Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History

EMPIRES Perspectives [roIn Archaeology and History Edited by

Susan E. Alcock Terence N. D'Altroy I(athleen D. Morrison Carla M. Sinopoli

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This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place witholll the written permission of Cambridge Unil.ersity Press. First published 2001 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

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Contents

List of figures

page ix

List of tables

Xlll

Notes on the contributors

xiv

Preface

xvii

Carla M. Sinopoli and Tercnce N. DJAltroy PART I

SOURCES, APPROACHES, DEFINITIONS Kathlecn D. Morrison

1 The shadow empires: imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

1

10

Thomas]. Barfield 2 Written on water: designs and dynamics in the Portuguese

Estado da fndia Sanjay Subrahmanyam 3 The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru: the epistemological challenge of documenting an empire without documentary evidence

42

70

Katharina Schreiber 4 The Achaemenid Persian empire (c. 550-c. 330 BCE): continuities, adaptations, transformations

93

Amclie Kuhrt PART II

EMPIRES IN A WIDER WORLD Tercnce N. DJAltroy

5 The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system

125 128

Michael E. Smith 6 On the edge of empire: form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty

Carla M. Sinopoli

155

vii

Vlll

Contents 7 Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America: ideology and social integration

179

Kathleen Deagan PART III

IMPERIAL INTEGRATION AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS 195

Figures

Carla M. Sinopoli 8 Politics, resources, and blood in the Inka empire Terence N. DJAltroy

201

9 Egypt and Nubia

227

Robert Morlwt 10 Coercion, resistance, and hierarchy: local processes and imperial strategies in the Vijayanagara empire Kathleen D. Morrison PART IV

IMPERIAL IDEOLOGIES

252

279

Susan E. Alcock and Kathleen D. MOYl'ison 11 Aztec hearts and minds: religion and the state in the Aztec empire Elizabeth M. Brtmifiel

283

12 Inventing empire in ancient Rome Greg Woolf

311

13 The reconfiguration of memory in the eastern Roman empire Susan E. Alcocll

323

14 Cosmos, central authority, and communities in the early Chinese 351 empire Robin D. S. Yates PART V

THE AFTERLIFE OF EMPIRES

369

Susan E. Alcoclz 15 The f.111 of the Assyrian empire: ancient and modern interpretations Mario LiJJerarli

374

16 The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn? John More/and

392

17 Cuzco, another Rome? Sabine MacCormaclz

419

Notes

436

References

448

Index

508

1.1 Steppe empires of Central Asia. 11 1.2 Kazak timber graves near the Mongolian border in an older 12 graveyard marked by an ancient stone stele with an incised human face. (A1tai Mountains, Xinjiang, Peoples Republic of China, July 1987 © Thomas Barfield). 1.3 Xiongnu owed their strength to their cavalry. (Kazak nomads, 13 A1tai Mountains, Xinjiang, Peoples Republic of China, July 1987 © Thomas Barfield.) 1.4 Among the Kazaks, keeping hunting eagles, who some claim 16 were once used in battle, fits this ideal of a fierce warrior people. (A1tai Mountains, Xinjiang, Peoples Republic of China, July 1987 © Thomas Barfield.) 1.5 The combination of Chinese silk into a sheepskin hat worn by 20 traditionally dressed Kazak men in northwestern China today is an example of the long-term historic relation between China and the steppe nomads. (Altai Mountains, Xinjiang, Peoples Republic of China, J lily 1987 © Thomas Bm·field.) 2.1 The Portuguese empire in Asia, c. 1500-1700 C E. 46 2.2 Cathedral ofBom Jesus, Goa. (Photograph by K. D. Morrison 48 and C. Sinopoli.) 2.3 Fort ChapOl·a, Goa. (Photograph by K. D. Morrison and C. 56 Sinopoli.) 3.1 The Wari empire. 75 82 3.2 A partial site plan of the planned enclosure at Jincamocca, a provincial Wari site. 3.3 A view of Pikillaqta, in which the central open patios and 83 surrounding narrow galleries can be clearly seen. 3.4 The large-scale, imperial architecture ofPikillaqta preserves its 84 rigid grid layout. 3.5 The central core ofPikillaqta. 87 4.1 The Achaemenid empire. 96 4.2 Trilingual inscription and relief of Dm·ius I, carved in the cliff at 99 Behistun.

IX

x

List offigures

List offigures 4.3 Rock-cut tomb of Darius I at Naqsh-i Rustam, near Persepolis. 4.4 Two groups of subject peoples (Elamites and Armenians) bringing gifts to the Icing. 4.5 Royal Hero stabbing lion; west door of "Harem," Persepolis. 4.6 Funerary stele from tlle Persian period, found at Saqqara. 5.1 The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system. 5.2 Aztec soldiers wearing jaguar skin costumes and carrying obsidian edged swords (after Sahag6n 1950-82, Bk 8, Fig. 78). 5.3 Aztec professional pochteca merchants (after Sahaglll1 1950-82, Bk. 9, Figs. 13 and 3). 5.4 The location of MOl·elOS witllin central Mexico. 5.5 Aztec peasant houses at Capilco, MOl·elOS. 5.6 Ceramic tools used to spin cotton. 5.7 Mean ceramic frequencies through time. 6.1 Capital of Asokan lion-headed column from Sarnath (after Allchin 1995: 255). 6.2 Asokan inscriptions and Mauryan geography. 6.3 Major monastic sites and settlements of tlle Early Historic Deccan. 7.1 The Spanish American empire c. 1700 C E. 8.1 Andean region encompassed by Tawantinsuyu, including the principal Andean subregions mentioned in the text. 8.2 The principal roads of the Inka royal highway system. (Mter Hyslop 1984: flyleaf.) 8.3 Distribution of the colonist artisan settlements described in the text. 8.4 Distribution of the principal royal estates in the Cuzco region, Peru. 8.5 Distribution of the terraced lands in Pachakuti's royal estate at Cusichaca. (Modified fr0111 Kenda1l1994: fig. 3.) 8.6 Distribution of some of the principal state f.1rms, provincial estates, and storage facilities throughout Tawantinsuyu. 9.1 Lower Nubia. 9.2 Upper Nubia. 10.1 The Vijayanagara empire. 10.2 The Tiruvengalanatha temple in a canal irrigated zone of the Vijayanagara imperial capital. 10.3 Locations of the Valangai-Idangai revolt in the Tamil provinces of the Vijayanagara empire. 11.1 The Aztec empire in 1519. 11.2 War captives and slaves were sacrificed at state temples to nourish the sun with human blood. (Sahaglll1 1981, illustration 52; courtesy of the School of American Research and the University of Utah.)

104 106 108 122 136 138 141 147 148 149 153 158 160 165 180 202 211 217 219 222 224 233 236 254 264 270 285 288

11.3 In Tenochtitlan, commoners offer blood-covered sedges and maize gruel (atole) in their houses during the fourth montll of the Aztec solar calendar. (Sahagun 1981: 61 and illustration 13; courtesy of the School of American Research and the University of Utah). 11.4 In Tenochtitlan, the boys of the telpochcalli fight a mock battle with the boys of the call1'lecacs. (Sahaglll1 1981: 149 and illustration 52; courtesy of the School of American Research and the University of Utah.) 11.5 In Tenochtitlan, a war captive without physical blemish was chosen to impersonate the god Tezcatlipoca for a year. (Sahaglll1 1981, illustration 5; courtesy of the School of American Research and the University of Utah.) 11.6 Dancers in the Aztec ruler's palace. (Sahaglll1 1981: 123-4 and Sahaglll1 1979, illustration 69; courtesy of the School of American Research and the University of Utah.) 11.7 In Tepepolco, rituals associated with the sixth month of the solar calendar. (Sahaglll1 1979:59; drawing by M. LaNoue.) 11.8 An Aztec-period ceramic figurine of a woman holding two children. Musee de l'Homme, Paris (drawing by M. LaNoue). 12.1 The Roman empire at the death of Augustus, 14 C E. 13.1 The eastern Roman empire in the early imperial period. 13.2 The Athenian agora in the second century C E. (Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.) 13.3 Reconstruction of the Athenian agora in the second century CE. (Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.) 13.4 Torso of a large marble statue of the emperor Hadrian (117-138 C E) fC:Hlnd in the excavations of the Athenian agora. (Courtesy of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.) 13.5 Reconstructed view of the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. (Courtesy of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies and R. R. R. Smith.) 13.6 Sculpted panel from the Sebastcion at Aphrodisias: the emperor Claudius subdues the province of Britannia. (Col\l'tesy of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies and R. R. R. Smith. ) 13.7 A view oftol\l'ist traffic in modern day Ephesos. (From G. Wiplinger and G. Wlach, Ephesus: 100 Years of Austrian

291

295

300

301

304 306 312 324 335 336

339

340

341

343

Research.) 13.8 Reconstruction of the northeast corner of the Parthenon in Roman times. (© by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Tiibingen/ Germany. ) 14.1 The Qin empire.

344

352

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Xll

List offigures 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

16.5 16.6 16.7

The Assyrian empire, c. 860 BCE. The Assyrian empire, c. 730 B CE. The Assyrian empire, c. 705 BCE. The Assyrian empire, c. 640 BCE. The Carolingian empire, c. 800 CE, including the border regions. Reconstruction of the palace at Ingelheim. The gatehouse at Lorsch. The apse mosaic at Germigny-des-Pres. (Courtesy 00. Feuillie and Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites © CNMHS) Schematic plan of the palace at Aachen. Central and southern Italy, c. 750 CE. Abbot Joshua's "monastic city" at San Vincenzo al Volturno.

375 376 377 378 394

Tables

397 403 405

406 409 410

1.1 Cycles of rule: major dynasties in China and the steppe empires 23 in Mongolia 1.2 Xiongnu visits to the Han court 28 2.1 Casado settlements in Portuguese Asia, 1635 47 2.2 Ecclesiastical orders in Asia, 1635 49 4.1 Regnal years of the kings of Persia 94 4.2 Achaemenid empire: chronology of main political events 95 5.1 Chronology for Postclassic central Mexico 129 5.2 Archaeological criteria for the identification of empires 131 6.1 A short chronology for the Satavahana dynasty 167 8.1 Conventional list ofInka emperors 205 9.1 Comparative chronology: Egypt and Nubia 231 11.1 Commoners' household rituals during the eighteen months 289-90 of the Aztec solar year 11.2 Ritual activities in the calpulcos during the eighteen montl1s of 292 the Aztec solar year 11.3 Activities for telpochcalli youths dlll'ing the eighteen months of 294 the Aztec solar year 11.4 Mock battles dlll'ing the eighteen months of the Aztec solar year 297 11.5 Warriors' activities dlll'ing the eighteen months of the Aztec 298-9 solar year 16.1 Principal rulers mentioned in the text, with their period of rule 393 and "ethnic affiliation"

xiii

Notes on the contributors

American Cultural Genesis in the Early Spanish American Colonies," joumal of Anthropological Research 52 (1996).

Notes on the contributors

Susan E. Alcock is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Classics at the University of Michigan. Her recent major publications include: Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece (1993); Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece (co-editor, 1994); The Early Roman Empire in the East (editor, 1997); Pausanias: n'aJ'el and Memory in Roman Greece (coeditor, 2001). Thomas J. Barfield is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. His recent major publications include: The Perilous F1'ontier: Nomadic Empires and China (1989); Afghanistan: An Atlas of Indigenous Domestic Architectttl'e (co-author, 1991); The Nomadic Alternatil'e (1993); The Dictionary of Anthropology (executive editor). Elizabeth M. Brumfiel is the John S. Ludington Trustees' Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Albion College. Her recent major publications include: Specialization, Exchange and Complex Society (co-editor, 1987); "Breaking and Entering the Eco-system - Gender, Class and Faction Steal the Show," American Anthropologist 94 (1992); Factional Competition and Political Del'elopment in the New World (editor, 1994). Terence N. D'Altroy is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. His recent major publications include: Prol'irlcial Power in the In/la Empire (1992); "Comments: Rc-thinking Complex Prehistoric Societies in Asia," Asian Perspectipes: Special No., Landscapes of Power (1994); "Recent Research in the Central Andes," joumal of Archaeological Research 5 (1997).

xiv

K.'lthleen Deagan is Distinguished Research Curator and Joint Protessor of Anthropology and History at the University of Florida. Her recent major publications include: Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies (1988); Puel'to Real: The Archaeology of a Sixteenth Century Spanish Town in Hispaniola (1995); "From Contact to Criollo: The Archaeology of Spanish Colonization in Hispaniola," Proceedings of the British Academy 81 (1995); "Colonial Transtormations: Euro-

AInelie Kuhrt is Professor of AIlCient History at University College London. Her recent major publications include: Achaemenid History 2-4, 6, 8 (co-editor, 1987-94); Hellenism in the East (co-author, 1987); From Samarkand to Sardis: A New Approach to Seleucid History (co-author, 1993); The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330BC(1995). Mario Liverani is Professor in the History of the Ancient Near East at the University of Rome. His recent major publications include: Antico Oriente. Storia economia societa (1988); Prestige and Interest. International Relations in the Near East, ca. 1600-1100 BC (1990); Studies in the Annals ofAshumasirpal II (1992); AflIlad, the First World Empire (editor, 1993); Neo-Assyrian Geography (editor, 1995). Sabine G. MacCormack is the Mary AIm and Charles R. Walgreen Professor for the Study of Human Understanding, Professor of Classical Studies, and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Her recent major publications include: Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity ( 1981); Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991); The Shadows of Poetry: Vet;gil in the Mind of Augustine (1998). John MOI'eland is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His recent major publications include: "Integration and Social Reproduction in the Carolingian Empire," World Archaeology 23 (co-author, 1992); "The Middle Ages: Theory and Post-modernism," Acta Al'chaeologica 68 (1997); "The World(s) of the Cross," World Archaeology 31 (1999). Robert MOI'kot is an independent scholar. His recent major publications include: CentU1'ies of Darkness (co-author, 1991); The Blaclz Pharaoh: Egypt's Nubian Rulers (2000). Kathleen D. Morrison is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her recent major publications include: "Dimensions of Imperial Control: The Vijayanagara Capital," American Anthropologist 97 (co-author, 1995); Fields of Victory: Vijayanagara and the Course of Intensification (1995, repr. 2000); "Typological Schemes and Agricultural Change: Beyond Boserup in South India," Current Anthropology 37 (1996); "Inscriptions as Artifacts: Precolonial South India and the Analysis of Texts," jottmal of Archaeological Method and Theory 3 (co-author, 1997). Katharina Schreiber is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent major publications include: "Conquest and

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Notes on the contributors Consolidation: A Comparison of the Wari and Inka Occupations of a Highland Peruvian Valley," American Antiquity 52 (1987); Wari Imperialism in Middle Horizon Peru (1992); "The Puquios of Nasca," Latin American Antiquity 6 (1995 ).

Preface Carla M. Sinopoli is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Curator, Museum of Anthropology, at the University of Michigan. Her recent major publications include: Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics (1991); Pots and Palaces: The Earthenware Ceramics of the Nobleman's Quarter of Vijayanagara (1993); "The Archaeology of Empires," Annual ReJlielll of Anthropology 23 (1994); "From the Lion Throne: Political and Social Dynamics of the Vijayanagara Empire," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 43 (2000). Michael E. Smith is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Albany, State University of New York. His recent major publications include: Archaeological Research at Aztec-Period Rural Sites in Morelos, Mexico, I: Excavations and Architecture (1992); Economies and Polities in the Aztec Realm (co-editor, 1994); Aztec Imperial Strategies (co-author, 1996); The Aztecs (1996). Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Directeur d'etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His recent major publications include: The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (1990); Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-Period Tamilnadu (co-author, 1992); The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700 (1993); The Career of Vas co da Gama (1997); The Mughal State, 1526-1750 (co-editor, 1997). Greg Woolfis Professor of Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. His recent major publications include: Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (coeditor, 1994); "Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity and the Civilizing Process in the Roman East," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994); "Monumental Writing and the Expansion of Roman Society in the Early Empire," Journal of Roman Archaeology 86 (1996); Becoming Roman: the Origins of Provincial CiJlilization in Gaul (1998). Robin D. S. Yates is Professor of East Asian Studies at McGill University. His recent major publications include: Science and CiJlilisation in China, vo!. V.6 (co-author, 1994); Fhle Lost Classics: Tao, Huang-Lao and Tin-Tang in Han China (1997); "Early China" in War and Society in the Ancient and Mediepal Worlds: Asia, the Mediterranean, Europe and Mesoamerica (1999).

Carla M. Sinopoli and Terence N. D'Altroy

Like many collaborative scholarly works, this project had its origins in a bar. At the 1994 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, three of us (Morrison, D'Altroy, and Sinopoli) discussed our longstanding interests in the comparative study of empires; Susan Alcock joined the discussion a few months later during the 1995 meetings of the Society for American Archaeology. We concurred that the time was right to organize a conference that would bring together archaeologists, classicists, cultural anthropologists, and historians to speak to and with each other about research on specific empires and about more general issues relevant to the comparative study of empire and imperialism. And like many projects conceived in bars, this one has taken a while to come to a head. This volume is the outgrowth of the conference "Imperial Designs: Comparative Dynamics of Early Empires," held in Mijas, Spain in the autumn of 1997 and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research as their International Symposium #122. It contains revised versions of all seventeen papers presented at the conference, almost all of them substantially altered as a result of six days of formal and informal discussions. The geographic and temporal range of the papers is deliberately broad, as are the intellectual perspectives of their authors. The papers explore polities from both the Old and New Worlds and span early prehistoric empires through later historic empires, including the problematic early modern period and the first century of European intercontinental imperial expansion. We also include cases that in some definitions would be classed as non-imperial or at best marginal to better-known "classic" imperial states (Barfield's "shadow empires"). Our goal was not to develop a single unified intellectual viewpoint, nor to embrace a shared terminology or advocate a single methodology (to the disappointment of some conference participants). Indeed, contributors disagreed on several important issues, even some as essential as definitions of empire, appropriate or useful scales of comparison, and the utility of working with formal models. Several authors have explicitly presented their definitions of empire in their papers, and their differing perspectives will be readily apparent. For the most part however, disagreements tended to emerge around the margins of issues ratller than on core concepts, often reflecting the diverse disciplinary perspectives of the

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Preface

Preface contributors. In particular, individual archaeologists were on occasion suspicious of interpretations deeply dependent on texts, while some historians were skeptical of accounts heavily reliant on archaeological data. From the Old World, the chapters by A1cock and Woolf address the Roman empire - arguably the paradigmatic example from which many traditional understandings of empire derive. Rome's significance to later imperial states and to general understandings of imperial societies is also considered in a number of chapters, especially by MOl'e1and in his discussion of the medieval European Carolingians. Middle Eastern chapters include MOl'kot on Egypt and Nubia, Liverani on the Assyrians, and Kuhrt on the Achaemenids. Asia is considered by Yates on Qin China, Barfield on Central Asia, Morrison on Vijayanagara, India, Sinopoli on Satavahana India, and Subrahmanyam on the Portuguese Estado da india. New World examples include Brumfiel and Smith on the Aztecs, Schreiber on the Andean Wari empire and D'A1troy on the Inkas. Deagan considers the Spanish empire in the Caribbean and North America and MacCormack addresses the Spanish empire in Peru and Spanish responses to the Inka, including how these were mediated by their understandings of Rome. While the cases discussed here form a broad list, they are far from encyclopedic - either in the range of empires considered or in how each author examines the particular period and polity of interest. We regret that two invited participants had to withdraw from the conference rather late in the day - and thus the Ottoman empire and early Islamic empires of the Middle East were left uncovered. African and Southeast Asian empires are also not represented. While the editors discussed including additional authors who had not participated in the conference in this volume, we ultimately decided against this - both because we hoped that discussions at the conference would figure in authors' revisions of their papers and because, as is apparent, this already had the makings of a massive publication. Despite these acknowledged gaps, the geographical and temporal ranges represented in this volume extend tar beyond any previous comparative study. The volume is also not encyclopedic in terms of the thematic coverage in individual chapters. That is, while all authors have sought to provide non-specialist readers with sufficient background to follow their general arguments, no contribution is intended as a comprehensive historical essay. Instead, each author addresses particular themes, l1'om particular perspectives. The volume bibliography can guide interested readers to numerous additional sources on each case study. If the intention was never to create "the big book of empires," this volume and the conference it was based upon did aim to break down some predetermined and arbitrary boundaries, both disciplinary and temporal. While the broad scholarly mix of the contributors is noteworthy, perhaps most striking is how the cases addressed transcend conventional disciplinary barriers between anthropology and classical studies (as well as other regional or scholarly traditions). This is perhaps most evident in the attention paid to the historic Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East (Rome, the Carolingians, the Achaemenids), as well as to historic South Asia (Satavahana, Vijayanagara). It is relatively rare for

such imperial structures to be considered side-by-side with more conventional "anthropological" case studies: usually owing to misconceptions on all sides about what they could offer to, or gain from, comparative analysis. Yet this volume clearly reveals just what a mistake it would have been to disregard or discount these particular imperial systems, and we hope that their inclusion in future collections such as this will be less remarkable. A second barrier to be challenged was chronological. While our primary temporal focus is on empires that are traditionally glossed as "early" (although many are in fact temporally quite late), several of the papers push the envelope into European modernity (e.g., Deagan, Subrahmanyam, MacCol'lnack). In part, this emphasis arises from the research interests of the editors; the primary research focus of three of us lies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries C E (D'A1troy on the Inka, and Morrison and Sinopoli on Vijayanagara). However, for Sinopoli and Morrison in particular, our interests in bridging the ancient-modern divide lay in our skepticism concerning the intellectual legitimacy of this divide. This is particularly the case for the early modern period considered here, for which arguments of the uniqueness of Europe's trajectory are often based on what Europe eventually became in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rather than what its components were in the preceding 200 years. It is fair to note, however, that neither Deagan nor Subrahmanyam entirely shared our misgivings, and wished to retain a special place for their cases or - for Subrahmanyam - to limit comparison to more historically and geographically proximate examples.

