Who are you really and what were you before?

Pyramids of Cambodia and Mexico Part II

There’s a line in Casablanca where Humphrey Bogart is falling in love with Ingrid Bergman. He smiles the ironic Bogart smile and says, “Who are you really, and what were you before?”

  

Who are you really? And what were you before?

The world is a mysterious place.  We study the past to understand our future. We search for origins to better understand our destiny. Earlier this year I journeyed to Cambodia to seek the roots of civilisation among the ruins of Angkor Wat. The ancient temple complexes of the Khmer are the most extensive in the world and hold precious secrets about the mysteries of human society.

Were the ancient cultures of the world somehow connected through commerce and transportation, albeit primitive?  We've all heard the outlandish theories from pseudo-scientists like Von Daniken and his chariots of the gods, how strange beings from other planets colonised the earth.

Ancient Astronaut at the controls of his Rocket Ship?

An ancient landing strip in the Andes can only be seen from an aerial view high in the sky. Why was it built?

Was this an ancient landing strip in the deserts of Peru?

And yet while these theories are outlandish, they do raise valid questions about the nature of lost civilisations. We often take the narrative of progress as a given. Our society has made more scientific progress in a generation than in a thousand generations before us.  There are those who believe in this narrative about the relentless march of progress. But are we really superior to the cultures that went before us? What did they know and when did they know it. These are questions belonging to a discipline called cultural anthropology.

Who were the Khmer and how was their civilisation related to ancient India? These temples were built between 700 AD and 1400 AD. Before London and Paris were bustling cities, a vast settlement covered the area around the Tonle Sap lake. Rice was cultivated.

Perhaps a million people lived and worshipped here.  What was their fascination with Shiva, with Vishnu, and with Buddha? They lived thousands of miles away from the Himalayas and built replicas of Mount Meru, which they considered the centre of the universe.

Angkor Thom

Apsaras carved in stone at Angkor Thom

Their warriors conquered the region, sailing in boats up the Tonle Sap river to the Mekong, conquering territories for their kings and building a vast system of water-works, aqueducts, and irrigation systems to service their rice paddies.  They traded in gold and silver, wore fine jewellery and silk gowns with gold threads. They knew Sanskrit and Khmer and were known to the Chinese.

How great is our hubris that we dismiss these civilisations as "primitive." Are we really so advanced? Is our own attempt at society really so superior?

 Is the stone face that of a god or a conqueror? This face smiled on people who lived simply in communities where rice and sunshine were plentiful, along with fruits, flowers, coconuts and bananas. They wore fine cloth, slept on grass mats and worked together to great works of architecture that have lasted centuries. Was their life truly more primitive than our own? 

Our modern international community is divided. Wars rage around the globe constantly without cessation. We pour poison into the oceans, destroy coral reefs that have taken millions of years to form, melt glaciers with global warming, and fight wars over oil. Are we really so much more advanced? 

We have stumbled upon nuclear technology and hold the world hostage to the atomic bomb. But is this really the crowning achievement of humanity? Our electronic tablets give us more information than humans knew for centuries. The whole of the Alexandrian library, the complete works of Shakespeare, and the encyclopaedia of Diderot fits in the palm of our hands. But are we wiser? Or have these devices stripped us of our memories? Now that we can take photos with ease and post them around the world on the internet have we lost our true vision? The ancients had to remember their precious moments. Wasn't the fragility of their memory a goad to sharpen their sight? Could it be that our ancestors needed their memory and their sight, and so their remembrance was more vivid, their sight more accurate?  In recent history, Mozart was able to compose complex sonatas as a child. His peers were able to appreciate his ability. Today's music is as insipid as it is ever-present. But we seem to lack the attention span to sit quietly and hear, as Mozart did, the complex harmonies of the soul. Were our ancestors more sensitive spiritual than we are?

Perhaps in gaining so much through our precious science and technology, we have also paid a price.

As I try to make sense of these questions, my travels brought me from the  pyramids of Cambodia to the pyramids of Mexico. 

