more slowly than intermediate centres; in Venezuela, for example, Maracaibo and Valencia were expanding faster than Caracas. In the cities, where literacy and then access to television were nearly universal, people were exposed more and more quickly to new trends and ideas emanating from the United States or western Europe; to a lesser degree the same forces, and the continuing improvement of road transportation, were also decreasing the isolation of rural Latin Americans.
With social and economic modernization came changes, too, in gender relations. In most of Latin America women achieved full legal equality with men only gradually and usually later than winning the vote. In Argentina, for example, wives gained equal authority with husbands over minor-aged children only after the return of democracy in the 1980s. Traditions of patriarchy remained strong, and Latin American women’s groups were more prone than those in the United States or western Europe to exploit the symbolic discourse of motherhood in gaining their objectives. No significant number of women in this predominantly Roman Catholic region took up the cause of women’s ordination to the priesthood. As in most of the world, furthermore, equal pay for women remained elusive. Yet women did take advantage of increased educational and employment opportunities to gain more control of their lives. As many women as men were enrolled in secondary education, and the traditional alternatives for those women who chose or were obliged to work outside the home—e.g., domestic service and prostitution—had been supplemented by an array of clerical, professional, and light factory jobs. From the 1960s to the ’90s the proportion of women in the general labour force increased substantially. Falling birth rates likewise indicated that women were pursuing new options. The fact that domestic servants were still relatively inexpensive made it easier for middle- and upper-class women to pursue professional careers. Servants, however, were less inclined than they once were to accept their position as permanent; realistically or not, they dreamed of something better and to that extent epitomized a more general yearning for personal and social improvement that posed a challenge for all Latin American nations.
Ethnic minorities also sought greater opportunities and respect from society at large. Afro-Latin Americans increasingly questioned the long-accepted notion that racism did not exist in their countries and that such discrimination as existed was merely class-based; across Latin America, they formed social movements demanding their economic and political rights. In some countries, minority groups formed militant organizations. In Colombia, Afro-Latin Americans obtained rights to special legislative representation (as did Indian communities) in a new constitution in 1991. The peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, was the best-known example of greater militancy among indigenous peoples. Yet even more striking was the appearance of a strong nationwide Indianist movement in Ecuador, which sought not only immediate improvements for Native Americans but also formal recognition that Ecuador was a multiethnic, multicultural nation. By the end of the 20th century, these Ecuadoran indigenous groups had already gained influence in national politics and demanded economic improvements. In 2000 a coup led by indigenous Indian leaders and military members briefly toppled the ruling government, removing the president from power. However, the coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice President Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. This agreement emerged partly from military opposition of a junta-ruled government and also from the adamant refusal of the United States to accept a new government imposed by unconstitutional means. The last has not been heard from the indigenous movement in Ecuador—or elsewhere in Latin America. David Bushnell
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Latin America
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 23 January 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Latin-America
Access Date: August 19, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America (1984– ), is a general reference work with essays by recognized specialists on many aspects of the region’s development. Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (1992); and Simon Collier, Harold Blakemore, and Thomas E. Skidmore (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (1992), offer introductory material. Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1970), focuses on the region’s colonial and neocolonial relations with North Atlantic nations.
Early Latin America
General
Overviews are presented in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983); and Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 2nd ed. (1994), both emphasizing analysis over narrative detail and treating all of Latin America as a unit.
Spanish America
C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (1947, reprinted 1985), is an institutionalist classic. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 3 vol. (1971–79), is by the field’s most illustrious demographers.
A number of works treat 16th-century Spanish American history. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (1966, reissued 1992), is a thoroughly outdated treatment of early Spanish activity in the Caribbean but has yet to be replaced. William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vol. (1843), and History of the Conquest of Peru, 2 vol. (1847), both available in many later printings, contain archaic, invalid interpretations but, as literary classics, are famous almost in the manner of historical novels. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949, reprinted 1965), concentrates on the ideological crusades of fray Bartolomé de las Casas. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History, 2nd ed. (1994), surveys Hispanic conquest society in a central area. Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and America in the Sixteenth Century (1989), follows people across the Atlantic. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (1966; originally published in French, 1933), is a masterpiece of institutionalist historiography but ignores the roles of the indigenous people and the Spanish civil population. George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 2 vol. (1948, reissued 1972), attempts to combine mainline history and the history of art. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians & Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (1952, reprinted 1975), shows how Spaniards operated in areas of nonsedentary Indians. Nobel David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (1998), thoroughly treats the postconquest decline of the Indian population.
The mature period in Spanish colonial history is addressed in the following works. Studies of indigenous society include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1880 (1964), a large work based mainly on Spanish sources; William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide & Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (1979), showing the relative normality of indigenous behaviour in central areas after the arrival of the Spaniards; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (1984, reissued with corrections, 1992), a broad treatment combining historical and anthropological techniques; James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (1992), based largely on sources in Nahuatl; and Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (1984), which begins to bring the level of Peruvian ethnohistory up to that of its counterpart for Mexico. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (1974), thoroughly investigates the role of Africans in a Spanish American area. P.J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (1971), broadly treats a major silver mining centre. Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1590–1660 (1991), describes changes in the commercial world after the conquest period. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991), analyzes intellectual developments with a strong awareness of the European background. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973, reprinted 1984), is the cornerstone of early Guatemalan historiography. Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation & Crisis, 1567–1767 (1989), investigates society in a fringe area. Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (1989); and Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (1998), are anthologies.