THEMATIC ORGANIZATION The volume's seventeen chapters are organized into five thematic sections, each of which is briefly introduced by one or two of the editors. These themes largely structured the design of the conterence itself. The groupings are rather different from our original conception of the symposium. Initially, wc had defined four very broad sets of issues and asked authors to address one or two. These were, somewhat prosaically: (1) the vertical and horizontal integration of empires (the political), (2) the social context of imperial development, (3) the ideological sphere, and (4) imperial economies. Introductory discussions of these tour themes were presented in a position paper authored by the tour conterence organizers and distributed in advance to the participants, with requests that their papers address particular themes or topics. As the papers came in and we met to determine the final organization of the conference, it became clear that many of the authors had, tortunately, not been particularly obedient to our requests. The resultant papers were ultimately tar more interesting than our rather milquetoast (non)position paper (perhaps an inevitable result of trying to produce something that could satisfY four cooperative but not necessarily agreeing co-authors - ultimately dissatisfYing to all). It also was apparent that the approaches taken by various authors tended to tall into

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Preface both anticipated and unanticipated groupings and it is these groupings that we identified and used to structure the conference and this volume. We therefore chose not to include either our initial or a revised position paper, but instead opted to write shorter introductions that layout major issues relevant to each theme. These preambles draw heavily on our recollections of broader discussions that took place in Mijas. The five themes that structure this volume are to a considerable extent organizational devices and each of the chapters addresses a range of issues that extend beyond the individual group it is placed in. Nonetheless, it is our hope that the juxtaposition of papers in these groupings will permit the exploration of structural commonalities and differences among a broad array of cases. We have deliberately mixed and matched papers in each section to include a range of historical cases. That is, given our goals and broad commitment to comparativism, we chose not to group papers by culture area or period, although some readers may choose to read them in that order. Two of the themes - "Imperial integration and imperial subjects" and "Imperial ideologies" - are relatively straightforward and require no additional discussion beyond their respective section introductions. The first grouping of papers into "Sources, approaches, definitions" may, however, seem a bit more opaque. Here we include chapters that address very different and widely variable historical cases. The Wari polity discussed by Schreiber is the only empire considered in this volume where historical written sources (internal or external) are nonexistent and scholars must rely solely on archaeological evidence. It also is the case that provoked the greatest skepticism among conference participants. More explicitly than any other contributor (though see also Smith, chapter 5), Schrei ber explores the nature and particular challenges of archaeological evidence and interpretation for the study of early empires. Kuhrt's discussion of the Achaemenid, or Persian, empire addresses a case where considerable archaeological material exists, but where surprisingly little systematic archaeological research has occurred. Thus her primary sources are historical and she presents a detailed discussion of the use of such sources, their limitations, and their impact on our interpretations. Bat·field and Subrahmanyam each address polities that do not conform to many traditional understandings of empire - the nomad empires of the Eurasian steppe, and the maritime empire of the Portuguese, characterized by extraordinary geographic range, but minimal territorial control. Their papers were placed in this section to open up broader considerations of what we mean by empire, and indeed whether the kinds of comparison attempted in this volume are worthwhile across such an extensive frame. The section entitled "Empires in a wider world" contains three chapters that suggest that, in order to understand particular empires, we often need to look beyond imperial boundaries to consider their broader political, economic, and social contexts. This may be an obvious lesson, but the challenges it presents are still daunting, especially for those of us who feel that the particular empire that we study is more tllan enough to take on as a research topic. Smith addresses the Aztec

Preface empire in the context of me Mesoamerican world system; Sinopoli considers the South Asian Satavahana empire in the context of broader subcontinental political, economic, and ideological developments, and Deagan addresses tile enormously expanded world created by Spanish imperial movement into tile Americas. The volume's final section, "The afterlife of empires," considers a tlleme that runs tllrough a number of chapters throughout the volume. Tllis is the emphasis on history - both in terms of the role of historical knowledge in tile nature and construction of individual empires and in questions of historiography and tile contextualization of historical understandings. The chapters by Liverani, MOl·eland, and MacCormack consider how historical knowledge was constructed and the roles such knowledge plays in particular imperial contexts (Assyrian, Carolingian, and sixteenth-century Spanish, respectively) in constructing imperial identities, understanding imperialllistories, or understanding "otllers," whetller subject peoples or competing polities. Liverani approaches these issues both in the context of Assyrian understandings and in contemporary historical interpretations of the Assyrian collapse. Throughout the conference, he repeatedly reminded us that we needed to take into account our own academic and historiographic contexts. Beyond the tluee chapters grouped in tile "Afterlife" section, several others explore historical knowledge. Alcock addresses history and memory in her discussion of memory theaters in Roman Greece, and Sinopoli considers Satavahana historical knowledge in Early Historic India. D'Altroy draws attention to the interplay between the control of history and political power, and Yates and Woolf also touch on similar concerns. In most of these cases, the founders of empires had considerable knowledge of earlier polities and of subject areas and peoples and used that knowledge in the construction and legitimation of their positions and polities. Deagan's discussion presents a strikingly different case of imperial conquest and consolidation, in which, at least in the initial stages of Spanish expansion in the New World, knowledge (historical or otherwise) of su bject populations was non -existent. While these papers and themes encompass a broad array ofissues and evidence, it is also worth briefly considering some important topics that are not addressed in the volume. It is perhaps most striking that none of the authors chose to discuss military practices or strategies, given how key these are to the formation of all of the empires considered. Brumfiel does consider elite ideologies of militarism, and several other chapters briefly touch on the topic, but no autllOr took on military strategy, tactics, or logistics as a core topic. The lack of emphasis on militarism is certainly in part a function of the group of individuals invited to participate in the conference. But we think it also reflects some disciplinary (and perhaps global political) trends - of increasing concerns with ideological dimensions of complex societies and of increasing interest in the broader array of noncoercive (or, perhaps, more su btly coercive) mechanisms involved in imperial formation and consolidation. An additional issue of balance was also discussed at the conference, but ultimately received only limited coverage in the published chapters. It concerns the

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Preface perennial disparity in scholarly emphasis between the interests and activities of elite members of society and the vast majority of the peoples brought under imperial sway. Discussions of various non-elites and/or comparisons between the representations of the upper echelons of society and life among the broader populace do figure prominently in chapters by Brumfiel, Deagan, Morrison, and Smitll (see also Yates), but are rare in other contributions. In part, this differential emphasis derives from the relatively brief length of the contributions here and the specific research questions posed within tllem. However, tile frequent commitment of historically and archaeologically based research on empires to tile lives, activities, and constructions of the powerful is also a contributing factor, despite recent trends to tile contrary. The editors are well aware that many of tile chapters here do not redress tile existing imbalance, but anticipate tllat future studies of tllese and other empires will take us deeper into tile quotidian.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The "Imperial Designs" conference was sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and we owe many debts to the foundation and particularly to its tllen president, Sydel Silverman. The Foundation's International Symposium program has a long and prestigious history within antl1l"opology, and we were happy to be the beneficiaries of experience gained in the previous 121 international symposia. Pre-conference meetings in New York with Sydel and with Laurie Obbink helped us clarify our thoughts and assured that we arrived in Spain ready to roll, and we greatly appreciate their insights and experience. In Spain and New York we particularly acknowledge the organizational skills and good humor of Laurie Obbink and Mark Mahoney for making sure everything ran smoothly (and Spanish wine flowed freely). Frances Hayashida was another valued participant in the conference, serving as monitor and note taker, as well as commentator. And of course, our deepest thanks to all of the conference participants who together made this a productive, informative, and highly pleasurable gathering. We also thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for post-conference financial support that has greatly helped in the preparation of this volume. Peter Johansen has been invaluable in the preparation of the volume, with the unenviable tasks of getting all of the papers into a uniform format, preparing and checking the compiled bibliography, and preparing computer graphics. He has our deepest gratitude. Graciela Cabana picked up with the bibliography where Peter left off, and her careful proofing was of immeasurable assistance. We also thank Bryan Burns and K<\y Clahassey for additional help with the maps and cover art. Two anonymous reviewers from Cambridge University Press provided helpful comments on the conference papers, and suggestions for the ultimate organization of this work. Thanks also to Jessica Kuper and Cambridge University Press for their support in the production of this volume.

PART I SOURCES, APPROACHES, DEFINITIONS Kathleen D. Morrison

Amid the welter of vague political abstraction to lay onc's finger accurately on any "ism" so as to pin down and mark it out by definition seems impossible. Where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not onl}, following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort, it is idle to demand the same rigor as is expected in the natural sciences. A certain broad consistenC}' in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. (Hobson 1965 [1905]: 3)

In attempting to come to terms with the structure and dynamics ofimperial politics, the contributors in this volume arc hardly pioneers. Interest in empires is as old as empires themselves; onc could cite a vast literary and scholarly corpus on the genesis, operation, and decline of imperial politics, encompassing a staggering degree of variability in approaches, sources, and conclusions. Why this enduring interest? Part of it may have to do with the great impact empires have had on the world and on the lived reality of many artists and scholars who were participants in imperial politics, many of them dependent on state support or patronage. However, tracing the history of fascination with subjects imperial is complicated considerably by the shifting terrain of the concept itself.

THE CONCEPT OF EMPIRE In scholarship coming from the European tradition, ideas of and about onc empire - Rome - have contributed definitions and constituted foils for all

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Kathleen D. Morrison subsequent discussion of the concept of empire. It is thus worth considering that heritage and its intellectual legacy, as several chapters in this volume do (Alcock, MacCormack, Moreland, Woolf). In so doing, we acknowledge that western scholarship grew up around culturally and historically specific notions of imperialism and that these intellectual legacies have framed our enquiry in particular ways. However, to acknowledge the ways in which historical experiences of European and Mediterranean empires have set the terms for inquiry is not to suggest that our perspectives are entirely historically determined. Indeed, we adopt a more anthropological view, that underpins our focus on comparison and that suggests that our perspectives can be extended beyond this received historiography through the careful study of other imperialisms and through the evidential interplay of diverse source material - texts, art and architecture, artifacts, and landscape modification on local and regional scales. The word "empire" itself derives from the Roman imperium with its root sense of order and command (Pagden 1995: 14). Tracing the semantic history of the notion of empire, Pagden isolates three basic European understandings that emerged over the last two millennia. The first meaning invokes a basic sense of authority or rule. As he explains: In the first instance, the Latin term "empire," imperium, described the sphere of executive authority possessed by the Roman magistrates, and like everything in the Roman state it had marked sacral overtones, which would survive well into the modern period. It was frequently employed, particularly in the various humanistic discourses of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which borrowed tlleir etymologies from Cicero, in tlle somewhat indeterminate sense which would later be captured by tlle word "sovereignty." The first sentence of Machiavelli's The Prince, for instance, begins: "All the states and dominions which have had and have empire over men." (Pagden 1995: 12) Thus, definitions of empire that invoke sovereignty as a basic feature (see contributions by Barfield, Subrahmanyam, Schreiber, this volume) bring us back again to this sense of the term, a curiously recursive semantic dilemma. Obviously, it is easy to invoke a kind of chicken-and-egg logic in this case, but my point here is simply to highlight the changing semantic baggage of the term empire and the difficulty of transforming a historically and culturally contingent term into a broader analytical category. The second sense in which the term empire has been used historically is more circumscribed and less abstract, relating to the kind of "non-subordinate power exercised within what the Aristoteleans called a 'perfect community'" (Pagden 1995: 12) - in a word, a state. This notion of empire clearly builds upon the first meaning while confining it to the political container we shall come to expect in the smdy of empires. Thus, even states without significant external territorial ambitions could and did refer to themselves as empires without making a clear distinction between "internal" political domination I and "external" conquest and dominion. By the nineteenth century, however, the common definition of empire had

Part I Sources, approaches, definitions stabilized at the contemporary understanding of an expansive polity incorporating multiple states (or more broadly, incorporating significant internal diversity). Again, Pagden (1995: 13-14) explains: Already by tlle first century C E, however, tlle term had also acquired sometlling of its more familiar modern meaJling. The Roman llistorian Sallust uses lie phrase Imperium romamntl ... to describe the geograpllical extent and tlle authority of tlle Roman people. And when Tacitlls spoke of tlle Roman world as an "immense body of empire" (immmsum imperii corpus) he was describing precisely tlle kind of political, and cultural, lIIlity created out of a diversity of different states widely separated in space, wllich Edmund Burke speaking in 1775 of tlle Spanish and British empires called "extensive and detached empire." Imperium, in tllis sense, bound together different and formerly independent or "perfect" states. These various understandings of the term "empire" managed to coexist, even if the third sense has come to dominate more recently. It is worth noting here that these first two senses, while having considerable historical resonance even now, are also of immediate and critical importance for the interpretation of documentary sources that employ such varied and shifting understandings - sources that informed tlle study of all New World empires until tlle nineteenth century, for example.

COMPARATIVE DYNAMICS OF EARLY EMPIRES The project of this volume is explicitly comparative. While we acknowledge the specificity of each case as well as the contingencies of history, we also suggest that there is something to be gained by juxtaposing consideration of different empires, perhaps even different imperialisms, widely separated in space and time. The project of comparison immediately raises the question of what, exactly, is being compared, bringing us back to the problem of definition. Without doubt, discussions of definitions were among the most divisive topics of the conference that produced this volume. One easy way out of this morass is to employ what we may call the "pornography definition" of empires - I can't say what they are, but I know one when I see one. In this section we deliberately include what may be seen as "marginal" cases of empires, the steppe polities described by Bat·field and the Portuguese seaborne empire described by Subrahmanyam, as well as cases that engender less ambiguity about their ontological "status" as empires. What, then, is an empire and where/how shall we draw boundaries between empires and mere states, or empires and other forms oflarge-scale expansion and incorporation? In this section, Bat·field, Schreiber, and Subrahmanyam all venture definitions of empire. Both Barfield and Schreiber adopt a kind of diagnostic approach, listing attributes of the archetype - or, in Barfield's analysis, of the many subtypes. Subrahmanyam's definition is significantly leaner, conforming most closely to the third historical definition described by Pagden, above. Considering our task to be the definition of the category empire might,

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Kathlem D. Morrison however, unduly restrict us. Phrasing the problem in this way tempts us to a misplaced concreteness, to a belief that the analytical category "empire" is somehow a "tiling" witll properties - a living, breatlling entity. In a sense, what is really critical is not the typological class that we might define, but the logic with which we dissect complex phenomena in the world to create such classifications. Why might sovereignty, for example, be important? Like "empire," sovereignty is not a natural category. It can be profitably seen not so much as a "property" of states, but as a kind of argument about one person or group's right to hold power over anotller. In his chapter in this volume, Yates explains that the, as he puts it, Chinese "imperial mytll" developed in tile Qin period identified empire not in terms of the sovereignty of a ruling people, as did the Romans (Woolf, this volume), but in terms of the person of tile emperor and his lineage. South Asian empires, too, diverge from this Roman-derived expectation. On the other hand, concerns about legitimacy loom large in both the Chinese and South Asian cases, concerns that are shared by participants in and observers of empires such as the Roman one, who work out the issue in very different ways. What really drives our study of empires, then, is this working out of how, why, when, and where the processes of empire - the establishment of sovereignty here by way of example - are effected or fail. The definitional issues raised above are concerned primarily with the notion of empire as a political form or type, a kind of super-state, juxtaposing empire, if only implicitly, against politics that are not empires. However, another way of viewing the problem, one that partakes of some of the wariness of misplaced concreteness raised in the previous paragraph, is to consider empires not in relation to an abstract array of political or evolutionary types, but in terms of their own cultural context. Here we come to another vexed definitional debate; what, then constitutes the empire "itself"? What are its elements? Where does the state begin and end; what are the boundaries between the state and the society in which it is embedded? It is one kind of argument to ask "were the Carolingians really an empire?" and quite another to attempt to define the contours of the Carolingian state apparatus, as MOl'eland does (this volume), to consider the practice of the state itself, and its impact on others who, in this exercise, must be considered in some sense to be not-the-state-itself: A Weberian definition of states as organizations claiming a monopoly on legitimate force within a given territory or of empires as special kinds of states does not, as Mitchell (1991: 82) notes, "tell us how the actual contours of this amorphous organization are to be drawn." Mitchell goes on to describe the problem of analytically isolating the state from its sociocultural matrix (society in his terms) as a key issue in defining the state concept and as a central debate in twentieth-century political science. Attempts to extinguish the state concept, by replacing it for example with the concept of a political s),stem, always founder on this problem of boundary definition. The state, somehow, manages to maintain a salience in actual practice that defies attempts to define it away. Mitchell (1991: 78) proposes, tllen that:

Part I Sources, approaches, definitions the elusiveness of the state-society boundary needs to be taken seriously, not as a problem of conceptual precision but as a clue to the nature of the phenomenon. Rather than searching for a definition that will fix the boundary, we need to examine the detailed political processes through which the uncertain yet powerful distinction between state and society is produced. This distinction must be taken as the boundary not between two discrete entities, but as a line drawn internally within the network ofinstitutional mechanisms through which a social and political order is maintained.