The pyramids of Cambodia raise some serious questions about cross-cultural convergence. While many anthropologists dismiss any communication between the continents in ancient times, it's difficult to explain away the similarities between the pyramids of Koh Ker, shown here, and the Pyramids of Mexico.

http://mexpostfact.blogspot.com/2015/03/trailer-test-angkor.html  

I've touched on this theme before: 

http://mexpostfact.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-similarities-between-cambodian.html

When I visited the pyramids of Koh Ker I couldn't escape the eery feeling that I had been here before.

Pyramids of Koh Ker, Cambodia

 This pyramid was an ancient Shiva temple, deep in the heart of the jungles of Cambodia.

Here it is from another angle. We're looking at the pyramid from the East. The sun is setting behind the pyramid in the West. This is a "step" pyramid, much different from the Egyptian model.  There is a shrine to Shiva within the temple located to the left in the photo above. There is a Shiva lingam. Worship in this temple took place over a thousand year period, beginning in the 8th or 9th Century. It was later abandoned when people moved on and joined the prospering Khmer civilisation at Angkor, closer to the rice paddies of the Tonle Sap Lake.

Here I am at the Pyramid of La Cañada de La Virgen, in Mexico. This looks like a miniature of the above Shiva temple.  This pyramid is built as an observatory. There is a large, shallow reflecting pool behind the pyramid that was build for observing the reflections of the stars, planets, and moon. One can mark the position of various stars with sticks and so make calculations. A low wall around the back of the pyramid is notched for observing the position of the sun. The Aztecs knew the sun calendar and understood the movements of the stars. This area was close by a river. It was an active centre about a thousand years ago, but when the weather changed and the river´s bed moved, the people moved on as well.

Museo de Antropologia, Ciudad de Mexico

A good place for fathoming the secrets of pyramids is the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City.  I´ve been here a few times and always learn something new. I was here last week on some other business in Mexico City and thought I´d try to make some sense of it all.

The National Museum of Anthropology (Museo Nacional de Antropologia) in Mexico City is dedicated to understanding the Mayan and Aztec cultures and their impact on the region. 

It has the world's largest collection of Precolombian Meso-American art as well as a mind-numbing array of artefacts from pyramids around Mexico.

All of Mexico is an archeological zone, and if you dig deep enough where you´re standing you´ll find evidence of previous American civilisations.

In Pre-historic times, people in northern mesa-america were cave-dwellers. They carved their living spaces out of rock walls like these

It's hard to know much about their quotidian lives, apart from what we can gather by the artefacts they left behind: a few shards of pottery, broken bits of glass, turquoise jewellery, tools made of stone and obsidian...

We know that Mexico's ancestors lived in communities near water sources. They had common living areas, perhaps lived in extended families with upstairs and downstairs systems much like this replica.

They made tiny figures of jade, turquoise and semi-precious stones. Were these figures toys? Or perhaps household gods? They may have been representations of important family members or community leaders.  The ceramics from the Northern regions of Mexico have formal designs, but lack sophistication.

But the pyramid structures are found in the North as well as the South. Attempts to date these structures are based on their sophistication, the precision of their orientation, as well as architectural details and the carbon-dating of remains found in settlements nearby.

One of the most curious details that I found striking is the absolute dearth of metals: no iron weapons of any kind, no tools. As I visited one exhibit after the next I found little or no evidence of metal-work, with the exception of ornaments and jewellery. A few tiny needles made of gold, an occasional copper fish-hook. But the entire culture of pre-Columbian Mexico up until the conquest seems to be neolithic, an advanced stone-age culture.

These tiny figures may have been gods or toys.

 Social organization was formal. Even in this strange neolithic culture, towns were laid out according to plans. 

People smoked clay pipes, shaped in anthropomorphic forms, especially snakes. 

While at first glance these paintings may appear "primitive," they compare well to the art in many modern museums from the Louvre to the Hermitage.

Given that this work was carved in stone with stone tools, it has remarkable power, centuries after it was conceived and executed.

The tiny figures remain a mystery, but these figures from the Monte Alban civilisation of  Oaxaca show greater delicacy in the handling of materials. In the foreground are ornaments made of copper. 

These stone masks from Oaxaca demonstrate a greater range of expression.

