The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (62 page)

Inequality in Maya Society

Maya society was divided into hereditary nobles and commoners. There were differences in rank within each class. All lineages reckoned descent in the father’s line and were ranked relative to one another. Most rulers were men, but there were exceptions. A woman from the highest lineage of a Level 1 city usually outranked a man from the highest lineage of a Level 2 town. Royal women could serve as regents when their sons were too young to assume power.

The Spaniards wrote down a hierarchy of titles for sixteenth-century Maya nobles. Because some of these titles appear in earlier hieroglyphic texts, we know that they had been in use for more than 1,000 years. Examples include the terms
ahaw
or
ajaw
(“lord”) and
k’uhul ahaw
(“divine lord”).

One royal woman from Calakmul, who married the ruler of Yaxchilán in the Mexican state of Chiapas, was known by three different titles:
ix Kaan ahaw
(“Lady of Calakmul”),
ixik k’uhul
(“Holy Woman”), and
lak’in kaloomte’
(“East Ruler”). She bore the Yaxchilán ruler a son. After her husband’s reign ended in 741, the Calakmul woman held onto the throne of Yaxchilán for almost a decade, ensuring that her son would become ruler in 752. During those years her son was gaining military experience, so that when the time came he could demonstrate prowess in war. That prowess would allow him to outmaneuver his competitors—for example, any half brothers born to his father’s other wives.

In the territory around Yaxchilán the lords of subordinate towns were called
sajalob’
(“provincial sublords”); the most highly ranked among them was designated
b’aah sajal,
“head sublord.” Among the duties of a sublord were the collection of local tribute and its delivery to the capital and the delivery of war captives to the palace of the ahaw.

Sublords often fought in battle beside their overlords. For example, one battle scene carved on a lintel at Yaxchilán shows the divine king Bird Jaguar the Great and his “head sublord” Yellow Flint capturing two noble enemies. After the battle each of the victors was given the title “captor of [prisoner’s name].” Such titles were awarded only in the case of elite captives and amounted to entries on a noble’s resumé.

FIGURE 57.
   This carved stone wall panel uses the height of a throne and the steps of a staircase to communicate the Maya social hierarchy. The divine king of Yaxchilan, Itzamnaaj B’ahlam, sits cross-legged on his throne. His sublord, Aj Chak Maax, kneels on the top step of the staircase, presenting his ruler with three elite prisoners. At the bottom of the scene we see the prisoners, with their upper arms bound and their jadeite ear ornaments replaced with strips of cloth.

Some monuments depict obeisance and humiliation among the Maya. A carved wall panel from Yaxchilán shows a sublord presenting war captives to his divine king in 783 (
Figure 57
). The Yaxchilán king sits on a throne; his sublord kneels on the top step of a stairway; the prisoners kneel on a lower step, with their arms bound and their jade ear ornaments replaced with strips of cloth. The ruler’s face expresses Zenlike serenity, while the captives grimace. The hieroglyphic text informed the elite minority who could read. The majority of Maya, who had not been taught to read, either had to rely on the scene to get the gist of the message or attend performances at which a minor priest chanted the text.

Literacy was not the only skill denied to Maya commoners. Even the most renowned war captain was prevented from usurping a sublord’s position by his ignorance of sacred lore. The Maya lords who vetted him would rapidly discover that ignorance. The Spaniards report that in sixteenth-century Yucatán, any usurper who could not answer a set of official riddles would quickly be exposed.

Power-sharing among the Maya was exemplified by the noble councillors who met in the
popol naah,
or council house. Skilled commoners could fill important posts such as master craftsman, head sculptor, monument carver, scribe, or painter. Within the religious hierarchy they could also hold lower-order posts such as “keeper of the fire” or “keeper of the sacred book” (a reference to hieroglyphic texts on bark paper or deer hide).