The following are among the more notable works on Spanish American history during the late period. Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (1977), is a social-institutional study. D.A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971), is a massive social and economic study of Mexico’s late-colonial international economy and government, and Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (1978), shows the rationality and market orientation of the agricultural sector. John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (1978), studies urban demography. John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City (1983– ), broadly surveys urban society. Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1992), facilitates comparison between the Mexican and Peruvian silver industries. Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (1981), links the growth of agrarian estates to the size and nature of urban populations. Jacques A. Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796 (1980), views all the governmental institutions of a single region as an interlocking unit, including their socioeconomic dimension. Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (1978), is a prosopographical study. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (1996), studies the role of parish priests in New Spain.
Brazil
Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580 (1942, reissued 1966), though badly outdated in its ethnohistorical aspect, shows typical European economic procedures in a fringe area. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (1957, reprinted 1973), and The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (1962, reissued 1995), extract a maximum of social, economic, and general information from institutional-narrative materials. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande & Senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, 2nd ed., rev. (1946, reissued 1986; originally published in Portuguese, 4th ed., 2 vol., 1943), concerns the society of northeastern Brazil in the time of sugar production; most scholars today can credit very little of it, but it is read because it changed the direction of Brazilian historiography. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casada Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (1968), though nominally institutional, is tantamount to a study of northeastern urban society and partly updates Freyre. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751 (1973), combines social and institutional approaches, and his Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985), embraces many methods, materials, and topics. Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779 (1968), is broader than its title implies, dealing also with demographic and economic matters. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (1992), illuminates fringe-area society.
Independence to 1910
General works
David Bushnell and Neill Macauly, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1994), focuses particularly on politics in the middle decades of the century. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (1980), creatively argues that modernization hurt the majority of Latin Americans.
Spanish America
John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (1986), reviews rural rebels’ motives from the wars preceding independence to those of the Mexican Revolution. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (1986), is the best account of the political and military events of the wars for independence. Kenneth J. Andrien and Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (1994), compiles essays on economic aspects of the transition to independence. Verena Martinez-Alier (Verena Stolcke), Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (1989), links race, gender, and class factors. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (1985), portrays the abolition of slavery in Cuba as the result of social, political, and economic factors. Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (1989), examines the complicated social contests through which integration into global economic relations emerged after independence. Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (1979), challenges assumptions about Latin America’s economic dependence on North Atlantic powers. Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (1983), details the social and political aspects of a period of economic overhaul. Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (1968), provides a model of intellectual history. John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (1995), is an exciting, highly readable study of two caudillo brothers and their divergent legacies in Brazil and Uruguay. Robert H. Jackson (ed.), Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (1997), explores control and land-use reforms after independence.
Brazil
Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (1985; originally published in Portuguese, 1977), collects well-written essays on liberalism, slavery, the end of the empire, and other major topics. C.H. Haring, Empire in Brazil: A New World Experiment with Monarchy (1958, reissued 1968), is a somewhat dated but still useful political history. Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (1976), examines changing labour arrangements during the growth and demise of slavery. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993; originally published in Portuguese, 1986), weighs African cultural contributions and other factors in analyzing one of the century’s most influential revolts. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (1985), studies the rise and decline of a traditional coffee zone. Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (1987), analyzes in detail the patronage system that defined politics in late 19th- and early 20th-century Brazil; and Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), does the same, specifically for the empire period. Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971), presents a strong regional history of politics. Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (1980), analyzes how two million European immigrants worked and lived.
Twentieth-century Latin America
General works
Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 4th ed. (1997); and Peter Calvert and Susan Calvert, Latin America in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (1993), are good introductions to the period.
Political developments
Now somewhat dated in interpretation but extremely influential when it appeared is John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (1958, reissued 1965). Treatments of political topics that cross national boundaries include A.E. Van Niekerk, Populism and Political Development in Latin America (1974; originally published in Dutch, 1972); Edward J. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties (1967); and John A. Peeler, Latin American Democracies: Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela (1985), assessing variants of liberal democracy. The impact of the Cuban Revolution and associated leftist currents is explored in Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (1993), by a frustrated sympathizer; and William E. Ratliff, Castroism and Communism in Latin America, 1959–1976: The Varieties of Marxist-Leninist Experience (1976), a conservative perspective. Frederick M. Nunn, The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism in World Perspective (1992); and J. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (1998), discuss the political role of the military. Sandra M. Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939 (1999), examines an important part of the political spectrum often neglected by scholars. Ronald M. Schneider, Latin American Political History: Patterns and Personalities (2007), details Latin America’s struggles to establish viable participatory political systems.
Economics
Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (1994), provides the best overall treatment. Labour issues are examined in Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Workers in Dependent Societies (1977), a helpful introduction; and Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (1986). William C. Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (1995), covers the rise and fall of agrarian reformism. The essays in Paul W. Drake (ed.), Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present (1993), deal with varied aspects of economic policy. Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930 (1998), surveys the urbanization process.
International relations
Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile (1988); and R.A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vol. (1981–82), examine the repercussions of foreign conflicts. Good examples from the vast literature examining the role of the United States are Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (1985), covering a broad spectrum of 20th-century issues; Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (1989), treating a critically important theatre; Barbara Stallings, Banker to the Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900–1986 (1987); and Fredrick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (1995).
Culture and society
Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, rev. ed. (1970), covers cultural history. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (1991), discusses the changing role of women and women’s movements. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (1990); and David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (1996), treat the rise of Protestantism and, less directly, changes in the Roman Catholic Church. David Bushnell
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