The processes tllat fix the precise location of this line, an internal distinction appearing as an external boundary, are what make the state seem to be a coherent, autonomous actor, and tllese processes warrant more detailed analytical attention. This is not to say that tlle state is thus somehow not "real" (Mitchell 1991: 81-2). Rather, The point that the state's boundary never marks a real exterior can suggest why it seems so often elusive and unstable. But this does not mean that line is illusory. On the contrary ... producing and maintaining the distinction between state and society is itself a mechanism that generates resources of power. (Mitchell1991: 90)

What Mitchell does not discuss but which nevertheless seems probable is that tllis "line drawn internally" will vary in both its character and its location between different polities. A comparative approach may be one of the best possibilities for addressing the processes that shape the apparent contours of any polity. Differences between the broad outlines of imperial polities, then, need not be the rocks upon which definitions founder, but instead may constitute the very sources of understanding the processes that set up such polities as seemingly independent objects or categories in themselves. As Brumfiel and others in this volume remind us, even the elite echelons of imperial society may be separated by basic differences ofinterest, culture, and capability - the imperial state is probably always a finely balanced (or unbalanced) set of compromises and concerns that work together to constitute what may be in sum seen as a polity. Ifwe shift concern from definition per se to the kinds of processes that act and interact to form historical empires, a larger range of subject material becomes germane to our analysis. Some of this larger field of enquiry, into the kinds ofideological justifications and apparatuses set up by and about imperial politics, the responses to and ramifications of imperial expansion on a range of subject people, are addressed in this volume in the sections on "imperial ideologies" and "imperial subjects. " Even if we cannot agree on what precisely empires are, still, paradoxically we can ask: What kinds of shapes do what we call empires assume? How do they behave? How, when, and why do they emerge, expand, f.111 apart and disappear? How do they view and represent themselves and others? How, why, and by whom are they remembered? How are those brought into imperial polities affected and how do they shape its trajectory? Which ofthese processes recur and

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Kathleen D. Morrison

which seem to be unique? These are the kinds of questions that animate the chapters in this volume: questions of comparison in a dynamic rather than typological mode, questions that suggest to us that the comparative project is valuable indeed. Thus, it seems to be the case that we can disagree on actual definitions, even on the very need for close definition, and still be able to discuss imperial processes and histories to our mutual benefit.

TRACES OF THE PAST: WAYS OF CREATING HISTORY In this section and indeed this entire volume, we are concerned with empires that, while remembered, are no longer extant. How may we come to know this past? It seems that to some extent our views - and indeed our definitions - reflect the sources of information available. The study of past empires employs many diverse kinds of sources: texts of a very large variety; archaeological remains (settlements, monuments, houses, artifacts - both quotidian and rarified, evidence oflandscape modification); representations in art and architecture; even tl1e evidence of human bodies. Obviously, the broad range of potential information and tl1e proliferation of specialist knowledge require interdisciplinary cooperation. Very often, favored sources are closely linked with disciplinary training, but it is also, and more insidiously, true that different disciplinary traditions tend toward the acceptance of different kinds of explanations altogether. Most of the authors in this volume attempt to overcome these limits to some degree through engagement with multiple sources of information and a broad scholarly gaze, but it will always be worthwhile to closely interrogate not only the conclusions drawn from a body of evidence, but also the very selection of that corpus of information. How inferences about the past are made is, of course, a central preoccupation of history, archaeology, and historical anthropology, among other disciplines, and is far too broad a topic to consider here. In the context of the chapters in this section, however, I point to a few specific areas that reflect differences in disciplinary and topical focus. In her chapter on the Wari empire, Schreiber concentrates on the spatial and temporal distribution of objects of a particular, she argues imperial, style. These objects, chiefly ceramics and architecture, are of interest not only for their potential functions in Wari society (serving, cooking, or storage vessels; warehouses, administrative offices, and barracks), but even more so as markers of Wari imperialism. The latter, as she readily agrees, is difficult to pin down precisely, although she does argue for a shift from more political to more economic forms of domination. Schreiber's analysis is, of necessity, intimately material, explicitly spatial, and based on chains of inference about association (terraces near a settlement, ceramics in a temple, an iconographic depiction in a distant locale). The very natme of the material record or perhaps just the training of archaeologists makes them (us) generally comfortable with and knowledgeable about the material world and its challenges, and accustomed to a constant scalar

Part I Sources, approaches, definitions

disjunction between regional-scale information and minute, household-scale patterns of data. Archaeological prejudices and possibilities also vary, however, by region. In areas Witll long traditions of research, archaeologists may have available minute detail on diet, agriculture, health patterns, production, household organization and variability, or tlley may have primarily monumental architecture and ceramic chronologies to work with. Different times and places also have divergent traditions of the ways in which text-based and archaeological data are compared and generated. In Schreiber's case, tllere are no texts of any sort and her analysis tlms omits tile genealogical accounts, for example, that frame Kuhrt's exegesis of Achaemenid history. In most of the otller chapters in this volume, texts and material culture constitute two, if not the two, primary sources of information; but tile balance in individual chapters varies significantly. If archaeological data and archaeological traditions vary widely, then so too do both documentary records and historical approaches. The Inka, for example, are known only from texts of the conquering Spanish, as well as from archaeological and art historical information (D'AJtroy, MacCormack, this volume). The Chinese empire, by contrast, has copious internal textual information (Yates, this volume), tllis information contrasting further with that available for many time periods in South Asia where historical texts, though abundant, are conventionalized in different kinds of ways (Morrison, Sinopoli, this volume). Even witlun a particular region, time, and research tradition, texts may vary in the degree to which they represent elite viewpoints and the perspectives of particular ethnic and cultural groups in an empire. Research traditions also play a role here. In the South Indian Vijayanagara empire, the focus on scholarship of the Tamil region and in the Tamil language has led to a situation in which an important, but distant province of the empire was better understood than the heartland of the empire itself. Clearly, the history of research and the historiography of our scholarship on empires play a powerful role in how we approach them. Finally, we can point to a concern shared by historians, archaeologists, art historians, and all others who study empires, and this is the problem of scale. Empires, as Greg Woolf remarked at the conference, are both too big to study and too small to study. As we consider in the section "Empires in a wider world," it is necessary to look beyond political boundaries, even if this means in some cases that om area of study is the entire world. Archaeologists typically acquire very rich detail on a scale that is spatially very intimate yet temporally blurry. Extending archaeological understandings across very large spatial scales moves beyond anyone scholar's own fieldwork; the masses of local data to be assimilated make supra-regional analysis on the basis of archaeological evidence difficult, though of course t:1r from impossible. Text-based analysis is also critically dependent on the spatial, temporal, and social scale of the texts themselves, as well as on work locating, transcribing, translating, and making texts available (publication, archives, libraries). Kuhrt mentions, for example, the critically important Elamite texts from Persepolis, the

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majority of which still sit in a museum, awaiting analysis. Or again, in the case of the Vijayanagara empire, textual scholarship focused on inscriptions has relied disproportionately on temple inscriptions, not because of deficient scholarship, but because temples were where epigraphers and archaeologists looked for inscriptions and consequently what was primarily available to historians. When new strategies of fieldwork are followed, however, bOtll tile shape and tile content of the historical record look quite different (Morrison and Lycett 1997). Here the scalar problems of dealing with tens of tllOusands of texts are similar to those in archaeology where, for example, literally millions of artifacts may be involved. It is easy to overdraw bOtll tile differences and tile difficulties of working Witll diverse data sets. In most cases, tile contributors to tllis volume bridge tllese differences in tlleir own work and an eclectic approach may be tile rule ratller tllan tile exception.

THE POLITICS OF ANALYSIS IN THE ANALYSIS OF POLITICS As Hobson suggests (above), tile very notion of what constitutes imperialism is subject to political agendas. As we discuss in tile section on the "afterlife" of empires, tile selection of which polities come to be remembered and invoked as exemplary, and hOJII they are remembered, is also critically responsive to contemporary concerns. In some sense, then, empires never die - they are just reinvoked, reinvented, and recalled over and over again. The potential rewards of this process for rulers and politicians who may partake of past glories and legitimacies seem evident. Analytical interest in empires, however, also operates in an interested context to some degree. Some scholarly analyses of empires are or seem to be overtly utilitarian, providing object lessons from the successes and failures of the past, veritable cookbooks for imperialism. Fredrick Danver's (1894) two-volume study of the Portuguese overseas empire, for example, clearly drew out lessons for British rule in India from the "mistakes" of the Portuguese - including Catholicism and intermarriage with local people. Indeed, at particular points in time, British scholarship on the Portuguese in India was strikingly interested in issues such as when and how the Portuguese lost the right to rule, or whether they ever had it: issues suspiciously germane to contemporaneous self-justification for British rule over those very same territories. Other scholarship has worked quite explicitly to condemn the whole imperial enterprise, Wittfogel's (1957) classic study of despotism as a protest against fascism being one example, Hobson's (1965 [1905]) critique of imperialism another. Of course, not all study of empires follows such an explicit political agenda. In putting together a conference and volume on empires we are certainly making a point about the historical and analytical importance of empires and the value of studying them - or, as I would prefer, about the importance of understanding the process and practices of imperialism, the hows and whys of empire-building,

Part I Sources, approaches, definitions

expansion, legitimation, consolidation, and decay. At least part of this value lies in understanding the ways in which the ideologies, operations, and structures of imperial power work and affect people on the ground. Another part of this value is situated in developing a more nuanced theoretical understanding of imperial polities and processes; it is our goal in tllis volume to work, with all means possible, toward bOtll tllese ends.

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Impcrial statc formation a/Oll!! tbe Chi1JeJc-No1Jtad jhmtiel'

1

The shadow' en1pires: in1perial state forn1ation along the Chinese-N on1ad frontier

LAKE

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Thomas J, Barficld

0S

KWARAZAM

10

The large empires periodically established by the pastoral nomads of the Eurasian steppe present significant problems to students of imperial organization, With economics based on a mobile f(JI'Il1 of animal husbandry, small and scattered populations, and a tribal social organization, these horse-riding peoples stood in stark contrast to lleighboring sedentary civilizations, Their relatively unsophisticated technology and lack of urban centers made them poor candidates f(ll' achieving state level organization, let alone imperial hegemony, Yet beginning in the third century BC E along China's northern fj'ontier, the nomads nevertheless managed to create a series of empires that controlled immense territories under the rule of powerful long-lived dynasties, Over a period of more than 2000 years they terrorized, and periodically conquered, rival states in northern China, Central Asia, Iran, and eastem Europe (Fig, l.1), Empires established by nomads in Mongolia were distinctive "shadow empires" that arose as secondary phenomena in response to imperial expansion by the Chinese, Their stability depended on extorting vast amounts of wealth (,'om China through pillage, tribute payments, border trade, and international reexport of luxury goods not by taxing steppe nomads, When China was centralized and powerful, so were nomadic empires; when China collapsed into political anarchy and economic depression, so did the unif1ed steppe politics that had prospered by its extortion, Evidence ()r this pattern comes f,'om both sides of the (I'ontier and is well documented because ancient and medieval Chinese historians Id) detailed records of their dealings with the nomads north of the Great Wall. Though these records arc o(ten very Sinocentric, they include contentious court debates about China's nomad policies, accounts of military expeditions (often tales of disasters ), reports of fi'ontier off1cials, diplomatic correspondence, treaties with the nomads, and details about trade and other economic relations, They have slll'vived largely because each new dynasty in China commissioned an official history of its predecessor as evidence of its own merit, producing an almost continuous record of China's dealings with its nomadic neighbors, Each of these works f()lIowed a basic pattern of composition established by the Shi ji, China's first great history of the Qin and Former Han dynasties authored by Sima Qian in the first century

KIZIL KUM

DESERT Bukhara

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LAKE BALKASH III River


Uighurs Turks

TIEN S AN FERGANA MOUNTAINS

.SOGDIA~

NAN SHAN MOUNTAINS

PAMIR TAKLA,MAKAN DESERT MOUNTAINS

Pacific Ocean

TIBET

CHINA INDIA

BC E (Ssu-ma 1993), He drew his material (I'<m1 court records and devoted individual chapters to each of the major ()reign peoples along China's (,'on tiers, Sollt'ce material drawn (,'om archives was usually inserted verbatim in a "cut and paste" (~lshion rather than being summarized, so that the level of detail is often quite extraordinary, Sima Qian was writing his work during the reign of Han Wudi (I', 140-87 BC E) when the "nomad problem" was onc of the most contentious issues at court. His model was (c)lIowed by Ban Gu, author of the Hmi shtt, which completed the history of POl'lller Han dynasty, This rich material has been the source (c)r a number of important studies 011 Hall fI'ontier relations (Lattimore 1940; Loewe 1967; Yii 1967; Hulsewc 1979), as well as later periods, particularly ()r the Tang (Shafcr 1963; Mackerras 1972) and Ming dynasties (Serruys 1959, 1967; Waldron 1990), The early nomads left no written records of their own, but there is extensive archaeological material, mostly tomb sites, that flesh out the nomads' material culture (Jettmar 1964; Rudenko 1970; Cosmo 1994; So and Bunker 1995), Beginning with the Turks in the eighth century, we also have nomad inscriptions that supplement this picture with their own words (Tekin 1968), as well as travel accounts fI'om non-Chinese sources (Bretschneider 1888; Minorski 1948), The period of the Mongol empire provides the most details on the nomadic lifcways and political organization of the world's largest empire, T'hese include the Mongols' own oral history of their rise to power (Cleaves 1982), as wdl as more

1,/ SICppC fllI/,il'cS i!f' (;cTllm! Asill, [{cgill/IS IInd Illll~fiJ/'llls arc ill CIlpi/ll!!cttcl'.\~ italic typc illdim/cs pClIplcs,

12

Thomas J. Ba/field

1IIIpfI'in/.rtntc/imllatiOlI a/mill tile (,'llillcsc-NolJlad /hmticr

13

1.3 17le XiOlllT11II owcrl their stl'{'J/lTth to t/Jcir CI11'1l/1'),. Ellcb JIIal'l'iol' WIIS expcctcrl to bl'illlT /Jis OJl!II bol'sc Illlrl JUN/ifJ/ill' 111 ili tlll'Y lTa III cs. HOI'JC l'irlilllT sllil/s lI'el'c Jharjlcller! by lfl1111l'S SI/ch ITS thcsc ill Il'lJich two ridcl'J lTl'ippilllf 11 Jilllllc leMhi'!' tholllf wcb IlttcllljJt to 1'111/ the othcl' l!fJ: (KIlZllll 1101llllrlJ, Altlli MOlllltllills, Xilljill1ll', Peoplcs Rcpublic Id' Chil/fl, III~), Jl)87.)

1.2 NOllladic j1aJtol'llliJtJ Iml'c l'c/atil'c~y/cJII rClllaills, so tha t l1I11C" 1!f'II'/JIlt JIIC ImoJllabollt lfl'OlljlS liIle the XiOllllll1l is rI cri I'ed /hllll 11 I'dJll cololJim I CXCII I'll tiollJ (!f't 0111 bJ. 'lJlest' C01ltcllljlO1'll1',l' [(llzllll tilllbcI'l11'lll'CS IICI1r thc MOlllTolill1l borrlcr sit in 1711 olrlcl' lT1'Ill'f,Ylll'rllIIlll'llt:rI by 1111 Illlcimt stOIlC stc/c JIIit" 1111 illciscrl /mlll/III/ha. (Altlli MOlllltllillS, Xilljil1lllT, Pcojlles RCjlllblic of Chilla, IlIly 1987.)

gcncral contcmporary historics and first-hand accounts of nomadic life in Pcrsian, Latin, and Chincsc (cr. Juvaini 1958; Rashid al- Din Tabib 1971; Spuler

1972).

THE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION OF NOMADIC STATES Historically, thc lvlongolian (i'omicr prcscnts thc c1carcst cxample of sccondary impcrial dcvelopmcnt bccausc nomads thcrc f;1Ccd a single statc, China, ofovcrwhelming sizc and powcr. Thc problcm thc nomads f:1Ccd was this: whcn China was united undcr nativc dynasties it wanted nothing to do with the nomads and attemptcd via walls, (i'onticr garrisons, and occasional military campaigns to cut thcm ofI' both politically and cconomically. Whcn dividcd into many fl'agmcntcd tribal groups scattcrcd across vast distanccs (Fig. 1.2), thcsc nomads wcrc no match f()r the world's largest agrarian state, but whcn united into a singlc cmpirc they becamc China's most effective f()rcign encmy. Thcy stood as a political cqual against a Chinesc state that was fiflS to onc hundred timcs larger than their own in population, ruled over by a powcrful centralized governmcnt with acccss to an immensc revenuc stream, and possesscd ofa standing army and Great Wall. Thc kcy to thc nomads' success was a singular military advantagc, horsc cavalry,

and an imperial state organization that distributed rcvcnue to subjcct nomad groups instead of collecting it. The steppe nomads wcre masters of mounted archery with an unlimited supply of horses (Fig. 1.3) and a warlike tradition who, as a I-Ian Chinese official complained, made "a business of pillage and plunder" (Ssu-ma 1993, 2: 196). They created a political organization, an imperial confederacy that centralized their military power and kept the lI'ibes united. It employed the principles ofll'ibal organization and indigenous tribal leaders to rule at the local level, while maintaining an imperial state structlll'e with an exclusive monopoly controlling f()reign and military afbirs. This structure had three basic levels or organil'.atiol1. The imperial leadership or the empire was drawn fi'om the ruling lineage of the tribe that t
14

Thomas]. Barfield

effectively deal with a united China, but a single empire with an imperial administration could wield a power that even China could not ignore. Initially the unification of the steppe tribes was the product of a steppe-wide military conquest by a charismatic tribal leader. But uniting the nomad tribes of Mongolia by conquest was only the first step in building an effective empire because the nomadic state could not depend solely on the threat of military force to maintain cohesion; it also had to offer real economic benefits. The political bargain was this: in exchange for accepting a subordinate political position, the leaders of the confederacy's component tribes received access to Chinese luxury goods and trade opportunities they could not have gained for themselves alone. Therefore the imperial confederacy and its leadership owed their continued financial success and political stability to their relentless exploitation of resources from outside tlle steppe. Exclusive control of foreign affairs was central to tlleir power. To understand why we must first understand just how little tllere was for a nomad leader to exploit internally in an undiversified livestock economy witll a low population density.

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

Unlike peasants who were tied to specific pieces ofland, nomadic peoples could move themselves and their animals if they felt put upon. Even if nomad leaders could tax tlleir followers regularly, tllere was little point to it. Unlike grain that could be cheaply warehoused at a single point, live animals needed constant attention and had to be moved regularly among widely scattered pastures. Therefore nomadic leaders tended toward irregular exactions in times of need, in particular demanding tllat tlleir subjects be prepared to go to war at short notice and provide tlleir own weapons, supplies, horses, and other equipment for military campaigns. Thus the economic foundation of imperial political organization on tlle steppe was rooted not in tlle relatively undiversified pastoral economy of Mongolia but on exploiting tlle wealtll of China. The foreign policies of all imperial confederacies of Mongolia had a single aim: to extract direct benefits from China directly by raiding or indirectly through subsidies, and tlle establishment of institutionalized border trade agreements tllat met subsistence needs. WitllOUt such revenue tlle nomadic state would collapse. To get tllis revenue tlle nomad rulers of Mongolia turned to China and made them an offer tlley could not refuse.

ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION OF NOMADIC LIFE Nomadism in central Eurasia has always depended on tlle exploitation of extensive but seasonal steppe grasslands and mountain pastures. Since humans cannot digest grass, raising livestock is an efficient way of exploiting the energy of such a grassland ecosystem. The herds consist, as the Mongols say, of the "five animals": sheep, goats, horses, cattle, and camels. Of these, sheep and horses are the most important, but the ideal was to have all the animals necessary for both subsistence and transportation so that a family or tribe could approach selfsufficiency in pastoral production. There was never any specialization in the production ofa single species (such as developed among the camel-raising Bedouin of the Near East and North Africa). The proportion of each species within a herd always reflected the constraints imposed by local ecological conditions: a higher percentage of cattle in wetter regions, proportionately more goats than sheep in areas of marginal pasture, and larger numbers of camels along desert margins. More than in any otller pastoral area, the nomads of central Eurasia took full advantage of the multiple uses of their animals. Steppe nomads not only rode horses but milked mares, ate horsemeat (and sometimes blood), and used their skins for leatller. Similarly, while the camel was used primarily as a baggage animal, it was also milked, utilized as a source of hair, and occasionally eaten. Oxen were also employed to pull carts or carry loads. In any event, there was little economic diversity, unless perhaps one wanted to trade cows for camels. Everybody raised the same animals and produced the same products. This was excellent for subsistence but provided a weak internal economic base for a state. This weakness was compounded by structural difficulties nomad leaders faced if tlley wished to extract revenue or labor from their widely scattered subjects.

The outer frontier strategy The number of nomads confronting China was small, perhaps about a million people overall, and they were trying to extort Chinese dynasties that in Han times (202 B CE-220 CE) ruled over fifty million people, and onc hundred million in the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). To succeed tlley had to influence decision-making at the very highest levels of government because Chinese foreign policy was made at court and not by frontier governors or border officials. To this cnd the nomads implemented a terroristic "outer frontier" strategy to magnify their power. Taking n.1I advantage of tlleir ability to suddenly strike deep into China and then retreat before the Chinese had time to retaliate, tlley could threaten the frontier at any time (Fig. 1.4). Such violence and the disruption it caused encouraged the Chinese to negotiate agreements f.1Vorable to the nomads. The outer frontier strategy had three major elements: violent raiding to terrify the Chinese court, the alternation of war and peace to increase tlle amount of subsidies and trade privileges granted by the Chinese, and the deliberate refusal to occupy Chinese land that they would tllen have to defend. The threat ofvioIence always lurked beneath the surf.1ce of even the most peaceful interactions. Zhonghang Yue, a Chinese defector working for the nomads, once warned some Han dynasty envoys of the danger they f.1ced in very simple terms. Just make sure that the silks and grain stuffs you bring the Xiongnu are the right measure and quality, that's all. What's the need for talking? If the goods you deliver are up to measure and good quality, all right. But if there is any deficiency or the quality is no good, then when the autumn harvest comes we will take our horses and trample all over your crops! (Ssu-ma 1993,2: 144-5)

15

16

17JolllasJ. Ba/ficld

1.4 Stci'Pc 1lOlI/ads oftCII C1IltipiTtcd a ficrcc imagc whCII dmling with thc outsidc world. A 1II01lg thc [(azl1ll.1', IlccjJilllJ 'mll tilllJ calJlc.\~ who somc claim wcrc OIlCC wcd ill {mule, Jits this idmll!f'aJicrcc warrior pcoplc. (Altai MOlllltaill.l; Xinjiallll,

Pcoplcs Republic Id' China, Jllly 1987.) The Chinese had no good choices when confi'onted with fi'ontier violence. They had three policy options: (1) respond defensively, fc)rtif)' the fi'ontier, and ignore the nomads' demands; (2) respond aggressively, raise an expeditionary cavalry (ixce, and attack the nomads on the steppe; or (3) appease the nomads with expensive peace treaties that provided them with subsidies and border markets. Each approach produced its own set of problems. If the nomads' demands were ignored, they could continually raid the fi'ontiCl', looting to get what they wanted and wreaking havoc with China's border population. But the altel'l1atives of aggressive military action or appeasement WCl'e only slightly less problematic. Seeming to pay "tribute" to milk-drinking barbarians violated the VCl'y essence of a Sinocentric world order in which the Chinese empCl'or was deemed paramount. Such payments were particularly galling since Chinese court officials recognized that in terms of population, military strength, and economic production, they WCl'e I:H' more powerflil than the nomads. Yet any sustained war

Impcrial statc fiJl'lllatioJl

atoll!]

the Chillese-Nollladfhmticr

conducted by China against the nomads f~lCed serious obstacles. While the nomads could be driven away from the frontier, they could not be conquCl'ed because they were mobile and simply moved out of sight until the Chinese armies withdrew. Their land could not be permanently occupied because it was unfit f(x agriculture. Although nomad attacks on the border could be stemmed by means oflarge armies and campaigns on the steppe, li'ontier warfare was economically more disruptive for the Chinese than for the nomads. It drained the treasury and strained the peasantry with ever increasing demands Ic)r taxes and soldiers. for the nomads war was cheap. Steppe households were always prepared to provide horses, weapons, and supplies on short notice, and the loot collected in China repaid this investment many times over. Pinally, continuous military operations threatened the balance of power at court by increasing the political influence of the military and the emperor at the expense of the civilian bureaucrats. Threatened with the loss of their hegemony, these oflicials moved to cnd aggressive military campaigns, arguing that they were 1:11' more expensive than simply paying the nomads to stay away. Consequently, no native Chinese dynasty was able to maintain an aggressive /(JI'eign policy against the nomads /(:>1' longer than the reign of a single emperor. I China disguised the true nature of this appeasement policy by devising an elaborate "tributary system" in which large payments to the nomads were described as gifts given to loyal subordinates come to pay homage to the cmperor. Once the agreements were in place with native Chinese dynasties, dlC (i'ontiers experienced long pcriods of peace because a nomad leader's ultimate aim was to extort China, not conquer it. A symbiotic relation developed in which some nomad leaders even allied with China to lend off rivals when they were driven off the steppe and China tUl'l1ed more and more to the steppe nomads as a source of auxiliary troops to put down peasant rebellions or revolting provincial governors. Indeed, in their final years Chinese dynasties often (HInd that (1111), the nomads remained loyal. The nomads were dependent on the subsidies supplied by such dynasties and the collapse of' t-he latter was a f:ltal blow to any nomadic state in Mongolia.

Circulation

(~f'.!1oods

and politicaJ power in steppe etnpires

Because llomadic states depended primarily on revenue extracted (i'om China in various ways, we should examine why these goods were important. Sedentary states were ultimately based on the labor of a subject peasantry in a landlorddominated agrarian economy that supported a complex class hierarchy and paid the costs of state administration. Nomad states were more like redistributive chicfdoms. They lacked a strong class structure and the leaders' main responsibilities intel'l1ally were organizational rather than extractive. 'They were expected to provide real benefits and prestige goods to component tribes and their leaders. They also took precedence in commanding armies, handling {()reign afIlirs, and resolving disputes that threatened intel'l1al order. While I
17

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Thomas J. Barfield

could be used to keep component tribes from rebelling or breaking away, the system depended less on threats of force than on regular flows of outside revenue. Initially these resources from China were acquired directly through raids. At some point, however, every sophisticated nomadic ruler realized he needed a more regular source of revenue and luxury goods to support tlle political elite, as well as an outlet for regular trade for ordinary nomads. It was at tllis point tllat nomads changed tlleir policies from simple raiding to tlle extraction oflucrative treaty agreements tllat provided tllem witll botll direct subsidies and border markets.

Border trade in subsistence goods What goods did the nomads seek and why? Because tlle steppe economy was so undiversified the nomads naturally looked to tlleir sedentary neighbors for a wide range of products and as an outlet for their own surpluses. The nomads produced regular surpluses in items (horses, milk products, meat, hides, and wool) tllat were in short supply and highly valued in agricultural communities. These agricultural communities produced grain in abundance, as well as metal goods, clotll, and luxury items such as silk and wine that were sought after by the nomads. Trade was tllerefore a natural process along the frontier and Chinese government attempts to restrict or prohibit it were the greatest source of tension in frontier relations. Grain was one oftlle products most in demand by nomads, but because this trade was so ordinary it is scantily documented and scholars continue to argue over whether the steppe nomads included grain as a regular part of their diet. While in theory it may have been possible to survive entirely on a diet of milk products and meat, historically most nomads have had a substantial grain component to their diet. Grain was an important food source because it could be stored for long periods and complemented the milk products and meat supplied by the animals. Grain could be grown in parts of the steppe but the early frosts in Mongolia made its production there doubtnll. Growing grain was also not compatible with nomadic movements, although part of the population (or Chinese captives at some periods) could have been devoted to this task. The nomads were willing to travel long distances to trade (or raid) for grain supplies because they had the baggage animals like camels that could transport bulk goods over long distances at low cost. The Chinese, by contrast, could not move grain very far overland economically in the absence of canal or river systems because they relied on grain-fed oxen to pull transport carts. It was easy to calculate the range at which the cost of feeding the oxen exceeded the amount of grain being transported. Thus, grain surpluses on China's frontier that could not profitably be extracted by the center were economically attractive to the steppe nomads despite being moved much longer distances. Camels that carried grain needed only nanIral pasture, hence their profitable transport range was almost unlimited.

Imperial >fate formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

In addition to grain, ordinary nomads were also interested in other goods for use, particularly cloth and metals. Linen clotll (from hemp, ramie, or kudzu) and cotton (of Central Asian origin) were a useful supplement to tlle felts and woolens produced by the nomads. Perhaps not absolutely necessary, tlley nevertheless made life easier and were much in demand (anyone who has ever experienced tlle discomfort of trying to dry steaming wet wool after a rainstorm can appreciate tlle value of a change of faster-drying clothes!). Metals were tlle most strategic of tlle common goods needed by tlle nomads. Iron was in particularly high demand on tlle steppe for tools and weapons, but China was also a good source of bronze and copper. The nomads had tlleir own tradition of metallurgy, of course, but the Chinese produced bronze and iron in such quantity tllat it was much simpler to acquire metal 6:om tllem and rework it on tlle steppe tllan to have to mine and refine tlle ore tllemselves. Chinese coins were a particularly good source of metal because when tlley went out of circulation they could be purchased in bulk even tllOugh tllis trade was often prohibited. In Han times trade in iron to tlle nomads was absolutely banned and violators were punished by death, a penalty inflicted on 500 merchants in tlle capital in 121 B CE when tlley (in ignorance oftlle law) sold iron pots to a delegation of visiting nomads (Yi.i 1967: 119). Border markets where the nomad trade flourished were characteristic of China's frontier areas. The relationship was a natural one and profitable to both sides, but the Chinese insisted that these markets be closely regulated and during many periods they prohibited all trade with the steppe peoples. This was because native dynasties feared they would lose control of their frontier areas iftlley were too closely integrated into the steppe economy. Banning trade, however, only caused tlle nomads to get what they wanted by force and turned the frontier into a zone of endemic raiding. Jagchid and Symons (1989) go so far as to argue that peace or war between China and the steppe depended entirely on whether China permitted such markets to be opened. While this argument is too simplistic, it does capture the fact that the status of border trade in ordinary goods was a key point of dispute between the nomads of Mongolia and China over the centuries.

Long-distance trade and tribute in luxury goods If trade in ordinary goods made up the bulk of exchanges, it was the acquisition of luxury goods (silk, gold, wine, etc.) that is the focus of most of the written histories. Why the nomad preoccupation with these luxury goods, especially silk? First, silk was a valuable luxury good. Although not well suited for steppe life, it was a highly valued sign of elite status (Fig. 1.5). Perhaps more important, it was a store of wealth, light in weight and high in value, that could be traded for more utilitarian objects or luxury goods from elsewhere. Silk was not the only product the nomads demanded. Gold, satin, precious metals, bronze mirrors, and even musical instruments appear on lists of gifts. And alcohol (mostly as rice wine), or yeast to make it, was a common trade item and given in large quantities as gifts

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J,5 17)c Xio1JlJlIII i1Jcorporatcd IIl1l11y jiJ/'Cigll goods into the stCjljlC, II'''crc they beClllllc part (if' cl'cI'yda), I~f'c, 77)e cOlllbination {if' Chincsc sill, i1Jto 11 shccpsldn IJllt lI'om by t1'l1diti01w/ly d/'c.ued [(azl1l, 1IICtI in 1I00,tlJll'cstc/'ll Chinl1 today is nil cXllmplc lif' thc IOlllJ-tcl'/IJ "istoric relatioll bctll'een Chinll Ilnd t"c steppe 1101IJIlds, (Altlli MOlllltains, XilljianlJ, Pcoples Republic lif' Chinll, JJI~)' J 987.)

Thomas J. Bm/icld

Iwperial .Itate /imlt atio 11 tllolllf the Chinese-Nolllad /hmtier to nomad leaders, Throughout steppe history, the nomads' appetite t(J(' alcohol was legendary and was associated with excess (Jagchid and Hyer 1979: 42-3), which led the Greeks to refer to drinking wine unmixed with water as "Scythian style" (Herodotus, The Hi.,tor)" 6,84,3), The Chinese had strong reservations about the export of luxury goods generated by tributary gifts because the Han court lost revenue in these transactions, Even private trade with distant foreign nations, it was argued, only served to drain China's real wealth t(J(' the acquisition of expensive luxury items whose only value was their rarity, This bias against international trade was closely tied to a Confucian ideology that condemned merchants as a class t(J(' being leeches on the hard work of peasants and artisans, vVhy, they argued, should a merchant deserve any more than the cost of transport t(X movi ng goods from onc place to another? That they could make phenomenal profits by moving merchandise from areas of surplus to areas of shortage was not an entrepreneurial virtue but a defect in the government administration that had allowed such shortages to arise in the first place, This is not to say that trade was unimportant in China, Many individuals, including government officials, profited li'om trade and throughout the Han period there were wealthy merchant f:1I11ilies that controlled large enterprises, However, at the elite level such enterprises wcre deemed illegitimate, and merchants were thereforc t()I'bidden /i'om competing in the imperial examinations which led to high officc and their wealth was subjcct to arbitrary confiscation, (A modern analogy that captures the flavor of this official distaste might be the public attitude toward I:lbulously wealthy drug slllugglers whose businesses and morals arc condemned evcn as their money is welcomcd,) Ideally China should be autarkic: sell~sullicient and sell~contained, The existcnce of a merchant class was evidence that it had I:liled to reach this idcal. Such attitudes stood in sharp contrast to those o( the nomad elites in Mongolia, They actively encouraged trade and attempted to attract merchants into their territories because the pastoral cconomy was not sell~sunicie11l except in terms o(sheep 01' horses, Far /i'om viewing export trade as a drain on national wealth, nomads saw it as a source o( prosperity and stability, Thc dcmand I(lr trade and the extortion of luxury items incrcased exponen-tially with the unification o(the steppe, As a I'cdistributive chieftain, thc Xiongnu Shrt1I)'II'S powcr was securcd in large part by his ability to generate revenue fl'om China and secure trading privileges there, But the nomads' increasing demands ICll' such luxury goods, particularly silk, were not simply I(lr their own use, Once they had acquired a surplus o( these valuable commodities the nomads in Mongolia became thc center o( an international reexport trade which attracted traders, especially fl'om thc oases of Central Asia, who became wealthy middlemen linking the economics o( China and the West. Indeed, when China under Emperor Wudi did expand into Central Asia it was to "cut off thc right ann of thc Xiongnu)) by stopping the revcnue the Xiongnu derivcd fl'om the city-states of Turkestan (Hulsewc 1979: 217), The wealth of items f<'Hllld in nomadic

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Thomas J. Barfield

tombs in Mongolia and their wide source of manufacture provide evidence of this flow. Thus, although Mongolia was never a center of production, as a center of extraction the nomad imperial confederacies acted as a trade pump, drawing surplus goods from China and redirecting them into international markets. While it has often been noted that the political unity of the steppe facilitated long-distance overland trade by securing the routes for peaceful passage, it may be equally true that the nomads themselves (and not the Chinese) were the source of much of what was traded along the silk route. This is particularly true if, in addition to the goods the nomads themselves resold, we take into account the number of foreign merchants who were incorporated into official tributary visits or who traveled under the protection of nomadic states in order to participate in border markets. The latter may have been particularly important since rich foreign merchants were less vulnerable to exploitation by Chinese officials when under the diplomatic protection of a powerful nomad empire like the Xiongnu. While this is supposition for the Ran period, it is amply documented in the Tang dynasty in the eighth to ninth centuries when the Turks and Uighurs provided protection to Sogdian merchants from Central Asia in the Tang capital ofChang'an (cf. Mackerras 1969).

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

23

Table 1.1. Cycles of rule: major dynasties in China and steppe empires in Mongolia Native Chinese dynasties

Dynasties of foreign origins'

Qin and Han (221 BCE-220 CE)

Steppe empires b XlONGNU (209 BCE-155 CE) Xianbei (130-180 CE)

Three Kingdoms and Period of Disunion (221-581 CE)

Toba Wei (386-556 CE) and other foreign dynasties directly before and after

Sui and Tang (581-907 CE)

Rouran

FIRST TURKISH (552-630 CE) SECOND TURKISH (683-734 CE) UIGHUR (745-840 CE)

Sung (960-1279 CE)

Liao (Khitan) (907-1125 CE) Jin (Juchen) (1115-1234 CE)

Dual unity Because centralized empires on the steppe were economically dependent on exploiting a prosperous and united China, they were structl\l'ally linked to them. Nomadic empires came into existence simultaneously with the unification of China and disappeared when China's political and economic organization collapsed. As Table 1.1 shows, there was a close correlation between the unification of China under native Chinese dynasties and the rise of imperial confederacies in Mongolia. This was particularly true of the relationship of the Ran dynasty and the Xiongnu and the Tang dynasty and the Turks/Uighurs. For this reason nomadic empires in Mongolia were intent on exploiting, not conquering, China. Native Chinese dynasties never feared their replacement by nomads, but the nomads' potential for disruption. With the exception of the Mongol empire, foreign dynasties that established kingdoms in China were all from Manchl\l'ia, and products of a very different tribal tradition (BaI'field 1989: 85-130,

164-86). Although raids and crude extortion may have characterized the early interactions between nomad empires and native dynasties in China, they eventually evolved into a more symbiotic relationship. To maintain their lucrative trade relations and imperial subsidies, leaders of imperial confederacies would give military assistance to declining Chinese dynasties to protect them against domestic rebellions. The most prominent example was the importance of Uighur aid in putting down the An Lushan Rebellion against the Tang dynasty when it was on

YlIan (Mongol) (1206-1368 CE)

MONGOL (YlIan) Oirats

Ming (1368-1644 CE)

Eastern Mongols Qing (Manchll) (1644-1912 CE)

Notes: • All but YlIan are 0(' Manchurian origin. b Unified steppe empires that ruled all of Mongolia are given in capitals.

the verge of extinction in the mid-eighth century (Pulleyblank 1955). As leaders of a steppe empire, the Uighurs sent the cavalry troops who broke the back of the rebel army in battle and helped restore the dynasty to power. By 840 C E, the Uighurs were collecting 500,000 rolls of silk a year in subsidies from China (Mackerras 1972). Because they presented a few horses annually at court, the Chinese officially deemed them "tributaries," an unrivaled example of the literate sedentary world's ability to disguise embarrassing facts about its relationship with the steppe. But perhaps the best way to understand an imperial confederacy is to turn to the Xiongnu, the first and most stable nomadic empire the world has ever seen.