The lineages of Maya commoners, often known by surnames inherited from specific male ancestors, held corporate rights to agricultural land. The Maya also had landless commoners, serfs, and slaves; the latter were usually war captives.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE NEW WORLD’S FIRST-GENERATION KINGDOMS

The Zapotec, the Moche, and the Maya all created monarchies out of rank societies. They did so in the absence of European visitors and without any template for what a monarchy should look like. It is therefore significant that these ancient societies did it much the way that the Hawai’ians, Zulu, Hunza, and Merina did it: by forcibly uniting a group of rival societies.

All these cases began with societies that already possessed a degree of hereditary inequality. The engine that drove kingdom formation was competitive interaction among multiple elite actors. The balance was tipped when one of the actors achieved a competitive advantage. Whether set in the temperate highlands, the coastal desert, or the tropical forest, the process was similar. It was independent of environment or ethnic group.

Our three New World monarchies had something else in common. Once having created the apparatus of a kingdom, they expanded against neighboring groups. Expansion was facilitated by the fact that many groups could not defend themselves against the centralized control and military strategy of a newly formed monarchy. As a result, many pristine New World kingdoms reached their maximum size early in their history. The Zapotec, for example, reached their territorial limits about
A.D.
200. After that, their outer provinces began to break away and form their own kingdoms. The same thing happened to the Moche around
A.D.
600.

Among both the Maya and the Zapotec, as we have seen, the process of political consolidation set off a chain reaction. Monte Albán, Monte Negro, and Huamelulpan kept each other at bay. Calakmul and Tikal attempted to pick off each other’s Level 2 and Level 3 communities; only rarely did they go head-to-head. By
A.D.
900, the repetitive cycles of military conflict had weakened both kingdoms and contributed to their eventual collapse.

We now need to see whether the earliest kingdoms in the Old World were created in the same way. We will begin in the land of the pharaohs.

NINETEEN

The Land of the Scorpion King

The world’s longest river has two main branches. The White Nile begins at Lake Victoria in Uganda. The Blue Nile begins near Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Both branches are fed by the summer rain of the tropics. White and Blue join at Khartoum in the Sudan and then pick up more water from the River Atbara. It is the last water the Nile will receive on its journey to the Mediterranean.

The Nile is almost 3,900 miles long, surpassing both the Amazon and the Mississippi. So full is its Blue branch at flood stage that its water dams up that of the White. Only after the Blue Nile has crested does the White deliver its burden, prolonging the high-water season. Once, before the era of hydroelectric dams, the flooding Nile carried almost six trillion cubic feet of water.

The bad news, of course, is that the Nile carries more water at Khartoum than it does at Cairo. As one travels north from Uganda, precipitation declines dramatically. Khartoum receives five to seven inches of rain each year; Cairo gets only one or two. For 1,300 miles, from Khartoum to the Mediterranean, the Nile crosses a desert whose evaporation exceeds its rainfall.

The result is an environmental contrast like that of Peru’s coastal valleys: a long strip of green alluvium flanked by desert. Geographer George Cressey once estimated that all but 4 percent of Egypt was desert. Before the adoption of gasoline or electric pumps, the Nile could irrigate only seven million acres in a land of 386,000 square miles.

The ancient Egyptians called the Nile alluvium
kemet,
“the black land.” They called the “red land” to either side
deseret,
from which we get our word “desert.” The foragers of Wadi Kubbaniya and Jebel Sahaba gathered plants on the black land and hunted game on the red.

THE RISE OF FARMING AND HERDING

Eleven thousand years ago some Nile Valley hunter-gatherers had begun to live in camps like those of the Natufians. One of these camps lay in the Wadi Or, a dry canyon running toward the Nile just south of Wadi Halfa, Egypt. Its occupants lived in circular huts ten feet in diameter, their conical roofs supported by wooden posts. Their tools suggest that they were gathering edible seeds and bulbs and hunting game with bows and arrows. In addition to wild members of the horse and cattle families the foragers of Wadi Or ate hippopotamus and turtle from the Nile.

