A History of the World (28 page)

Paul tried all the time to keep friendly connections with his old Jewish faith, and engaged in confrontations with Jews as he attempted to explain why Christ’s message superseded their beliefs. He baptized uncircumcised Greeks and Romans, including a centurion. The single, mobile and class-blind God of the Jews, whose worship had already been spread, although thinly, throughout the classical world, would now have another attribute: he would become everybody’s God.

The timing was almost perfect. Two years after the fires in Rome and Paul’s death, reputedly by beheading (since he was a Roman citizen, he was spared crucifixion), the Jewish revolt against Rome began, with riots in Caesarea. It had been sparked by religious arguments and protests over taxes, but as the legions converged on the mutinous cities
it became a full-scale rebellion that would be put down with exemplary Roman savagery. After a long and heroic siege Jerusalem fell to the legions in the year 70, and its inhabitants were either killed or sold as slaves. Herod’s famed Second Temple was destroyed, and the Jews were to remain scattered until modern times. Had the Nazarenes been at that point still a Jewish sect based in Jerusalem, their religion would probably have been snuffed out and never heard of again, except by religious scholars. The faction of Christ-worship that was exclusively Jewish, originally led by Jesus’s brother James, was indeed scattered in the ruins of the revolt, and soon disappeared from history.

Gentile ‘Christianity’ (the word appeared first in Antioch, used by Latin-speakers as an insult) was smuggled into the wider Mediterranean just in time. Its infancy was that of a rebel child of Judaism, but as Paul’s writings show again and again, it was forced to define itself against traditional Jewish thought. Though he ended up on a Roman executioner’s block, Paul admired the Roman state. He deliberately chose important Roman centres like Corinth, Antioch and Philippi to spread his message, and may well have hoped to win substantial support in Rome itself when sent there as a prisoner. Christians would be persecuted and exiled for a long time to come, but the possibility of an eventual deal between secular Roman power and the new religion could be glimpsed from early on. Unlike the rebellious Jewish leaders calling themselves Zealots, or the leaders of the revolt of 66–71, Jesus had shunned politics and spoke of giving Caesar what was Caesar’s. Paul, a good Roman citizen, agreed.

Because Paul’s reshaping of the Nazarene message was so influential, he has been blamed for much that followed – for Christian sucking-up to worldly power, for misogyny, fear of sex, intolerance. He was capable of great humane poetry: ‘Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful.’ He was trying to get his message across to traditional communities at a time of huge turbulence, almost hysteria. Like his fellow believers, he thought the Messiah would return in glory, very soon, almost certainly in his own lifetime, to save believers and condemn the rest. Having faith, and concentrating hard on it at the expense of almost everything else, was an urgent necessity that could not be put off.

In the same letter to the Corinthians that contains his hymn to
quiet love, he also warns Christians that ‘our time is growing short. Those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . those who are enjoying life should live as though they had nothing to laugh about; those whose life is buying things should live as though they had nothing of their own . . . I say this because the world as we know it is passing away.’ His words show him to be a control freak, a man with a temper and an authoritarian streak, and convinced that there is little time to waste; yet he can also be kindly, self-critical and thoughtful. He can sound like a twentieth-century revolutionary, darting between cells and factions, trying to hold them to the ‘correct’ ideological line and deploying a mixture of threat and flattery – fire and brimstone with a dash of charismatic charm. It is hardly unknown for the convert to become the most zealous hardliner, or the revolutionary leader to show a weakness for self-dramatization.

