Chapter 18
Matthew Stirling, the American archaeologist who excavated La Venta in the 1940s, made a number of spectacular discoveries there. The most spectacular of all was the Stele of the Bearded Man.
The plan of the ancient Olmec site, as I have said, lay along an axis pointing 8° west of north. At the southern end of this axis, 100 feet tall, loomed the fluted cone of the great pyramid. Next to it, at ground level, was what looked like a curb about a foot high enclosing a spacious rectangular area one-quarter the size of an average city block. When the archaeologists began to uncover this curb they found, to their surprise, that it consisted of the upper parts of a wall of columns. Further excavation through the undisturbed layers of stratification that had accumulated revealed that the columns were ten feet tall. There were more than 600 of them and they had been set together so closely that they formed a near-impregnable stockade. Hewn out of solid basalt and transported to La Venta from quarries more than sixty miles distant, the columns weighed approximately two tons each.
Why all this trouble? What had the stockade been built to contain?
Even before excavation began, the tip of a massive chunk of rock had been visible jutting out of the ground in the centre of the enclosed area, about four feet higher than the illusory ‘curb’ and leaning steeply forward. It was covered with carvings. These extended down, out of sight, beneath the layers of soil that filled the ancient stockade to a height of about nine feet.
Stirling and his team worked for two days to free the great rock. When exposed it proved to be an imposing stele fourteen feet high, seven feet wide and almost three feet thick. The carvings showed an encounter between two tall men, both dressed in elaborate robes and wearing elegant shoes with turned-up toes. Either erosion or deliberate mutilation (quite commonly practised on Olmec monuments) had resulted in the complete defacement of one of the figures. The other was intact. It so obviously depicted a Caucasian male with a high-bridged nose and a long, flowing beard that the bemused archaeologists promptly christened it ‘Uncle Sam’.1
I walked slowly around the twenty-ton stele, remembering as I did so that it had lain buried in the earth for more than 3000 years. Only in the brief half century or so since Stirling’s excavations had it seen the light of day again. What would its fate be now? Would it stand here for another thirty centuries as an object of awe and splendour for future generations to gawp at and revere? Or, in such a great expanse of time, was it possible that circumstances might change so much that it would once again be buried and concealed?
Perhaps neither would happen. I remembered the ancient calendrical system of Central America, which the Olmecs had initiated. According to them, and to their more famous successors the Mayas, there just weren’t any great expanses of time left, let alone three millennia. The Fifth Sun was all used up and a tremendous earthquake was building to destroy humanity two days before Christmas in AD 2012.
I turned my attention back to the stele. Two things seemed to be clear: the encounter scene it portrayed must, for some reason, have been of immense importance to the Olmecs, hence the grandeur of the stele itself, and the construction of the remarkable stockade of columns built to contain it. And, as was the case with the negro heads, it was obvious that the face of the bearded Caucasian man could only have been sculpted from a human model. The racial verisimilitude was too good for an artist to have invented it.
The same went for two other Caucasian figures I was able to identify among the surviving monuments from La Venta. One was carved in low relief on a heavy and roughly circular slab of stone about three feet in diameter. Dressed in what looked like tight-fitting leggings, his features were those of an Anglo-Saxon. He had a full pointed beard and wore a curious floppy cap on his head. In his left hand he extended a flag, or perhaps a weapon of some kind. His right hand, which he held across the middle of his chest, appeared to be empty. Around his slim waist was tied a flamboyant sash. The other Caucasian figure, this time carved on the side of a narrow pillar, was similarly bearded and attired.
Who were these conspicuous strangers? What were they doing in Central America? When did they come? And what relationship did they have with those other strangers who had settled in this steamy rubber jungle – the ones who had provided the models for the great negro heads?
Some radical researchers, who rejected the dogma concerning the isolation of the New World prior to 1492, had proposed what looked like a viable solution to the problem: the bearded, thin-featured individuals could have been Phoenicians from the Mediterranean who had sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and across the Atlantic Ocean as early as the second millennium BC. Advocates of this theory went on to suggest that the negroes shown at the same sites were the ‘slaves’ of the Phoenicians, picked up on the coast of West Africa prior to the trans-Atlantic run.2
The more consideration I gave to the strange character of the La Venta sculptures, the more dissatisfied I became with these ideas. Probably the Phoenicians and other Old World peoples had crossed the Atlantic ages before Columbus. There was compelling evidence for that, although it is outside the scope of this book.3 The problem was that the Phoenicians, who had left unmistakable examples of their distinctive handiwork in many parts of the ancient world,4 had not done so at the Olmec sites in Central America. Neither the negro heads, nor the reliefs portraying bearded Caucasian men showed any signs of anything remotely Phoenician in their style, handiwork or character.5 Indeed, from a stylistic point of view, these powerful works of art seemed to belong to no known culture, tradition or genre. They seemed to be without antecedents either in the New World or in the Old.
They seemed rootless … and that, of course, was impossible, because all forms of artistic expression have roots somewhere.
Hypothetical third party
It occurred to me that one plausible explanation might lie in a variant of the ‘hypothetical third party’ theory originally put forward by a number of leading Egyptologists to explain one of the great puzzles of Egyptian history and chronology.
The archaeological evidence suggested that rather than developing slowly and painfully, as is normal with human societies, the civilization of Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs, emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight – and with no apparent antecedents whatever.
For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.6
What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt’s amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period).7
The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt’s early sophistication. These implications are startling, according to a number of more daring thinkers. John Anthony West, an expert on the early dynastic period, asks:
How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being? Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of ‘development’. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start.