When domestic plants and animals were added to the economy of the Nile Valley, they came from two sources: local and foreign. The local species included native African sorghums and millets, cattle and pigs, and date palms. The foreign species included wheat, barley, flax, sheep, and goats, all of which were native to the Near East. These foreign species probably reached Egypt from the region occupied today by Jordanians, Israelis, and Palestinians. We will refer to this region by the generic term Southern Levant.

The Fayum Oasis

Egypt’s Fayum is a large, wind-eroded depression, 60 miles south of Cairo and 15 miles west of the Nile. Its source of water is a side branch of the Nile that breaks off from the main river, runs parallel to the Nile for 120 miles, and forms a lake in the Fayum. The lake attracted both wild game and early farmers.

Several generations of archaeologists have investigated the early farmers. Gertrude Caton-Thompson and geologist Elinor Gardner pioneered Fayum archaeology in the 1920s. Willeke Wendrich and René Cappers have since discovered that agriculture was under way in the Fayum more than 7,000 years ago.

The Fayum farmers lived in circular huts with clay floors. Taking advantage of humid soils at the lake margin, they grew wheat, flax, and two races of barley. They also herded sheep and goats, fished the lake, and hunted wild game. Owing to the aridity of the surrounding desert, even their baskets and wooden implements are sometimes preserved. The Fayum farmers prepared the ground with stone hoes, perforated it with digging sticks, planted their cereals, harvested them with flint-bladed sickles, threshed them with wooden pitchforks, and ground the grain on stones. The meal was then made into porridge by mixing it with water and heating it in earthenware pots.

One of Caton-Thompson’s most interesting discoveries was a series of 165 underground granaries, excavated in a dry cliff above the lake. At least 56 of these storage pits had been lined with basketry; some were still sealed with mud-plastered lids. Caton-Thompson estimated that each granary could have held the wheat or barley produced by a two-to-three-acre field.

Bir Kiseiba and Nabta Playa

While cereal agriculture spread over the Fayum and the Nile delta, a different lifeway was taking shape to the south. In the desert west of Wadi Halfa, near the border between Egypt and the Sudan, some of the world’s first cattle pastoralists were learning how to use an inhospitable environment.

The desert near Bir Kiseiba featured a series of huge, shallow depressions that temporarily filled with rain runoff in the summer. Geologists refer to such depressions as
playas,
the Spanish word for “beach.” More than 7,000 years ago, according to archaeologists Fred Wendorf, Romuald Schild, and Angela Close, groups of herders were pasturing their cattle at Bir Kiseiba.

When the depressions became playa lakes in the summer, grasses and herbs provided forage for the cattle. When the lakes dried up, herders moved to the center of the depression and dug shallow wells to tap the subsurface water. These herders traveled between playas and oases, using ostrich eggshells as water bottles and hunting gazelles, desert hares, and the wild North African donkey.

At one wind-deflated desert basin, called Nabta Playa, Wendorf and his group found evidence for clearly defined huts and storage pits. The stored foods included seasonally available wild sorghum, grass seeds, tubers, legumes, and fruits. The prehistoric wells dug in the center of Nabta Playa were larger and deeper than those at Bir Kiseiba. Some were walk-in wells, with steps cut in the sides.

The huts and wells did not surprise Wendorf’s team. What surprised the group was that Nabta Playa had evidently served as a ritual center for the region. One ritual feature consisted of a north-south alignment of upright sandstone blocks. To the north of this alignment was a circle of smaller upright stones, carefully embedded in the playa sediments. There were, in addition, seven artificial mounds at Nabta Playa. One contained the burial of an adult cow, while the others held the remains of several cattle.

Let us consider the cultural legacies of the Fayum, Nabta Playa, and Bir Kiseiba. In the Fayum we see an early stage of the cereal economy that supported the later pharaohs. At Nabta Playa and Bir Kiseiba we see plausible ancestors for the cattle-keeping societies of eastern and southern Africa. The mitochondrial DNA of modern African cattle tells us that they are a domestic form of wild African cattle. Later societies such as the Nuer, Turkana, Fulani, Somali, and Zulu owe a debt to the early cattle herders of the playas.