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Thomas J. Barfield

THE XIONGNU EMPIRE The first political unification of Mongolia occurred with amazing rapidity at the end of the Warring States period. China was first temporarily united under the Qin dynasty (221-207 BCE, see Yates, this volume) and, after a period of civil war, reunified more permanently by tlle Former Han dynasty (206 B CE-8 CE). At almost tlle same time tlle steppe was unified by tlle Xiongnll under the leadership oftheir Shanyu (tlle nomad emperor) Maodun. This Xiongnu empire was extremely long-lived, dominating the entire eastern Eurasian steppe from the end of the third century BC E through the middle of tlle first century C E, and surviving as a minor power into tlle fourth century. The Xiongnu provide a classic example of an imperial confederacy, a form of large-scale political organization that could not exist without a united and prosperous China to extort. The Xiongnu empire was founded by their leader Maodun in 210 BC E, contemporaneous with the civil wars that reestablished a unified China under the Han dynasty. AltllOugh the nomads on the steppe took no part in tlle civil war that followed tlle collapse of the Qin dynasty in 206 BC E, they did threaten to devastate border regions by raiding, wreaking havoc, and stealing anytlling that could be carried off. They also plotted with frontier commanders against the central government. Such raids and border intrigues induced the newly established Han dynasty to attack the Xiongnu in 201-200 BC E, but the war ended disastrously when the nomads encircled the Han army. The emperor had to sue for peace to escape capture. It was the most humiliating defeat that the Chinese were ever to suffer at the hands of the Xiongnu and the emperor sent envoys to the Shanyu to negotiate peace and establish the hoqin ("marriage alliance") policy as a framework for relations between the two states. The hoqin policy had four major provisions (YU 1967: 41-2): (1) The Chinese made fixed annual payments in goods to the Xiongnu (which at their maximum amounted to somewhat less than 100,000 liters of grain, 200,000 liters of wine, and 92,000 meters of silk); (2) the Han gave a princess in marriage to the ShallYII; (3) the Xiongnu and Han were ranked as co-equal states; (4) the Great Wall was the official boundary between the two states.

In exchange for these benefits the Xiongnu agreed to keep the peace. Here we see the implementation of the outer fi'ontier strategy in full flower, for as generous as the treaty provisions seemed to the Chinese, the Xiongnu were still not satisfied. Mter expanding their own power in Mongolia, they renewed their raids on China and then sent envoys seeking peace. Pointing out that the Xiongnu were now the paramount power on the northern frontier, Maodun demanded a new peace treaty in a letter to the Han court: All the people who live by drawing the bow are now united into one family and the entire region of the north is at peace. Thus I wish to lay down my weapons, rest my soldiers, and turn my horses to pasture; to forget the recent aff.1ir [of

Impel'ial >fate formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier raiding China] and restore our old pact, that the peoples ofthe border may have the peace such as they enjoyed in former times, that the young may grow to manhood, the old live out their lives in security, and generation after generation enjoy peace and comfort. (Ssu-ma 1993,2: 140-1)

The Han court decided the Xiongnu were far too powerful to attack and so agreed to renew the treaty and open border markets. Maodun died peacefully in 174 BCE, leaving his large steppe empire to his son. Mter Maodun's death, the Xiongnu made greater access to these regular markets their key demand, for the hoqin subsidy payments, although very profitable for the political elite, could not adequately compensate the much larger number of ordinary nomads who were forced to forgo raiding. Without the guarantee of regular access to border markets where ordinary nomads could trade live animals or other pastoral products for grain, cloth, or metal, the Shanyu could not expect his people to observe the peace. Since the Chinese feared that such widespread economic links between their own frontier people and the nomads would lead to political subversion, the Han court was opposed to any increase in the size or number of border markets. The Xiongnu were therefore forced to extort increased trade privileges the same way they extorted increased subsidies: by raiding or threatening to raid China. Loot from such raids kept the Xiongnu tribesmen supplied until China finally agreed to liberalize its trade policy. Once established, these border markets quickly became important trade centers to which the Xiongnu flocked, exchanging pastoral products for Chinese goods. Now instead of prohibiting trade, the Han court attempted to control it by regulating what items could be sold, as well as the location and timing of trade fairs. The whole relationship between China and the nomads became more stable and old hostilities were t()rgotten: "From the Shanyu on down, all the Xiongnu grew friendly with the Han, coming and going along the Great Wall" (Ssu-ma 1993,2: 148). This situation lasted until 133 BeE when, under the aggressive leadership of Emperor Wudi, the "Martial Emperor," the Han court abruptly abandoned the hoqin policy and mounted a surprise attack on the nomads, beginning more than a half~century of f1'ontier warfare. Although the hoqin policy had successfully preserved the peace for three generations, it was always unpopular at the Han court because treating the Xiongnu as an equal state violated the very essence of a Sinocentric world order, a view well expressed earlier by Jia Vi, an official at the court of Emperor Wen (r. 179-157 BCE): The situation of the empire may be described just like a person hanging upside down. The Son off-leaven is at the head of the empire. Why? Because he should be placed at the top. The barbarians are at the tcet of the empire. Why? Because they should be placed at the bonom ... To command the barbarian is a power vested in the Emperor at the top, and to present tribute to the Son of Heaven is a ril"llal to be perlormed by vassals at the bottom. Now the tcet are pm on the top and the head at the bottom. Hanging upside down is something beyond comprehension. (Yii 1967: 11)

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Emperor Wudi was susceptible to such criticism. Although his predecessors considered it expedient to appease the Xiongnu to avoid trouble, he now considered such a policy demeaning. China was an empire unrivaled in wealth and military power that would invade the steppe, defeat the Xiongnu and destroy their power forever. Wudi's wars failed. Although China sent a series of massive expeditionary forces against the Xiongnu, they found nothing to conquer but empty land. Lack of supplies forced Chinese armies to retreat within a few months of each campaign. Although they occasionally defeated the nomads in battle and engineered the defection of some of tile Xiongnu empire's component tribes, tile cost of these wars in men, horses, and money was so high that tile dynasty practically bankrupted itself. Nor did tile attacks destroy tile stability of tile Xiongnu empire; ironically the invasions only reinforced tile Shanyu's position as protector of tile nomads against Chinese aggression. Mter decades of war, tile Han court reluctantly concluded China had no more chance of ruling the nomads of the steppe tllan tlley had of governing the fish in tile sea. By 90 BC E they had abandoned tlleir attacks on the steppe and adopted a completely defensive position of cutting off trade while repulsing raids (Loewe 1974a). The Xiongnu had long understood tllat the disruption of peaceful relations over tile long term worked to tlleir disadvantage so tlU'oughout the war they had sent envoys to China requesting a resumption of the hoqin treaties as a way to restore tile status quo ante. But China had rejected such peace offers, insisting tllat any new peace agreement take place within tile new framework of a "tributary system" in which, tlley told the nomads, the Xiongnu would be required to pay homage to tile Han emperor, send a hostage to court, and pay tribute to China. It was a relationship the Xiongnu considered unacceptable and explicitly rejected in 107 BC E: "That is not the way things were done under the old alliance!" the ShanYIJ objected, "Under the old alliance the Han always sent us an imperial princess, as well as allotments of silks, foodstuffs, and other goods, in order to secure peace, while we for our part refrained from making trouble at the border. Now you want to go against the old ways and make me send my son as hostage. I have no use for such proposals!" (Ssu-ma 1993,2: 157)

Yet with no subsidies, no trade, and borders too strong to raid, successive Xiongnu Shanyus found tlleir political positions undermined. In 60 BC E a succession dispute split tile Xiongnu elite into rival f.1ctions who warred upon onc another. The losing Shanyu, Huhanyeh, decided that his only chance of political survival was to come to terms Witll China and so he broke with Xiongnu tradition in 53 B CE by agreeing to accept the Chinese demands for peace under tile terms of the tributary system. Surprisingly, the tributary system proved a sham. In return for formal compliance, the Xiongnu received even larger gifts and better border markets. During his first visit to the Han court in 51 BC E, Huhanyeh received twenty jin of gold, 200,000 cash, seventy-seven suits of

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

clotlles, 8000 pieces of silk, and 6000 jin of silk floss; his followers were supplied with 34,000 hu ofrice2 (Wylie 1875: 44-7). The discovery of tile true nature of tile Han tributary system allowed Huhanyeh to implement a new "inner frontier" strategy in steppe politics. In essence he used Han wealtll and military protection to re establish unity witllin tile Xiongnu empire. This strategy differed from outright surrender to China, in which a tribal leader accepted Chinese titles and entered tile Han administrative framework, disappearing from tile steppe political scene. Instead Huhanyeh maintained his autonomy and avoided direct Chinese control while demanding foreign aid and even military assistance to defeat rival Xiongnu leaders. The Chinese were eager to support contenders in a civil war ("using barbarians to fight barbarians"), a policy always popular at tile Han court witll the expectation tllat by aiding tile winning side they would be able dominate their ally in the future. While in tile short term such goals could be realized, in the long term Chinese aid simply enabled the nomads to rebuild tlleir empire and return to tlleir aggressive outer frontier strategy once again. In 43 BC E, after a decade of receiving Chinese aid, Huhanyeh did just this and returned nortll to his homeland as supreme ruler of the Xiongnu, "and his people all gradually came together from various quarters, so that the old country again became settled and tranquil" (Wylie 1875: 47-8). Even though they regained their unity and power, the Xiongnu never again objected to the structure of the tributary system. Instead, they actively set about exploiting it for their own ends. They continually demanded the right to present "tribute" and send hostages to court because they profited so handsomely. Indeed, they threatened invasion if their tributary missions were not received and appropriately rewarded. For the remainder of the Former Han dynasty Xiongnu regularly visited the Chinese court, with each Shanyu generally making at least one visit during his reign. And with each visit the amount of gifts increased (Table 1.2; also Yii 1967: 47). The policy oflavish tributary payments continued into the Later Han dynasty (25-220 CE) and expanded to include other newly powerful fi'ontier tribal groups like the Xianbei, Wuhuan, and Qiang. By 50 C E when the system was regularized, it is estimated that the annual cost of direct subsidies to the nomads amounted to one-third of the Han government payroll or 7 percent of all the empire's revenue, goods to the value of $130 million dollars in modern terms (Yi.i 1967: 61-4). This fragmentation of the tributary system in the Later Han was a consequence of a second civil war that permanently divided the Xiongnu into northern and southern branches beginning in 47 CE. As in the previous civil war, the southern Shanyu allied himselfwith China and employed the inner frontier strategy, using China's wealth to defeat his rival. However, because this civil war lasted more than forty years, the victorious lineage of the southern Shanyu was unable to reassert its control over northern Mongolia which fell into the hands of the rival Xianbei nomads. Instead, the southern Shanyu maintained his close

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Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

Thomas]. Barfield Table 1.2. Xiongnu ),isits to the Han Chinese court Year of visit BeE

Silk floss(jill)

Silk f.1bric (pieces)

51 49

6,000 8,000 16,000 20,000 30,000

8,000 9,000 16,000 20,000 30,000

33 25 1

connection with China and was content to leave the steppe fragmented, maintaining control only around the immediate frontier in order to dominate the flow of goods to the steppe and keep the less well-organized nomads from gaining access to the system. By the end of the second century CE, the relationship between the Han dynasty and the southern Xiongnu had become so close that they acted as "fi'ontier guarding barbarians," protecting China from attacks by other tribes on the steppe and, not coincidentally, milking the dynasty for more subsidies. Although dming the second century the southern Xiongnu became so closely tied to the Han court that they fell under the indirect control ofHan frontier officials who could determine succession to leadership by supporting favored candidates, they never lost their identity as an independent state. So important was this relationship that it was the nomads who provided the last bulwark against domestic rebels when China fell into civil war in 180 CE. But because nomad empires were dependent on a prosperous and stable Chinese dynasty, they could not survive its collapse. When the Han dynasty finally dissolved in 220 CE, China's economy and population were devastated. The nomads no longer had any rich provinces to loot, had no dependable border markets in which to trade, and saw their subsidy payments disappear. Under such conditions centralization proved impossible and the tribes in Mongolia reverted to anarchy. Thus an empire as powerful and centralized as that of the Xiongnu would not reemerge for another three hundred years until the Turks were able to exploit a reunifying China under the Sui and Tang dynasties in the sixth century to establish a relationship stl'l\cturally analogous to that of the Han and Xiongnu. Like that relationship, unity on the steppe also disappeared with the collapse of the Tang dynasty at the end of the ninth century (Barfield 1989).

EMPIRES AND SHADOW EMPIRES When comparing the Xiongnu empire with Han China, an immediate question arises. Can states that are so different both be empires? They were certainly politically comparable and both ruled over vast territories. But in most other ways (sophistication of administration, political centralization, urbanization, size of population, economic specialization, etc.), they bore almost no similarities. This

was because steppe empires were secondary phenomena, arising in response to imperial state formation in China and largely dependent on exploiting a unified China for their existence. However, the Xiongnu empire is not a unique case. Looking at the other examples of empires discussed in this volume, we find a similar sharp divide between those that most scholars would easily accept as empires and those that are in some way problematic. The "primary empires" would include Assyria, Achaemenid Persia, Rome, China, Inka, Aztec (though this was still in its formative stage when destroyed by the Spaniards), Spanish, and Ottoman. The problematic cases are the Xiongnu, Nubia, Carolingian Europe, and the Portuguese Indies. But (to paraphrase Tolstoy) while all primary empires are alike, each problematic empire is problematic in its own way. In some respects, they are out\vardly empires, but each is missing something vital that sets it apart and makes it a shadow empire.

Primary empires What is an empire and how does it differ from other types of polities? An empire is a state established by conquest that has sovereignty over subcontinental or continental sized territories and incorporates millions or tens of millions of people within a unified and centralized administrative system. The state supports itself through a system of tribute or direct taxation of its component parts and maintains a large permanent military force to protect its marked fi'ontiers and preserve internal order. Empires also share a set of five common internal characteristics:

First, empires are ot;ganized both to administer and exploit diJ1ersity, whether economic, political, religious, or ethnic. While empires may begin with the hegemony of a single region or ethnic group, they all grow more cosmopolitan over time with the incorporation of new territories and people very different from themselves. Indeed it is characteristic that, once established, the elite of an empire may change or be replaced without the necessary collapse of the state structure. Egypt's many dynasties are a notable example of this, as was the tendency of Roman emperors to be drawn from non-Italian regions after the end of Augustus' line. Even in China one finds that dynasties that drew their elite from one region during the formation of a new empire moved to broaden their base to countrywide recruitment within a couple of generations. It is their ability to incorporate large numbers of different ethnic, regional, and religious groups that makes empires so different fi'om tribes and locality-based polities such as citystates that organize themselves on the basis of some common similarity. Empires are comfortable with, and even thrive on, diversity. The f.1mous frieze at Persepolis with all the Persian empire's many component satrapies lined up before the Great King in their native dress to present tribute of distinctive local products is a physical representation of this diversity. Of course this was not because empires thought well of peoples different from themselves, but rather that their policies were designed to make all groups integral parts of the empire

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and share in a common political order. It was no missionary enterprise. The first steps were often brutal: to conquer and destroy any groups that opposed them militarily or politically. This was accomplished by wholesale population transfers of conquered populations to distant parts of the empire, settlement of imperial troops and immigrants in new territories, and tlle destruction (or incorporation) oftlle group's indigenous political elite. Once rival groups were politically neutralized, empires displayed a high tolerance for local variation (as long of course as it did not interfere Witll good order and tlle collection of taxes). The success of tllis policy can be seen in tlle decline of troop concentrations and military fortifications within tlle empire and tlleir transfer to tlle frontier to confront outsiders. Second, empires established transportation systems designed to serve the imperial center militarily and economically. Sophisticated and well-maintained transportation systems were characteristic of all great empires. No place in the empire was beyond the center's military reach and supplies needed for military operations were stored tllfoughout tlle empire. The Persian, Roman, Chinese, and Inka road systems were particularly impressive in size. In maritime or riverine environments, empires made large investments in port f.'lcilities to exploit sea trade or canal systems to link rivers for bulk inland transport. In arid landlocked areas tlley created and maintained systems of caravansarai and river crossings that facilitated caravan trade. In all cases, the amount of investment in these infrastructures was well beyond the capacity of any single part of the empire to finance on its own, particularly in sparsely populated marginal territories. Economically this transportation network and centralized revenue collection allowed imperial centers to support a population and level of sophistication well beyond the capacity of its local hinterland. Where bulk transportation of commodities was possible, the empire's capital (or sometimes, dual capitals) became a mega-center that dwarfed all other urban centers. Here water transport was key. Roman imports of grain from Egypt and North Mrica were vital to the capital's survival. China invested heavily in a series of canals that linked the north and the south of the country. Aztec success in conquering the lake regions of central Mexico underlay the rapid growth of their capital to a size that astonished the Spanish. Areas that did not have access to such water transport focused on overland transport such as caravan routes using pack animals. This allowed the circulation of high quantities of goods (particularly luxury items), but was not enough to support the mega-city capitals that had access to maritime or canal commerce. Capitals such as the Inka's Cuzco or Assyria's Nineveh were architecturally impressive as imperial centers and covered large areas, but they were subject to much more strict upper limits on their size because they were supported mostly by the agricultural surplus of their local hinterlands. In economic terms, empires provided large-scale economic integration tllat permitted the expansion of trade and production. AltllOugh arising out of bloodshed and conquest, an imperial state was most admired for tlle peace it gave its component parts. Areas that had suffered endemic warfare could now turn their

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

attention to trade, investment, and production of goods. The market for such products was also greatly increased. The level of production and distribution of goods reached unprecedented scales, including large-scale foreign trade with distant peoples for luxury goods. These economic links bound the empire's component parts together far more strongly than any army. Roads and ports designed to ensure the rapid transport of troops and weapons to put down possible rebellions eventually became the lifelines of civilian commerce tllat superseded military force as the key to maintaining unity. Third, empires had sophisticated systems of communication that allowed them to administer all subject areas from the center directly. If trade and taxation were the material lifeblood tllat flowed through the empire's veins, then the development of a communications system could be likened to its central nervous system. AlIimportant policy decisions in empires were made at the center, so tile expedited flow of information was critical to imperial survival. Roads that transported armies also sped information from the very edges of empire to the center for analysis and disposition. Although an army on the march was a more highly visible sign of imperial power, the quieter flow of information to the center and instructions from tile center was perhaps more impressive. All empires had some sort of official postal system (often surprisingly swift in moving important information) that variously included horse relay stations, runners, or fast boats. In admiration of the Persian empire's messenger service, Herodotus (8.98.2) observed: Than this system of messengers there is nothing of mortal origin that is quicker. This is how the Persians arranged it: they say that for as many days as the whole journey consists in, that many horses and men arc stationed at intervals of a day's journey, onc horse and onc man assigned to each day. And him neither snow nor rain nor heat nor night holds back ti·oll1 for the accomplishment of the course that has been assigned to him, as quickly as he may.