The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a ‘development’, it was a legacy.8
West has been a thorn in the flesh of the Egyptological establishment for many years. But other more mainstream figures have also confessed puzzlement at the suddenness with which Egyptian civilization appeared. Walter Emery, late Edwards Professor of Egyptology at the University of London, summed up the problem:
At a period approximately 3400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to one of well-organized monarchy …
At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of a luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time, for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architecture.9
One explanation could simply be that Egypt received its sudden and decisive cultural boost from some other known civilization of the ancient world. Sumer, on the Lower Euphrates in Mesopotamia, is the most likely contender. Despite many basic differences, a variety of shared building techniques and architectural styles10 does suggest a link between the two regions. But none of these similarities is strong enough to infer that the connection could have been in any way causal, with one society directly influencing the other. On the contrary, as Professor Emery writes:
The impression we get is of an indirect connection, and perhaps the existence of a third party, whose influence spread to both the Euphrates and the Nile … Modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area. [However] a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to Egypt and Mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations.11
Among other things, this theory sheds light on the mysterious fact that the Egyptians and Sumerian people of Mesopotamia appear to have worshipped virtually identical lunar deities who were among the oldest in their respective pantheons (Thoth in the case of the Egyptians, Sin in the case of the Sumerians).12 According to the eminent Egyptologist Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, ‘The similarity between the two gods is too close to be accidental … It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.’13
The question, therefore, is this: what was that ‘common but exceedingly ancient source’, that ‘hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area’, that advanced ‘third party’ to which both Budge and Emery refer? And if it left a legacy of high culture in Egypt and in Mesopotamia, why shouldn’t it have done so in Central America?
It’s not good enough to argue that civilization ’took off much later in Mexico than it had in the Middle East. It is possible that the initial impulse could have been felt at the same time in both places but that the subsequent outcome could have been completely different.
On this scenario, the civilizers would have succeeded brilliantly in Egypt and in Sumer, creating lasting and remarkable cultures there. In Mexico, on the other hand (as also seems to have been the case in Peru), they suffered some serious setback – perhaps getting off to a good start, when the gigantic stone heads and reliefs of bearded men were made, but going rapidly downhill. The light of civilization would never quite have been lost, but perhaps things didn’t pick up again until around 1500 BC, the so-called ‘Olmec horizon’. By then the great sculptures would have been hoary with age, ancient relics of immense spiritual power, their all-but-forgotten origins wrapped in myths of giants and bearded civilizers.
If so, we may be gazing at faces from a much more remote past than we imagine when we stare into the almond eyes of one of the negro heads or into the angular, chiselled Caucasian features of ‘Uncle Sam’. It is by no means impossible that these great works preserve the images of peoples from a vanished civilization which embraced several different ethnic groups.
That, in a nutshell, is the ‘hypothetical third party’ theory as applied to Central America: the civilization of Ancient Mexico did not emerge without external influence, and it did not emerge as a result of influence from the Old World; instead certain cultures in the Old World and in the New World may both have received a legacy of influence and ideas from a third party at some exceedingly remote date.
Villahermosa to Oaxaca
Before leaving Villahermosa I visited CICOM, the Centre for Investigation of the Cultures of the Olmecs and Maya. I wanted to find out from the scholars there whether there were any other significant Olmec sites in the region. To my surprise, they suggested that I should look farther afield. At Monte Alban, in Oaxaca province hundreds of kilometres to the south-west, archaeologists had apparently unearthed ‘Olmecoid’ artefacts and a number of reliefs thought to represent the Olmecs themselves.
Santha and I had intended to drive straight on from Villahermosa into the Yucatan Peninsula, which lay north-east. The journey to Monte Alban would involve a huge detour, but we decided to make it, in the hope that it might shed further light on the Olmecs. Besides, it promised to be a spectacular drive over immense mountains and into the heart of the hidden valley where the city of Oaxaca lies.
We drove almost due west past the lost site of La Venta, past Coatzecoalcos once again, and on past Sayula and Loma Bonita to the road-junction town of Tuxtepec. In so doing, by degrees we left behind countryside scarred and blackened by the oil industry, crossed long gentle hillsides carpeted in lush green grass, and ran between fields ripe with crops.
At Tuxtepec, where the sierras really began, we turned sharply south following Highway 175 to Oaxaca. On the map it looked barely half the distance that we had driven from Villahermosa. The road, however, proved to be a complicated, nerve-racking, muscle-wrenching, apparently endless zig-zag of hairpin bends – narrow, winding and precipitous – which went up into the clouds like a stairway to heaven. It took us through many different layers of alpine vegetation, each occupying a specialized climatological niche, until it brought us out above the clouds in a place where familiar plants flourished in giant forms, like John Wyndham’s triffids, creating a surreal and alien landscape. It took twelve hours to drive the 700 kilometres from Villahermosa to Oaxaca. By the time the journey was over, my hands were blistered from gripping the steering-wheel too tight for too long around too many hairpin bends. My eyes were blurred and I kept having mental retrospectives of the vertiginous chasms we had skirted on Highway 175, in the mountains, where the triffids grew.
The city of Oaxaca is famous for magic mushrooms, marijuana and D. H. Lawrence (who wrote and set part of his novel The Plumed Serpent here in the 1920s). There is still a bohemian feel about the place and until late at night a current of excitement seems to ripple among the crowds filling its bars and cafés, narrow cobbled streets, old buildings and spacious plazas.
We checked into a room overlooking one of the three open courtyards in the Hotel Las Golondrinas. The bed was comfortable. There were starry skies overhead. But, tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep.
What kept me awake was the idea of the civilizers … the bearded gods and their companions. In Mexico, as in Peru, they seemed to have confronted failure. That was what the legends implied, and not only the legends, as I discovered when we reached Monte Alban the next morning.