After Paul’s death in Rome, and probably after the execution of St Peter there too – who is said to have requested upside-down crucifixion so that his death could not be compared to that of Jesus – a Christian community began to grow in the imperial capital. It was a time of great religious confusion. Judaism was reorganizing itself and different versions of Christianity were competing around the classical world. The scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out how odd it is that Rome, the centre of anti-Christian persecution, became the great Christian city, rather than Baghdad. Indeed, Christianity could easily have become an eastern rather than a western religion. Over the next centuries Christian communities saw robust growth in Egypt, in Syrian and Judean cities such as Antioch, Gaza and Caesarea, in Anatolia in what is now Turkey, and in Rome itself, where the Christians were largely migrants. But Christianity did not take root easily in North Africa or Greece: despite the help Paul gave to the Ephesians, Corinthians and Thessalonians, it is possible that all three Christian communities failed to survive.
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The well rooted Jewish communities and the common language of Greek had a lot to with the spread of the new religion; so too did the unifying effect of persecution. This seems a paradox, but many movements have been strengthened in their early stages by repression. From European Jews to Protestants to Islamists, the experience of repression, as the etymology of the word suggests, has meant a pressing-back, but also a pressing-together; it has intensified belonging and commitment.

Lines and Spirals: The Other Quarter

These stories have referred to, very roughly, three-quarters of the world’s human population at any one time – the quarter in the Roman world, the quarter ruled by the Chinese Han, and the quarter living in India under the Guptas and their successors. What of the rest?

In the Americas, civilizations were emerging that were several thousand years behind Eurasia in their development, but impressive in their own right. The city of Teotihuacán, in Mexico, possessed an array of pyramids and temples that the Egyptians would have admired; and the great Mayan civilization of Yucatán and Guatemala produced sophisticated writing and a superb calendar system based on the stars, which divided the world into very long periods of time. Its nearest equivalents had been produced in Mesopotamia, more than two millennia earlier.

But lacking wheels and many of the animals of Eurasia, the Mesoamericans would, in general, pass on few fresh ideas to world culture. They had talented builders and sculptors, but their religions were mainly darker, more blood-soaked and more pessimistic than those of the cultures across the Atlantic. When the Spanish eventually arrived, they were horrified by the Aztec cult of mass human sacrifice, so extensive that it had forged a new war-making style, based on capturing enemies in order for them to have their hearts torn out on Aztec altars. There was no moral or spiritual equivalent to a Kongzi or a Jesus native to the American cultures – an absence that is worth pondering on.

One theory has already been discussed: the different distribution of animals and plants, which made agriculture slower and left Mesoamerican cultures far behind their European rivals. Another, often cited, difference is in the geographical shape of the two human-colonized landmasses. Eurasia, curling around the globe from east to west, has fewer climatic differences than the north-to-south stretch of America, which would allow for easier transmission of cultures. Yet these reasons are clearly not enough on their own. The Mesopotamians and Egyptians certainly had a dark side to their imaginations, but grew nothing like the pessimistic, gore-splattered religions to the west of the Atlantic. And even if the American cultures were one to two
millennia ‘behind’ the European and Chinese, by the 1400s you might have expected something to match the Greek golden age, or the Jewish religious revolution. But there is nothing remotely similar.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in two other differences, which go a long way to explain the gap. One is geological, rather than merely geographical: the world’s tectonic plates are responsible for much greater instability in the Americas, including earthquakes and volcanoes. This may well have produced a darker human imagination, as people struggled to deal with a greater number of natural disasters (including the climatic cycles of the Pacific). These may have seemed inexplicable, other than as the massively punitive swipes of angry gods requiring to be placated. All through mankind’s story human sacrifice has been the ultimate gift to a truly scary deity. As recently and trenchantly argued by the Cambridge historian Peter Watson, this may have combined with the greater proportion of mind-altering or psychoactive drugs in the Americas to create a bleak, ecstatic theatre of pain and death, rather than religions in the European, or Indian, sense.
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The greatest contribution the American cultures would bring to the world would be mainly through the new plants they domesticated, the corn, tomatoes, cacao, potatoes and squash which would be so eagerly adopted by others, radically changing populations, as well as tastes, in Europe and Africa. The mostly lost culture of the pre-Roman Celts is in some ways more typical of the people living at the edges of the advanced empires. Whether in south Indian forests, Africa, the Russian steppe or the plains of northern America, the little evidence we have points to tribal groups retaining ancient shaman- and nature-centred beliefs, combined with some sophisticated farming technologies and, in some areas, creating small urban centres.