But a communications system was much more than just a way to transmit information physically. It required a sophisticated record keeping system (most often writing, but also recording devices like Inkan Ithipu, see D'Altroy, p. 203), a permanent bureaucracy that managed the information flow, and a system for dealing with information in a timely manner. Underlying this was a common language of administration and education that all members of the imperial elite shared. This could be accomplished in a number of ways: with a common writing or symbolic system that transcended language differences (Chinese characters, Inkan Izhipu), using a common language of imperial administration that all members of the elite shared (Latin and Greek in the Roman world, Arabic in the Islamic world), or by employing a cultural lingua franca of administration adopted by new rulers even when it was not their own native tongue (L'ltin in the post-Roman West, or Persian in Central Asia and Mughal India). Less noted (but equally important) were empires' impositions of standardized measures (for weights, distance, volume, troop size, and money) and common numeral

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Thomas J. Barfield systems for recording numbers and accounting. Such systems did not necessarily displace localized customary measures, but they did serve as a common denominator understood throughout the empire and meant that imperial officials did not have to keep track of myriad local variations.

Fourth, empires proclaimed a monopoly offorce within the territories they ruled and projected their military force outward. This may be a baseline requirement of all states, but because they were founded on the basis of conquest and had to administer very large territories, empires faced problems of scale. Preservation of internal order required the maintaining of a permanent imperial army that could control disturbances in any part of the empire. But to the extent that empires regularly relied on such armies to preserve internal order, they were short-lived polities. As a Chinese adage had it, "You can conquer an empire on horseback, but cannot rule it from there." Successful empires therefore maintained internal order by effective administration, including implementation of a common legal system that could be relied upon throughout its territory and a centralized system of government appointees responsible for carrying out imperial policy. Local officials were often quite constrained about what they could do without permission from the center. In successful empires, internal rebellions were relatively rare and considered a sign of administrative failure. Externally, empires sought to expand well beyond the limits of other types of states. In their expansive phases they generally stopped only for three reasons: (1) when they reached the frontiers of another empire of similar power to their own (Rome/Iran); (2) when they reached an ecological frontier (desert, steppe, mountains, jungle) that they could not effectively occupy (China and Mongolian steppe, Rome and the Sahara and Arabian deserts); or (3) where an advance that could be accomplished militarily was foregone as part of a strategic policy designed to create a defensible frontier (Rome on the Rhine), or where cost of administration was deemed to exceed the benefit of running it (China in Central Asia). Once established, however, imperial borders displayed remarkable persistence and continuity. In part this was because empires stationed the bulk of their troops on the frontiers, not at their centers. Even in decline, empires sought to defend the whole of their territory. Very few (notably the Byzantine) retreated gradually to the core from which they started when pressured on the ft·ontier. Instead empires tended to direct ever scarcer resources from the center to the frontier to hold the line even at the risk of collapsing the whole system. Fifth, empires had an ((imperial project» that i'mposed some type ofunity throughout the syste'l'n. One of the reasons that empires were so tolerant of diversity was that they expected that their own cultural system would create a common core of values that would override local variation. This was often reflected in such material attributes as common systems of measurement, architectural styles, cosmology, ritual, art, and fashion that marked an imperial presence, even at the margins. It was a vision of unity that extended beyond force and created what we often identifY as a civilization (see Woolf, this volume). It was a project that

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier allowed wide participation and was implemented in a series of stages that moved from coercion through cooptation to cooperation and identification. Those empires that did not seek to develop long-term cooperation and identification were generally shorter lived than those that did. In such long-lived empires this legacy of belonging often survived its political collapse and remained alive as a historic model to be emulated in the future (see Moreland, MacCormack, this volume).

From empires to lat;ge states? It could be argued that these definitions could be equally applied to large states, not just empires. This should not be surprising because from an archaeological perspective it appears that empires were the templates for large states, and not the reverse. Historically, empires were the crucibles in which the possibility of large states was realized. Indeed, it is difficult to find examples of large states in areas that were not first united by an empire. Pre-imperial political structures were generally small and parochial: city-states, regional kingdoms, and tribes. States that did expand in this environment either grew to become empires themselves or collapsed into their component parts. It was the experience of empire that changed the political and social environment and created the capacity to rule large areas and populations in the states that followed. Imperial methods of government administration, military organization, and ideology were modified and used as models on a smaller scale. Thus large states were most common in areas where empires broke up and the imperial pieces became large states. It is only as we approach the modern period that large states rather than empires become common. This may have to do more with the expansion of western Europe, where this process was most pronounced, than with any changes in other parts of the world where empires as political structures ruled supreme (if not always independently) in South Asia, China, and the Near East until the twentieth century. It is also true that with the expansion of the world's population, states commonly found themselves ruling over large populations (40 million plus) that had been previously found only in the biggest empires of the premodern period. For most of history, there was an order of magnitude difference between the size of primary empires and any other type of state.

Shadow empires If classic empires were primary polities, that is, the product of an indigenous internal development, shadow empires were secondary phenomena. They came into existence as a response to imperial state formation that was initiated some place else. They could not exist except as part of an interaction with an imperial state because they lacked most of the essential characteristics of primary empires described above. However, in terms of power and historic influence, they mimicked empires in their actions and policies. They were "shadows" in that they took on the form of empires without all of their substance. They were in some

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Thomas J. Barfield way parasitic on a larger systems, although under exceptional conditions they could transform themselves into self-sustaining primary empires. The cases in tlus volume illustrate at least four types of secondary empires: mirror empires, maritime trade empires, vulture empires, and empires of nostalgia. Mirror empires Mirror empires emerged in direct response to imperial state formation of tl1eir neighbors. They rose and fell in tandem witl1 their rivals because tl1ey were responses to tl1e challenges presented by a neighbor's imperial centralization. Nomadic imperial confederacies are prime examples of mirror empire. The Xiongnu empire, and tl1e steppe empires tl1at followed it in Mongolia, rose and fell in tandem witl1 native Chinese dynasties because they were parasitically attached to them. Such empires lacked tl1e internal sophistication of a primary empire: no distinct economic classes, no standing armies, little literacy witl1 a milumal bureaucracy, few craft specialists and (most important) a subject population that could not be easily exploited. But externally, the steppe ruler's monopoly on foreign relations and command of a very effective centralized military force enabled him to impose his will on tl1e steppe as a whole and to create an imperial structure tl1at could deal as an equal witl1 even very large empires. The creation and maintenance of a unified empire as a response to a neighbor's imperial expansion was found mostly among nomadic people, and then primarily on tl1e Eurasian steppe. The reason for this was that the nomads' political structure was determined more by their relations with the outside world than by any internal dynamic. Drawing on cases from southwestern Asia where polities were much smaller, Irons (1979: 362) observed that, "among pastoral nomadic societies hierarchical political institutions are generated only by external relations witl1 state societies and never develop purely as a result of internal dynamics in such societies." As a corollary one might add that the degree of hierarchy mirrored the level of organization of their opponents. In gross terms there was historically an arc of growing political centralization that ran ft'om East Africa to the steppes of Mongolia with four increasingly complex types of tribal organization (Barfield 1993: 17): (1) age sets and acephalous segmentary lineages in subSaharan Africa where tribal societies encountered few state societies until the colonial era; (2) lineages with permanent leaders but no regular supra-tribal organization in North Africa and Arabia where tribal societies f.1ced regional states with which they had symbiotic relations; (3) supra-tribal confederations with powerful leaders who were part of a regional political network within large empires distributed throughout the Iranian and Anatolian plateaus linking tribes to states as conquerors or subjects; and (4) centralized tribal states ruling over vast distances on the steppes of central Eurasia, north of China and Iran, supported by predatory relationships with neigh boring sedentary empires. In Mongolia, f.1cing a united China, the steppe nomads regularly reached an empire level of organization. In part this was because their horse cavalry gave them the military means to challenge China. But it was also because their social

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier structure (unlike tllOse of nomads in the Near East or East Africa) was ruerarcrucal and culturally predisposed to accept tl1e claims of imperial lineages tl1at proclaimed an exclusive right to rule (Barfield 1991). As we have seen, steppe empires like the Xiongnu were not interested in conquest but extortion, and once tl1ey had established tl1eir lucrative relationship witl1 China (peace for goods) wealth poured into tl1e steppe and maintained tl1e imperial structure. For tl1e most part, mirror empires displayed little potential to transform tl1emselves into primary empires. The only case of this on tl1e steppe was the Mongol empire established by Chinggis Khan in the thirteentl1 century. He too started out intending only to extort his neighbors, but the technical skill and power of his army ended up destroying them and creating a true empire (t11e world's largest) t11at ruled directly from a center and relied on direct conquest and taxation of sedentary areas. For a time t11eir capital, Karakorom, became tl1e center of power for all of Eurasia, but within a few generations it broke down into its component parts. Maritime trade empires Maritime trade empires held only the minimum territory (usually at the margins) needed to extract economic benefits through trade from anotl1er polity run by someone else who was responsible for production and political organization. This form of empire, at least in the premodern period, was problematic because it attempted to extract wealth without the occupation or extortion of a large territory. To do this they attempted a monopoly, or at least direct control, over the means of exchange and transport rather than the means of production. For this reason all trade empires were maritime because it was possible, with adequate naval forces and fortified bases, to maintain control of shipping over large areas of ocean, particularly at the choke points of sea routes or at key embarkation points. By contrast, it was not possible to institute such controls over a land route without also dominating the territory surrounding it. Such control allowed imperial centers to amass the degree of wealth needed to finance the military power and act as empires in their dealings with other states. If the ultimate goal of empire was the centralization and control of resources to be used by the center to enrich itself and control the periphery, then such maritime empires could accomplish this task without the need to rule over large territories and populations. However, like the equally parasitic steppe empires, such polities were in many respects hollow (for a different perspective, see Subrahmanyam, this volume). They were vulnerable to collapse if their source of wealth, over which they had no direct control, was cut off. They were also vulnerable to attack ft'om surrounding states and rival naval powers. The solution to tl1ese problems involved either devolution (to become the center of a trading network that was not autonomous or in private hands) or evolution (expand into a true empire by conquering neighboring hinterlands and the populations that produce tl1e goods traded). In the ancient world, maritime trading empires arose most commonly as the

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Thomas]. Barfield consequence of the growing power of a city-state in a world of city-states. The trading network of Phoenician city-states, or perhaps Bronze Age Crete, may have been the first examples. The ancient Athenian empire of the fifth century BC E, with its collection of colonies and clients from whom it benefited but which it did not rule directly was a classic example of an empire based on trade ratl1er t1un conquest. It took advantage of Atl1ens' superior navy and network of alliances t11at had emerged during the Persian Wars and used its position to become a center of wealth and power. The weakness of such a structure was also clear when, during the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians found themselves vulnerable to land attack and trade disruption by the Spartans and t11eir allies. The rise of centralization in the Mediterranean under Alexander and his successors, and then Rome, put an end to such polities. In t11e medieval Mediterranean world, city-states such as Venice and Genoa also created trade networks but they were unable to achieve a degree of autonomy that would lead anyone to call them empires. Later examples were on t11e cusp of the modern age and involved the expansion oftl1e Atlantic European powers into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. These included t11e Portuguese in the Indies, as well as the later ventures by t11e Dutch and British. As Subrahmanyam's analysis (t11is volume) of the Portuguese empire in Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries makes clear, they dominated a lucrative trading network with a surprisingly small numbers of men and boats. This domination was not due entirely to technical superiority (gunpowder weapons were quickly acquired by states across the region), but to the fact that the Indian Ocean had no local regional hegemony (but see Morrison, this volume). When the region's neighboring land-based states decided that they were losing something important, they turned on the Portuguese. The Ottoman Turks built a navy and increased their control of the Red Sea region, the Saf.wids in Iran retook the Persian Gulfport ofHormuz, and the Mughal empire in India united much of the subcontinent and excluded the Portuguese from many of their strongholds. In addition, the profits of the sea trade attracted the Dutch and English. The latter two straddled the boundary between state and private company, with the state taking predominance when they decided to occupy and directly administer the territory they exploited. Over time, these trade empires therefore evolved into primary empires in which colonial dependencies were ruled directly from London and Amsterdam. Vulture e'mpires Vulture empires were created by leaders of frontier provinces or client states or by allies that sat on the geographic and cultural periphery of an empire. They were formed after the internal collapse of their imperial neighbors, when peripheral leaders were able to seize the imperial center and form a new empire. Frontier regions on the edge of empires were always considered to be places apart culturally and administratively even though they had strong economic and political ties to the empire. At some periods, they were formally incorporated

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier into an empire and occupied by imperial garrisons; at other times, they were ruled indirectly as client states or allies. In either case, empires typically compromised their usual policies of direct incorporation and cultural assimilation in favor of t11e cooptation of local e1ites who maintained much autonomy and preserved t11eir indigenous social structure. They were f.'lmiliar witl1 the dominant imperial culture but still strongly linked to t11eir coetlmics in t11e hinterland who maintained older indigenous ways of life. Long experience witl1 the dominant empire transformed local culture and political organization. During times of centralization, participation in t11e imperial system allowed cooperating local leaders to use their links witl1 t11e empire to overcome rivals with economic and military aid from the center. However, when the center weakened or witl1drew, these areas became independent. TillS led to a struggle between t110se local leaders who wished to return to a more autonomous and less hierarchical political structure, and those who wished to employ the tools of the witl1drawn imperium to create their own centralized state. This contest often took generations to resolve. If it resulted in the emergel1Ce of a new centralized state, it was one that combined elements of local indigenous culture with an administrative system modeled on the old empire (and sometimes employing its leftover personnel). If the center was weak enough, particularly if civil wars had created anarchy, leaders from such marginal territories could seize control of the center t11emselves and found new imperial dynasties. Although the new dynasty might be named after its new elite's frontier homeland, its success depended on maintaining domination over the existing administration of an older empire that it ran as a dominant minority. Such dynasties were, if you will, the tails that wagged the imperial dog occasionally, but even when dressed in imperial regalia they were always recognizable as tails and never dogs. The best example of clients at the margins in this volume would be Nubia, which Egypt treated as part of its political and economic sphere. Nubia absorbed much from Egypt but remained distinct culturally fi·om the lower part of the Nile Valley. As MOl·kot (this volume) points out, Nubia was an Egyptian frontier on the upper Nile, where Egypt initially established bases for direct control but also depended on the incorporation of a local elite as their agents. Over the course of time, interaction with Egypt had an enormous influence on the Nubian population. They were drawn into Egyptian politics and culture without becoming fully Egyptian. After Egypt withdrew, a process of state formation based on Egyptian models took place, its details largely undocumented, that resulted in the establishment ofNubian dynasties that later ruled Egypt. This was not really a Nubian empire so much as Nubians taking control of a declining Egyptian empire as a new dominant group. The population and economic locus always remained in Egypt proper, even though Nubia became more of a center politically than it was before. Similar examples can be drawn from other parts of the world, particularly frontier regions like Manchuria that play a similar role in Chinese history (Barfield

37

38

Thomas J. Barfield

1989). Like Nubia, Manchuria was a thinly populated border region that came under imperial control, directly and indirectly, when China was unified under native dynasties like the Han, Tang, and Ming. What parts escaped China's control fell under the imperial sway of tile Mongolian steppe empires. During these periods the Manchmian tribes were very weak and disorganized. However, upon tile collapse of imperial autllority within China (and tile consequent collapse of unity of tile Mongolian steppe), Manchmian tribes became autonomous. Rival tribes struggled for dominance in tllis vacuum and rulers became dominant by creating a new system of dual administrations Witll one branch (staffed by tribesmen) in charge of tribal affairs and war while tile otller branch (staffed by Chinese bureaucrats) handled civil affairs. Using tllis as a base, tlley expanded into areas of nortllern China weakened by civil war. When successful, tlley established dynasties in which tile Manchurians were a dominant elite in an empire still ruled by Cllinese officials under Chinese law. It was a new empire but built on an existing foundation. Table 1.1 shows tllat this pattern occurred regularly after tile collapse of central order in China. The final, and most successful, dynasty in tllis line was tile Qing (1644--1912), tllat eventually unified all of China and ruled it for almost tluee centmies. In tile process it underwent significant Sinification so that after a few generations it was transformed into a powerful primary empire in which Manchuria itself once again became a backwater. Empires of nostalgia The last group of shadow empires, empires of nostalgia, were based on remembrance of organizations past. They claimed an imperial tradition and the outward trappings of an extinct empire, but could not themselves meet basic requirements of true empire, such as centralized rule, direct control of territory, a significant imperial center, or enough territory to make tile imperial grade (i.e., a province of former empire). Long-lived empires left lasting marks on the regions they ruled (but see Sinopoli, this volume). When empires collapsed (particularly if that collapse resulted in political anarchy, population decline, and economic depression) the old imperial structure was often imbued with the aura of a former "golden age" now lost. More importantly the memory of the lost empire retained such an ideological hold over a region's population that it could be used as a powerful tool by rulers attempting to build new states and empires. It also provided a template for building a large-scale administration. As Yates (tllis volume) has shown, this tendency was strongest in China where the cosmological myth of a necessary emperor who linked heaven and earth was so influential that it served as the ideological foundation used by all succeeding states. The memory of empires past provided the foundations for empires of the future, and a united empire itselfwas seen as the highest political goal. A divided China was considered so incomplete that any group that could reunite it, including foreign invaders like the Mongols, was perceived as legitimate rulers when tlley accomplished this task. These efforts were so successful that, unlike the

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier

West, primary empires came to reunite Cllina after each period of state collapse. In many time periods, the reestablishment of a primary empire was, however, more often a distant hope tllan an achievable goal. The idea of empire provided the ideological basis and adnlinistrative model for the creation of a new empire, but in most cases was little more tllan an influential fantasy because tile material base was lacking and tile ability of leaders to centralize power was opposed by powerful local elites. The Carolingian empire fell into tllis category, as did tile small Cllinese states tllat arose in periods of disunion tllere (third tluough Sixtll centuries, tentll tlu·ough twelfth centuries), or tile many dynasties tllat claimed tile mantle of empire in Etlliopia. The Carolingian empire (Moreland, tllis volume) is a particularly good example because it meets almost none of tile criteria listed above for primary empires. It did not have a permanent standing army, a true central administration, or effective transportation and communication systems. It parceled out territory on a feudal basis and local notables felt under little obligation to carry out its orders. Its capitals were small and temporary; its soldiers and officials moved to where the food was because tlley could not transport it. Imperial architecture was impressive only when compared to the peasant huts tllat surrounded it. Still, it was recognized as an empire at the time, and it continues to hold a hallowed place in European history. Carolingian influence was so great because, as the first major attempt to bring back the idea of empire modeled on Rome in the West, it struck a powerful cultural chord and served as a potent ideological weapon in the (eventually unsuccessful) drive to centralize the petty states that occupied the former provinces of the Western Roman empire. In empires of nostalgia, rulers tied their own legitimacy to something that no longer existed but that had the power to command loyalty, a source of power tllat has been much underrated by scholars who have focused only on material conditions. Petty struggles for power and supremacy were tied to loftier goals. Cooperation was easier to achieve and the recognition of the fiction of a new empire and emperor provided the basis on which to build a new structure. For this reason, empires of nostalgia need to be seen as secondary phenomena that drew their power largely from the symbolic world of cultural memory. The only thing that could kill it was the inculcation of a new cultural order. Thus, while the idea of Rome remained strong in the West, the tradition was lost in Nortll Mrica after the Islamic conquest. From that point on, the empires of nostalgia there were drawn from the Islamic tradition. Similarly the long-lived Byzantine tradition did not survive the Ottoman conquest and its cultural transformation into the Turkish world, although its legacy did survive in far-off Russia, which saw itself as the inheritor of the Byzantine legacy of Orthodox Christianity.