The Aztecs practiced human sacrifice. This stone figure, called "Chac Mool" had a special purpose. He has a container over his belly meant to hold the  hearts of the sacrificial victims.

A theme that may tie the ancient cultures of Cambodia and Mexico together are the large stone serpents one finds everywhere. Here in Mexico the cult of Quetzalcoatle the Plumed Serpent ushers in the summer and winter solstices when the shadow of the snake climbs down the steps of the pyramids at Kukulkan, in the Yucatan.

Walking through the gardens of the museum I saw replicas of the distinct styles of pyramids that haunt the four corners of Mexico. As I strolled the gardens I was reminded of Angkor. I felt I could have been back in the jungles of Kbal Spean, where the sacred river flows over a thousand Shiva Lingams.

 The stone carvings here, while cruder in nature than those of Angkor, recall the stone pillars of Suryavarman II and the bas reliefs of the Mahabharata that were found deep in the Cambodian jungle by French explorer Henri Mouhot in the 19th Century.

Here in Mexico, I feel close to Angkor. I cannot but feel that these two cultures are somehow linked. I know it is not fashionable among archeologists to posit a connection across the oceans, but it is an inescapable conclusion. It may be pointed out that the halls of academe have their own politics as do national governments and that it is not in the national interest of Mexico or Cambodia to imply that their culture was somehow influenced from abroad.  It is also true that Cambodia's architectural schools were stunted and deformed by so much colonial rule and war.  The budget for an international team of qualified academics interested in studying this fascinating relationship is prohibitive. Any synchronicity between these cultures will have to be studied further by minds better qualified than my own. Still, I can't help wonder.

These are the jade death masks of ancient leaders who ruled over the valley of Mexico when Europe's royalty was in its infancy.

This king was buried with jade mask and earrings.  The wrist ornaments and rings are made of finely polished jade.

One of the areas of convergence between Mexico and Cambodia is the cult of death. Where in South East Asia, the god of death was the Hindu Yamaraja, in Mexico he was worshipped as Xipe Totec.

The huge Olmec heads originally found in Veracruz served the same purpose as the giant Roman statues commemorating emperors: to cow the people into submission before their governors.

And yet these so-called "primitive" peoples had deciphered the astronomical code of the solar calendar, knowledge that was unavailable to the Europeans at the time. When priests in so-called "advanced" cultures calculated passover by the lunar calendar, the Aztecs and Mayans followed the 365 1/4  days of the solar year.

The Original Solar Calendar used by Montezuma's priests

And while Cambodian priests recited the Hindu legends of the Naga serpents (http://mexpostfact.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-snake-people-continuedastika.html ) who ruled the underworld, Mexico exalted the serpent king Quetzal-coatl, here depicted in stone carving.

The Roman empire's descent into decadence included so-called "games" where gladiators made to use lead swords fought the notorious Emperor Commodus. Commodus, of course, slaughtered the hapless slaves using sharpened steel and accompanied by bodyguards who would protect him.

In Mexico a warrior was chained to the carved stone above. The runnel in the stone was a carved channel meant to conduct his blood to a cup used in appeasing the sun-god. When the god was satisfied, new fire was created and another 52 years of sunshine was guaranteed.

In another version of the same sacrifice, this stone was bound to the ankles of a warrior who would fight with blunt weapons the brave men who killed him with obsidian swords, in an Aztec version of Commodus and the gladiators.

After a day wandering about the museum, I began to see some lines of investigation that might be fruitful. And yet I still had a lot of problems that remained to be solved. But I couldn't see everything in one day. I'll write more about my discoveries in this space, as time permits.

Mexico's National Anthropology Museum also has a number or  of ethnographic exhibits about Mexico's present-day indigenous groups, so you can see how the ancient lives on in the present. There are large halls dedicated to each of the cultural regions of Mesoamerica and the ethnological exhibits are located on the second floor. 

You could easily spend a full day here..

As I stumble aimlessly from one exhibit to the next in search of lost clues my wife Aurora sits patiently. When we finished, she asked me, "Did you get the answers you were looking for?"

I told her, "Some. But there were still more questions than answers."

"They also serve who only sit and wait."