Some of the lost kingdoms may well have been more interesting and surprising than the civilizations that had the luck to build in stone, to write, and thus be remembered. Hundreds of languages, ideas, systems of art and belief, have gone for ever. In a few areas, archaeologists are still turning up remarkable evidence of forgotten peoples. We could choose to look more closely at any of many examples of peoples at the edge of history during the age of the Romans and the Han, but one of the most intriguing was a people living on the Pacific coast of South America – the Nazca.

As the Chinese were struggling with their anti-barbarian walls and the Romans were enduring a spate of incompetent emperors, the Nazca were building a holy city of pyramids and plazas called Cahuachi. Today much of it looks simply like a series of small hills in the desert, a wilderness of grit and stone. There is an excavated central pyramid that has been unpleasantly ‘restored’ with strips of concrete and plaster. But as you tramp around the area, you notice small holes everywhere, then human bones, scraps of beautifully woven clothing and splinters of brick-red pottery. These are the leavings of grave-robbers. Lying exposed to the air, they date back to roughly the time when the Romans left Britain. Not far away are graves still containing huddled Nazcan figures, who look as if they died a week or two ago.

The deserts on the coastal plains of Peru are among the driest in the world. Hardly anything rots. But among the corpses and the skulls have been found some that look hardly human at all. Priests the world over have favoured odd-looking hats or headdresses to distinguish themselves from the rest. Nazca priests went one step further. From childhood their skulls were tightly wrapped between boards to push the bones upwards, producing elongated craniums – the original eggheads. These skulls are eerie enough, looking more like space aliens or the originals of Munch’s painting of a scream. In life, they must have inspired awe, if not downright terror.
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Like other early cultures, the Nazca were created by the special advantages provided by an unusual landscape. For though the desert is very dry, there are river valleys, and underground water is surprisingly close to the surface. Even today the transition between bone-dry, lunar desert and lush green is as dramatic as can be found anywhere on earth. It is reminiscent of the Nile valley, and of parts of southern Iraq; and indeed, like the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, the Nazca were a river civilization. Like them, the Nazca had to learn to control the river flow and use it with maximum efficiency for irrigation. In their case the key was not canals, as in Egypt, or fields with sluice-gates and raised borders as in Mesopotamia, but underground water channels and filtration galleries, connected to the surface by beautifully made spiralling holes known now as
ojos
, or ‘eyes’. These allowed people to keep the underground channels clean and the water flowing, for drinking, bathing, washing and farming.

As in the river cultures elsewhere, this system depended on large numbers of people working together under direction, and on the development of special stoneworking skills. As in Egypt, this helped shift a farming culture towards a more centralized and hierarchical one. As in Egypt, this led to towns and the rule of a priestly caste – who even practised mummification and built pyramids. So it is hard not to see the Nazca as later, littler, American Egyptians. And for a long time for them, life was good. In these lush crinkles in the desert modern farmers grow cotton, avocados, asparagus and much else for the world market. The Nazca people lived off maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, beans, manioc, llama and guinea-pig meat, and squash.

They also fished at sea with nets and inflatable skin boats and used llamas as pack animals. The Nazca produced beautiful cotton and wool textiles and kept themselves working hard with the help of coca leaves, the chewing stimulant still popular in South America today. For wilder times, they used hallucinogenic drugs from a cactus plant. They made sophisticated pottery pan-pipes and trumpets based on a common frequency and standardized pitch, and, for personal decoration or trade, they particularly valued the shell of a thorny oyster, coloured a startling red. Their clothing included tunics, mantles, turbans and sandals. And according to the pottery record, these people survived and thrived for some seven hundred years – about the same time as elapsed between the rise of the Roman republic in its early encounters with Carthage and the death of the Western Empire, when Rome fell to the Vandals. They may not have developed (or needed) the great engineering skills of the Romans, but their system of aqueducts and
ojos
was a considerable achievement; some of it still works today.