CONCLUSIONS Understanding the dynamics of empires demands coming to grips Witll what tlley took for granted, issues tllat often require us to examine our own assumptions

39

40

Thomas]. Barfield about what made them work. When we compare primary and secondary empires we can see that they relied on their ability both to centralize power and to maintain control at a distance. Primary empires did this by creating complex structures that were self-sustaining and self-reproducing. Secondary empires achieved the same ends but without the complexity because they did not generate their own revenue directly. Two of our secondary types, tlle mirror empires of tlle steppe and tlle maritime trade empires of the seas, developed specific military technologies tllat magnified their power and disguised tlleir weakness in numbers. For the steppe empires, this was horse cavalry, for maritime empires, a naval force. BOtll permitted military strikes at a distance and allowed for a small but concentrated force to attack and dominate an enemy at a chosen point. The steppe empires used tllis power to establish empires financed by extortion and subsidies drawn from China. The maritime empires used tlleir power not so much to extort revenue directly as to dominate tlle international terms of trade to tlleir benefit. In both cases, military power did have the potential to transmute a secondary empire into a primary one ifit began to conquer distant lands directly. This rarely happened because these empires were run by people whose numbers were few and scattered. Their power also lay in their ability to retreat into tlle steppe or over tlle seas WitllOut putting tlleir key military assets at risk when confronted by a powerful counter-force. Extortion and trade were their strategic tools of choice. Both of tllese types of empires depended on the existence of more complex states to survive and existed simultaneously with powerful primary empires. Vulture empires and empires of nostalgia, by contrast, existed only in the wake of the collapse of empire. If there was enough of the structure intact, then vulture empires were able to keep them going (usually with a simpler organizational structure) by creating new empires or dynasties on the remains of the old. If an imperial system had collapsed more completciy, or its structural integrity had completely disappeared, then attempts to recreate it had a provisional quality to them, more symbolic than real. It was the myth of empire that ran at the heart of empires of nostalgia, but it was a powerful myth indeed, capable of inspiring people to recreate what was lost even when they lacked the means to do it. For archaeologists in particular, secondary empires like the Xiongnu provide an example of powerful long-lived imperial polities that break out of the normal mold. And, as this examination has shown, different lypes of polities, which I have classified as primary and secondary, can both produce imperial structures, but of quite different types. Perhaps because empires were so large they have been treated for too long as isolated phenomena and not as spheres of interaction (see also Smith, this volume). Once the process of empire was established it had an enormous impact internally (a process that has been well studied), but also externally (a process that has been neglected). Empires influenced one another and surrounding peoples even at long distances. Whether creating a frontier with tribal peoples (Rome and Germany, China and Mongolia) or confronting rival empires (Rome and Iran, Ottoman and Spanish), the dynamics of

Imperial state formation along the Chinese-Nomad frontier empire shaped tlleir development. Much of this development was not documented in written sources but did leave an archaeological record. It is to this archaeological record tllat we should turn to better understand how empires worked and the impact they had at home and abroad.

41

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

2

Written on water: designs and dynamics in the Portugese Estado da India /

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Many physicists are working very hard to put together a grand picture that unifies everything into one super-duper model. It's a delightful game, but at the present time none of the speculators agree with any of the other speculators as to what the grand picture is. (Feynman 1985: 150)

PROBLEMS OF DEFINITION

42

Comparing empires obviously requires some reflection on the nature of the domain itself, and more particularly, in this context, on the vexed question of the criteria for inclusion and exclusion (Duverger 1980). Empires are states, but not all states are empires; we may begin with this simple dictum. But going beyond such rather evident wisdom, it appears clear that there are at least two quite different ways of thinking about empires. One approach, relatively structuralist in orientation, would require a very large number of criteria to be met by any state that has pretensions to being an empire. The "symptoms" of empire would include elaborate hierarchical systems of administration, extensive military power (and the fiscal mechanisms that go with it), the control over extensive landmasses, a large subject population, and substantial revenues. Not only might all of these be taken into consideration, but some of our colleagues would even wish to define quantitative thresholds to be met in each of these cases. I must confess, at the outset, to considerable skepticism with regard to this quite peremptory manner of proceeding. If one is to use the concept of empire as much for antique political formations, when the world population was a mere fraction of what it was in, for example, around 1700, and the technologies of state-building rather different from those of the medieval and modern periods, it is obvious that the same demographic, or fiscal, or even military thresholds could simply not work for, say, the Achaemenids and the sixteenth-century Ottomans. The problem is roughly the same as defining an idea such as the "city": many quite minor settlements in South Asia today would exceed in population what were considered cities in antiquity, but tlley do not function as cities. It would hence appear to me far more sensible to propose a rather more minimal, contingent, and conjunctural definition of empire, one that controls,

.

:.

inter alia, for tile passage of time; thus, one ought not anachronistically to demand from empires of tile centuries before tile Common Era tile same tilat one does from early modern empires, for instance. But, equally, I would propose that even within a synchronic sample, such as one from the early modern period, tile notion of "empire" be nuanced somewhat. In the period between 1400 CE and 1750, some clear candidates exist for the status of empire. Amongst these are the Ottomans, tile Mughals in South Asia, the Mings and Qings in China, tile Spaniards (or tile Spanish Habsburgs) after about 1520, tile British and tile French in tile eighteenth century and later. But many more cases exist whose status was indeterminate even to contemporary observers. Were the Mexica in Tenochtitlan (or the Aztecs as they are sometimes called in the literature; see chapters by Brumfiel and Smitll, tllis volume) at the head of an empire, as tile size of tlleir domains might suggest? What of the Burmese monarchy of the Toungoo Dynasty in the years from 1530 to 1600? In brief, what is one to do with seemingly "imperial" states tllat do not fit into the mold and heritage defined in antiquity by four classic, and generally admitted, precedents: the empire of Alexander, tllat of the Achaemenids in Persia, the Roman Empire, and China? This is tile problem that one f.1ces with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. For while it is clear that the Portuguese monarch in tile years before 1580 (the year when tile Portuguese and Spanish crowns were united) did not term himself "emperor," bOtll the Italians and the northern European rivals of the Portuguese saw the overseas possessions controlled from Lisbon more or less in those terms. But, ironically, it was only far later, in 1822, that Dom Pedro of tile House of Bragan~a officially accepted in his Brazilian exile the title of "constitutiona
emperor." Thus, f.1r from the "maximal" approach summarized above, I would propose a "minimal" approach, in which empires would be rather modestly described as follows: (1) as states with an extensive geographical spread, embracing more than one cultural domain and ecozone; (2) as states powered by an ideological motor that claimed extensive, at times even universal, forms of dominance, rather tllan the mere control of a compact domain; (3) as states where the idea of suzerainty was a crucial component of political articulation, and where the monarch was defined not merely as king, but as "king over kings," with an explicit notion of hierarchy in which various levels of sovereignty, both "from above" and "from below," were involved. Writing in 1985, in a classic essay on the administrative and political structure of the Portuguese state in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Asia, the most innovative Portuguese historian of that domain, LUls Filipe Thomaz (1994 [1985]: 208), wrote presciently of his subject matter: "When we confi'ont it with the clll'rent notion of empire, the Portuguese Estado da India may appear to us to be somewhat original, and even disconcerting." He nevertheless proposed to include the Portuguese presence in Asia within the category of empire, while equally making a studious effort at contrasting the Portuguese with tile Spaniards in the Americas in the same period. If the model for the Spaniards was Rome (see MacCormack, this volume), it was argued by Thomaz, the precedent

43

44

Sanjay Subrahmanyam for the Portuguese may well have been the Phoenicians. In marked contrast, some years later, another study, also by a quite well-known authority on the Portuguese Estado da india ("State of India"), concluded with the following remarks, of some relevance for the reflections brought together in this volume: It has to be extremely doubtful that what the Portuguese constructed in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should really bear this title [of empire 1 at all ... Given tile su·ong image conjured up by the use of tile word "empire," and tile difficulty of reconciling tile actual content of the Estado da i"dia for most ofthe sixteentll century to tile real meaning of the term, it might be more appropriate to drop it altogetller. (Disney 1995: 34-5)

The same author then went on to suggest 1:\'10 alternatives: first, the quite vague idea of "network," to which one could immediately raise myriad objections on account of its imprecision, and absolute lack of reference to the idea of power; and second, the idea of a sort of proto-empire, a presence that was arguably in the process of becoming an empire, which to all intents and purposes merely pushes the problem to one remove. Some other writers, more imbued perhaps with the spirit of political correctness, have gone even further since then. The mere mention of words like "empire" in a Portuguese context, it is argued by historians like M. N. Pearson, means that suspicion should fall on the political motives of the authors themselves, whose use of such terminology "come[ s] close to invalidating their work" (Pearson 1996: 7). At the core of this, admittedly at times overwrought, discussion is a serious matter, an issue that needs to be aired: namely, that various sorts of imperial polities have existed in the past, which do not all conform to a single profile, with a contiguous landmass, centralized fiscal and cadastral organizations, and a powerful and continuous imperial military presence in peripheries that are rigorously controlled from a well-defined center. Did the Mongol "empire of the steppes" really constitute an empire in the same sense as, say, the Mughal empire in South Asia? Is the fiscal and bureaucratic structure of Vi jayan agar a at all comparable in its extent and depth to that of the Ottomans? This matter is made even more complex in the case of the Portuguese Estado da india, a structure that was - to employ and adapt a popular Indian expression of the epoch - "written on water." It should be made clear then that the idea of a Portuguese empire in Asia in the early modern period will necessarily be a more contested one than, say, the proposition that there was indeed a Roman empire in antiquity, which no historian at present seems noticeably interested in denying.

DIMENSIONS AND MOTIVATIONS This chapter presents a concise and somewhat schematic narrative of the Portuguese presence in Asia and the Indian Ocean between about 1505 - the year when Dom Francisco de Almeida was sent out as the first viceroy of Portuguese India - and 1665, when hostilities between the Portuguese and their

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India main European rivals, the Dutch, had nearly come to an end in Asia. My narrative will be broadly chronological, and its main analytical purposes are three in number. First and foremost, I wish to argue that unlike an earlier historiography on the Portuguese, which had focused on an Age of Consolidation in the first half of the sixteenth century, followed by an Age of Decadence (reaching its nadir under the later Habsburgs in the 1630s), it is in fact necessary to look to the Portuguese presence in Asia as a constantly evolving one, responding to a multiplicity of stimuli in both Asia and Europe. This itself thus requires a direct disavowal of some of the more structural methods used to define tlle essence oftllis or tllat empire, which one so commonly finds in the literature. Second, it is an implicit argument tllat it is necessary to move away from an exclusive focus on tlle western Indian Ocean (Kerala, Goa, and Gujarat) to a view that allows a far greater importance to the Portuguese presence east of Cape Comorin, namely around tlle Bay of Bengal, in Southeast Asia, and the Far East. Thus, my second objective is to propose a geographical opening out in our general conception of what constituted Portuguese expansion in Asia, and thus an exploration of the interface between "formal" and "informal" empire (as well as tlle shades of gray in between; Coates 1998). Third, there is a question of the social groups to be addressed in defining a history of Portuguese expansion in Asia. Rather than focus exclusively on the official hierarchy of viceroys, governors, and aristocrats (fidalgos), we need to look at other social categories, ranging from trader-settlers (or casados), to renegades, to mixed-blood (mestiro), and to other groups such as Christian converts who participated willy-nilly in building the edifice of the Portuguese presence in Asia. In sum, if many empires that we recognize as such were agrarian ones, we should in my view also permit the possibility of a commercial and frequently semi-formal empire within our range of possibilities. The Portuguese presence in Asia extended by the middle years of the sixteenth century from East Africa to Japan, via the Persian Gulf, India, Sri Lanka, the Malay Peninsula, and island Southeast Asia (Fig. 2.1). There is thus no doubt about its sheer physical spread, with problems being posed, on the contrary, by the density of the presence in each of these areas. What then were the human dimensions of this structure? Around 1540, one frequently cited contemporary estimate puts the number of Portuguese between Sofa la and China at 6000 to 7000; in the 1570s, the chronicler Diogo do Couto puts the total number of Portuguese in Asia at about 16,000. But with the process of miscegenation, and acculturation, the numbers of people within the official settlements of Portuguese Asia were obviously rather higher. These included the casados or casados moradores, which is to say married settler-colonizers; soldados or soldiers; and religiosos or ecclesiastics, as the main categories. The account of Ant6nio Bocarro from the mid-1630s provides us a breakdown by settlement of the casados, showing their presence to have been a vigorous one still at that time, when the Portuguese presence had entered somewhat into decline. Interestingly, he insists on listing not only the casados brancos (white casados) as was usually the case in official compendia, but also the native Christian settlers of the towns,

45

DCS{lJltS and dYllamics ill the Portugucse Estado da India Table 2.1. Casado settlements i1l Port1lguese Asia) 1635 Settlcmcllt Macall Goa Daman Basscin Collll11bo Cochin Mclaka Challl Nagapattinam Jafflla Sao Tome Thana Galle Others Total

White

Rtflell

850 800 400 400 350 300 250 200 140 140 120 80 70 800

850 2200

4900

600 2000 200 50 360 270 200 100

130 525 7485

tu

co i= z

~CI)

Cl)w


(J)

Cl)

~


.

.

:;

{ij

'"

{ii uc·

~

~


«j

e!

3i':l"

co

0

~ u.:


z

~

~

t::

0 0 0

~~ ~

,...

'«

0 0

J

l()

----

0

z

whom he terms casados jJl'etos (black casados) (Subrahmanyam 1993). Bocarro thus arrives at a figure of about 4900 white ca.mdos and some 7500 "black" cC/sados, spread out over settlements ranging fi'om Macau and Goa at the largest to Sof~lla and Chuamba at the smallest (Table 2.1). No less significant in geographical spread, as well as perhaps in its long-term influence, was the missionary presence, with the major religious orders ft-om the second half of the sixteenth centll1'y being the Jesuits, the Pranciscans, and the Augustinians (Table 2.2). There is thus surely some justice to C. R. Boxer's (1969) view that the purse and the cross continued to be the two poles of attraction around which the Portuguese presence in Asia fUllctioned as late as the midseventeenth century. Reading a Illlmber of contemporary travelogues, this is the lasting impression onc is left with, although the writers of such texts may not have been particularly sympathetic to the missionary ambitions of the Portuguese. I t is through the combination of'missionary activity, miscegenation, and private trade that Portuguese creole dialects survived into recent times. Indeed some of the lasting architectll1'al remains in what was once Portuguese Asia (besides some f()rtresses) arc in the {ill'll1 of religious architectlll'c, promoted by both the Crown Patronage of' Missions (padl'oado real) and the powerful religious orders (Fig. 2.2). -' Wc should not imagine that this history was contlict-ti'Ce, and in point of fact the conflict was not limited to that between Christians and Muslims (as it was in late-fitieenth- and early-sixteenth-century Iberia and North Afl·ica). With the Counter- Reformation, Hindus, Buddhists, and others came under increasing critical scrutiny; by the late sixteenth century, even the eastern Syrian Christians

47

48

Designs and dynamics in the Port1lguese Estado cla India

SallJay SlIbrahmanyam

49

Table 2.2. Ecclesiastical orders ill Asia, 1635

2.2 Cathcdmlo/nom !CJ/lS, GOfl.

were being obliged to con/(lI'Ill to rites and standards set by Rome, and implemented through the Portuguese jladl'oado. Nevertheless, as Table 2.2 shows, there is a broad correlation between the great centers of the official prcscncc (such as Goa, Malabar, and Sri Lanka), and thc missionary prescnce. Besides these two prcsences, of trader-settlers and ecclesiastics, the Portugucse Rstado, at any given time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also comprised several thousand soldiers and mariners, spread across a variety of garrisons and fleets. There was, besides, an increasing number ofmerccnaries and renegades who worked not I()r the Portuguese but I()r Asian powers of the period. And finally, wc need to bear in mind the existence of a subject population of varying dimensions, largely concentrated in Goa, the so-called "Northern Province" (north of Goa, in coastal western India), in the Sri Lankan coastal lowlands that

Settlement

rranciscan

Goa East Africa Ethiopia West Asia Sind Dui Daman Bassein Challl Prv. do Nortc (other) Mllghal Court Kanara Cochin Other Malabar Malabar Province Sri Lanka Cot'Omandcl Bengal Mclaka China etc. Solo!' Othe!'

149 0

0 0 0 3

12 15

Total

423

182

Capuchin

75 8 0

Augustine

Dominican

J(suit

102 10

",{)

10 12 15 0

148 14 21 0 0 8 8 15 8 38 5 0 0 0 190 0 0 0 0 190 0 15

302

256

660

()

0

0 0

0 10 10 0 15 12 0 0 15

125 8 0 33 3 0 6 8 15 20 0 0 20

()

()

0 10 0

0 18 8 17 6 15 0

()

()

38 26 27 0 6

58 20 0 96 0 0

0

0 0

()

0 Cl

8 6 12 31 7 0 0 20 0 0 18 5 0

the Portuguese controlled I()r a time between the 1580s and the 1630s, and in parts of the Zambezi valley in East A/'·ica. I f we were to add up the residents of these areas, wc would certainly come up with a population of several hundred thousand, and perhaps even a million, persons who were more or less under the power of the Portuguese li.l'tado, besides the in/(H'Il1al "client" populations of Christians, who were partly controlled through ecclesiastical institutions. These figlll'es remain very rough, and obviously vary ("om time to time, increasing gradually over the lirst halfofthe sixteenth centlll'y and reaching a peak between 1590 and 1610. How did this extensive, if thinly spread, presence come about? At the risk of appearing old-bshioned, an initial consideration of the metropolis of the empire may not be out of place at this juncture. Thus, some briefrdlections may be neeessary on the European background to Portuguese expansion in Asia. It has often been remarked that Portugal was one of the less "advanced" countries in Europe at the time that it began its expansion, and indeed historically much less prosperous than northern and central Italy, France, or Spain. In all of Iberia, Portugal was the last area to resist the Romans, the last to be incorporated into

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Sanjay Subrahmanyam

the empire of the Visigoths, the last to adopt the Christian calendar, and the last to adopt tities for its nobility in accordance with what obtained elsewhere. Earlysixteenth-century t:ravelers from elsewhere in Europe to Portugal often remarked on tile remoteness and poverty of tile country, in apparent contrast to Venice, or Florence, or tile Spain of the CatilOlic Monarchs and Charles V. Arguably, what made overseas expansion possible in tilese unpromising circumstances was tile intervention of tile Portuguese state. For, at tile outset, it may be wortil insisting that Portugal in the crucial period of Dom Manuel (1'. 1495-1521) was a sort of mercantilist state, and that its overseas expansion was hence motivated by a series of "materialist" motives as much as by "idealistic" ones. Modern historians tend to shy away from tile term "mercantilism," claiming tilat it simplifies far too complex a set of state policies. Yet, as historians of bOtil Asia and Europe in tilis period well know, certain policies can indeed be seen to transform states into quasi-commercial enterprises, and also into rivals of tilose of tileir subjects who were engaged in such activities. In the case of Portugal, a comparative historian has in a well-known work spoken of "monarchical capitalism" (capitalismo monarquico portugues), and it is tius phenomenon tilat we need to pose here within tile framework of mercantilism (Dias 1963-4). Historians of the later medieval period have shown convincingly tilat tile Portuguese monarchy was a crucial instrument, a fulcrum tilat from the fourteentil century held the balance between opposing elements in the country, in tile sense not of a class struggle pure and simple, but of a struggle between regions, between interior and coast, between a nobility attracted to Castile and an urban bourgeoisie and artisan class that saw trade as the obvious key to prosperity, given Portugal's - and especially Lisbon's - position at tile cusp of tile Mediterranean and tile Atiantic. What made this struggle particularly complex was the fact that the nobility itself was divided on some crucial questions concerning tile nature of both internal politics and expansion, which in turn was furtiler exacerbated by the entry of some merchants into the lower nobility. The basic strategy of the Portuguese monarchs, whose sphere ofinfluence was naturally enlarged as a consequence of the vacuum created by opposing groups pulling in different directions, does not seem wholly different at times from the policies followed by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabela, in neighboring Castile-Aragon. There too, an alliance of the cities (the so-called hermandad) was built up in the 1470s to combat the power of the rural-based aristocracy; tilere too, the crown sought to gain control of the military orders (in Portugal, those of Christ, Santiago, and Avis being the most important). But the crucial difference lay in the attitude toward trade itself. However hard the Spanish rulers may have tried at times to imitate the Portuguese "model" setting up their own Casa de Contratacilm in January 1503, for example, as an explicit mirror image of the Portuguese Casa da India - the nvo projects remained very different in spirit until fairly late in the mid-sixteenth century. One of the most important, and rather original, institutions in the latefifteentil-century Portuguese overseas system was the feitoria or f.1ctory.

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

Medieval cities in both Europe and Asia, which had numerous colonies of resident foreigners, tended to develop systems of internal regulation for these foreign communities, which at times gave them considerable social and juridical autonomy. In cities like fifteenth-century Melaka (in Southeast Asia), for instance, tilis took the form of tile system of multiple community-heads (or syahbandars), with tile Gujaratis, Tamils, Javanese and otiler groups each having a "representative" leader. In tile Mediterranean, and also in tile Low Countries, tile system of consuls of different "nations" had a sinular aspect and function. Thus, in medieval Bruges for example the Venetians and Genoese each had Jheir own consul, as did tile Hanseatic merchants and tile south Germans. But this post of consul must be distinguished, bOtil in theory and in practice, from tile Portuguese notion of f.1ctor (feitor), who derived his legitimacy (and also his remuneration) not fi'om tile merchant commllluty in which he was resident, but from an external state authority. One of the earliest Portuguese feitorias whose history we can trace in detail was located in tile city of Bruges. This factory remained in Bruges until the late fifteenth century, eventually shifting to Antwerp in 1498 (the year of Vas co da Gama's arrival in India) after a decade of unstable existence due to local political turmoil. The feitor's activities here, as elsewhere, were related to an increasingly important aspect of the royal household's interests in the fifteenth century: the trade conducted on royal ships (naus del-Rei). From at least the third quarter of the fourteenth century, there is sporadic evidence of the Portuguese crown's direct interest in trade. In the middle years of the next century, the celebrated Infante Dom Henrique both owned merchant ships, and even financed corsair ventures; still later, the ruler Dom Joao II, while still heir apparent, had vessels trading to Middelburgh. These royal merchant-capitalists, albeit still operating on a relatively small scale, traded in slaves and sugar, sold the grain, wine, and fruit produced in their reguengos (estates), and were imitated by a number of other nobles - notably the Duke of Bragan~a, the Condc de Vila Real, and even the Duke of Beja (the future Dom Manuel I) who in the 1480s already had his own factor in Flanders. Thus, the contemptuous epithet used by the French King Fran~ois I to describe Dom Manuci in the early sixteenth century - the "grocer king" (le roi epicier) - had roots going back at least into the early fifteenth century. The phenomenon of Portuguese royal mercantilism reached its apogee in the period fi'om the 1480s to the 1520s, under Dom Joao II and his successor Dom Manuel 1. Before this, the reign of Dom Monso V (I'. 1448-81) had been characterized by a preoccupation with military adventurism in North Mrica, rather tilan the direct control of maritime trade. Initially, it was the king's uncle, the Inf.1nte Dom Henrique, who concerned himself with the business of overseas expansion. After his death, Dom Afonso in 1469 gave over to a prosperous Lisbon-based merchant what was potentially the most significant of his mercantile avenues, namely the right to trade on the Guinea coast, for a period of six years. The contract also stipulated that the merchant-contractor push the exploration of the African coast along, and as an unforeseen result, in 1471, the

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Portuguese were able to attain what was later called Sao Jorge da Mina, which became a major center of gold trade and export. Little could be made of this discovery until the 1480s, altllOugh its significance was undoubtedly appreciated quickly. The policies of Do m Joao Il are in direct contrast to tllOse of his fatl1er. Quite resolutely turning his back on Castile, and executing Portugal's most powerful nobleman, tl1e Duke ofBragans:a, were two early signs of his impatience witl1 tl1e territorial nobility and its predilections. Again, when it came to soutl1ward expansion, it was not tl1e costly route of Nortl1 Afi"ican adventures - pleasing tllOugh tl1ey may have been to the nobility, who could send tl1eir second sons and bastard offspring tl1ere - tl1at he opted for, but rather the Atlantic route. In early 1482 a major fortress was built at tl1e gold-trading center of Sao Jorge da Mina, and by tl1e early sixteenth century around a dozen caravels made tl1e trip between Lisbon and tl1e gold-trading factories each year, bringing back a large sum of gold every year. It is tl1is preoccupation witl1 commerce ratl1er than military conquest tl1at made Dom Joao a logical choice as patron for men like Columbus, who in 1486 presented tl1e king witl1 a proposal to seek a westerly route to India. As is well known, Dom Joao rejected Columbus' proposal, but tl1is was not because of a return to traditional, North Mrican, preoccupations. Instead, Dom Joao had his own plans. He had sent out emissaries overland to East Mrica and India via the Mediterranean, and then, in 1487-8, was able to savor tl1e triumph of having his subject Bartolomeu Dias round the Cape of Good Hope. The all-sea route to India was now open, though internal opposition in Portugal seems to have prevented its actual use for a decade. It was only after the succession of Do m Manuel in 1495 that an expedition was actually sent out to explore tl1e Indian Ocean, and that too the tiny fleet commanded by Vasco da Gama. The building blocks stressed so far have been two in number: first, capital and expertise, and second, an institutional structure founded largely on the feitoria, and its head the feitor. Since the exploration of the Atlantic was largely centered around the discovery and settlement of desert islands, force was of little importance there save in the so-calledguerra do corso, the corsair activity equally practiced by Portuguese, Spanish, and French. Military force - the preoccupation of onc section of Portuguese society - was given full expression elsewhere, in the sanguinary campaigns of North Africa, such as in the capture of Ceuta and defense of al-Qasr al-Saghir, Arzila, or Tangiers.

IDEOLOGIES OF EMPIRE-BUILDING Taken to its logical extreme, it might seem that I am arguing that the Portuguese expansion enterprise of the fifteenth century was conceived in compartments. In one resided rational calculation and commerce, and in another the atavistic passions of anti-Muslim feeling were to be found. But this was not really the case, and in f.1Ct royal mercantilism itself cannot be seen in Dom Manuel's reign

Desigm and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

WitllOut its inevitable counterpart - royal messianism. That Porulguese expansion in general had a religious side to it is a commonplace in writings on tl1e subject, which speak of the "Crusading spirit" of tl1e Lusitanians, tl1e residual momentum left by tl1e "reconquest" (reconquista) oftl1e Iberian peninsula, and so on. Support for tl1is view can be found in tl1e writings of the greatest contemporary ideologue of Portuguese expansion, the sixteenth-century chronicler Joao de Barros. Barros, charged by his sovereign Dom Joao III to write of the deeds that tl1e Portuguese did in the discovery and conquest of the seas and lands of the Orient, nevertheless began his great chronicle of Asia by referring to how in the land of Arabia tl1at "great anti-Christ" Muhammad had risen to power in tl1e late sixtl1 century, leading to the Muslim conquest of Arabia itself, as well as parts of Syria, Persia, and Egypt. It was thus the rise of Islam that, in Barros' view, provided tl1e logical starting-point for an understanding of how the Portuguese came to be in Asia; he looks at the Muslim conquest of Iberia, the reconquest, the Atlantic explorations, and the charting of the west coast of Afi·ica, only arriving at the first Portuguese expedition to the Indian Ocean in the fourth book of his first Decada. However, the careful reader of Barros and of other contemporary writings and documents soon discovers that those who were so religiously motivated could often be equally the persons in whose breasts the most fervently mercantilist spirit resided. An example is the Infante Dom Henrique, Master of the Order of Christ and creator of the Portuguese Crown Patronage of Missions (the padroado da Ordem de Cristo, later to become the padroado rea/under Dom Manuel) by virtue of Papal Bulls, but equally a trader in sugar and slaves, and a patron of corsair ventures. Still, religious though Dom Henrique was, he was not really a messianist. Portuguese messianism is often associated quasi-exclusively with Dom Manuel's great-grandson, Dom Sebastiao (d. 1578), the focal point of a messianic cult after his death in North Africa in 1578. But, more recently, historians have pointed to the existence of a messianism of a somewhat different sort in the court of Dom Manuel. Revealed in the writings of some of his courtiers like Duarte Galvao and Duarte Pacheco Pereira, the proximate psychological reason for this messianism was the monarch's rather improbable accession to the throne, after the fortuitous demise of six persons closer to the throne than he (Aubin 1996). Furthermore, in his early life, Dom Manuel's educators seem to have imbued him with religious ideas derivative from Joachim of Fiore (c. 1130-1202), a Cistercian monk born in Calabria, who had a somewhat ambiguous reputation in Christian theology, being regarded by some as a saint and others as a heretic (Thomaz 1990). Joachite philosophizing centered around some key ideas: the literalist belief that onc had to wrestle with the letter of the scriptures to get at the spirit, a trinitarian approach to history, and an apocalyptic vision that held that a new age would soon dawn, corresponding to the Fifth Empire of the biblical Book of Daniel. Further, a powerfulmillenarian conjuncture operated in Europe in the late fifteenth century, and not only Christians like Columbus and Savonarola, but Iberian Jews (persecuted in both neigh boring

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Spain and Dom Manuel's Portugal), seem to have subscribed to such eschatological notions to some degree. Encouraged by some influential members of his council after his accession to the throne, these messianic beliefs seem to have enabled Dom Manuel at times to act in a highly autocratic fashion, since he believed that he was directly inspired by tile Holy Spirit. But tile Joachite influence on tile ruler also brought with it another effect: a specific preoccupation (indeed, even an obsession) Witll tile recapture ofJerusalem, which under Dom Manue! came to be seen as tile logical culmination of overseas expansion, and the crowning achievement that would enable him to claim tile title of Emperor of the East (or perhaps even Universal Emperor). The Jerusalem enterprise was one tllat lived and died Witll Dom Manuel, for neitller his predecessors nor his successors seem to have been particularly enamored of the idea. We should stress tllough tllat even in tactical terms tllere was no necessary contradiction between royal mercantilism and messianism, since tile former could be accommodated to tile latter. Dom Manuel's plan was to mount a two-pronged attack on tile Mamluk Kingdom of Egypt (or tile "Sultanate of Babylonia," as his messianist supporters termed it), witll one force attacking via North Africa, and the other via the Red Sea, once the Portuguese were in tile Indian Ocean. It is true tllat tllis policy required reactivating tile North African front, after a lull under Dom Joao Il, and hence a diversion of resources from mercantile activity. But tile Red Sea strategy was truly one of killing two birds with one stone: a blockade of the entry to the Red Sea would not only give tile Portuguese a decisive advantage in the European market for pepper and spices over their Venetian rivals (who were supplied through Cairo and Alexandria), but also cut into the revenue-base of the Mamluks. In order to do this, however, the support of other Asian powers was deemed necessary. Here Dom Manuel and his supporters were badly misinformed; for they believed, even after Vasco da Gama's return to Portugal in 1499, that the number of Christian kingdoms in Asia was far larger than was in fact the case. Eventually, this meant a strategy centered around an alliance with Ethiopia, the state ruled over by the Negus, whom the Portuguese identified as the fabled Prester John. This alliance was deeply opposed by other parties, both in Portugal and in Portuguese Asia. Thus, royal mercantilism was in part a necessary condition for the putting into effect of messianist plans: making war required resources, especially a war that was unlikely to enthuse the nobility (as the Jerusalem campaign is unlikely to have done, had it ever been prosecuted; Costa and Rodrigues 1992). The idea of maintaining a larger standing army, that became popular in the reign of Do m Manuel, was a natural outcome of this logic. It was also the next step in tile development of royal absolutism, albeit a step that was never wholly put into effect. The central problem with the two guiding principles of Do m Manuel's overseas policy was hence not their mutually contradictory nature, but rather the hostility they evoked in certain quarters, and on account of which they remained circumscribed in reality. As is well known, after a series of individual maritime trading-cum-military

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

expeditions, including two led by Vasco da Gama himself in 1497-9, and ilien again in 1502-3, tile Pornlguese presence in Asia acquired a certain solidity and permanence with tile sending of D. Francisco de Almeida as tile first viceroy to Portuguese Asia in 1505. The four years of his viceroyalty remain controversial. Besides tile defeat of a Mamluk expeditionary fleet off the Gujarati port of Diu in 1509, notlling of major geopolitical significance is to be reported from iliis epoch, otller than a number of exploratory missions (in which the viceroy seems only reluctantly to have acquiesced). However, tile next six years, from 1509 to 1515, are dramatic ones. The governor in this period, the celebrated Afonso de Albuquerque, who was closely attached to tile messianist Manueline ideology, succeeded in capturing first Goa, then Melaka, and finally the Persian Gulf island-port of Hurmuz. By 1521, the extant forts in Portuguese hands were tile following, Witll their construction dates being indicated in brackets: from west to east Sofala (1505), Mozambique (1508), Hurmuz (1515), Chaul (1521), Goa (1510), Cannanore (1505), Calicut (1513), Cochin (1503), Kollam (1519), Colombo (1518), Pasai (1521), and Melaka (1511). Forts earlier constructed and abandoned included Kilwa (1505-12), and the islands of Suqotra (1507-11) and Anjedive (1505-7). Undoubtedly some major gaps still remained. One of these was Aden, guarding the entrance to tile Red Sea, which Albuquerque was unable to take, and the long and busy coastline ofGujarat and tile Konkan too was as yet not host to any Portuguese settlement.

THE CREATION OF A DIALECTIC The action of the period noted above largely took place in the wcstern Indian Ocean, between Sri Lanka and East Africa. From as early as 1505, the intention was always to build a string of fortresscs in that rcgion (Fig. 2.3), and Albuqucrque only extended this conception to its logical cnd. The one major ventmc prosecuted by Albuquerque outside the western Indian Ocean was the captme of Melaka, which he took in August 1511. This act had profound and even somewhat unforeseen consequences for the Portuguese enterprise, leading to the creation of a second pattern of activity, to the cast of Cape Comorin. In the comse of their protracted actions leading up to the taking of Melaka, the Portuguese had acquired allies fi'om within the town's mercantile community. These were mostly Tamil merchants of considerable standing in the trade within the Bay of Bengal and cast of Melaka. The other major community in Melaka, the Gujaratis, concentrated tor the most part on trade to Malabar, Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf - and fled Melaka en masse on the Portuguese capture. It was through the Tamils that Albuquerque, and his representative in Melaka, the first captain Rui de Brito Patalim, sought to make contact with other parts of the Bay of Bengal littoral, insular Southeast Asia, and the Far East. Between 1511 and Albuquerque's death in 1515, a series of mar itime ventures was organized on a cooperative basis between the Portuguese crown and sevcral Tamil merchants (but especially a certain Setu Nayinar): ships

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Srmjay Sltbmlmtallyalll

went to Martaban in Burma, to Pulicat in southeastern India, to the Moluccas, and so on (Subrahmanyam 1990a, 1990b). Such ventures continued until about 1518. Therea(ter, they were replaced by Portuguese crown shipping with a captain, (:1Ctor, and scrivener on board each vessel, all ofwhol11 were Portuguese. In the initial phase, onc of apprenticeship and exploration, things were somewhat different: the crown was no more than a partner in the venture, and the other (Tamil) partner also sent his representatives on board the vessel. From these ventures there gradually emerged the system of m1'l'cims (or crown voyages), between designated ports in Asia such as Pulicat and Melaka, or Melaka and Chittagong (in Bengal). The system was not peculiar to the areas east of Cape Comorin. In the western Indian Ocean, there was similarly a set of wI'I'ci1'lls linking, say, Hurmuz to several ports on the Indian west coast. However, (i'om the 1520s, the (1Il'l'cim system represented a compromise between crown and private interests. The captain and other officials were allowed the (i'ee use ofa certain proportion of the cargo-hold (their qlliT/ta/ada), in addition to being given a salary. It was not uncommon by the early 1520s for noblemen embarking /I'om Portugal lix Asia already to have letters of authorization li'om the king, appointing them to the eaptaincy of this or that voyage. The crown supplied the vessel, and its trading interests were secured in part by its control over the greater part of the cargo space.

Desigm rll/d dYllamics

ill

the POl'tIIBIICSC Estado da India

East of Cape COl11orin, the first official trading routes to emerge were those from the Indian west coast to the Banda Islands in the Moluccas via Melaka, to Coromandel (that is, Pulicat), and to Pegu in lower Burma. There then (c)l!owed others: to Bengal, and to a whole host of ports on the Malay Peninsula. The captains of these were at times asked to play the role of diplomats and ambassadors, and to establish relations between Goa and the rulers of the ports to which the wrl'cims were destined. Albuquerque was replaced, even bcfi)l'e his death, by his bitter rival Lopo Soares de Albergaria, who represented a wholly different conception of Asian affairs than his predecessor. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that the govern01'ship of Lopo Soares (1515-18) was in its own way as startling in its impact as that of Albllqllerqlle. Lopo Soares was an avowed "(t-ee trader." He is supposed to have proclaimed that Portuguese in Asia were (i'ee to go anywhere to seck profit, and thus set inl11otion what has been termed the "great ("eedom" (Bratldc Joltltm) , the diametric opposite of Albuquerque's dil'~fJiJmc (Bouchon and Thomaz 1988). By 1520, this had already had dramatic effects. Private Portuguese settlements sprang up in most major ports of the Bay of Bengal littoral, and in such places as Patani, and Pahang on the Malay Peninsula. The numbers ofPortugllese involved were by no means negligible. In Pulicat, on the Corol11andel coast of southeastern India, it is reported that there were two or three hundred Portuguese by 1520, and smaller nuclei could he (Jllnd in Martaban, Tenasserim, and other centers on the l:1Cing littoral of the Bay of Bengal. The presence of the private Portuguese was undoubtedly an embarrassment fC)I' the captains of the erown ships that visited these ports, the more so since some of these Portuguese were not above turning pirate or corsair on occasion. Or worse still, {I'om the official Portuguese viewpoint, they could turn renegade, convert to Islam, and seck entry into an Islamic polity sllch as that of the Sultanate of Bengal. The two patterns described above have sometimes been compared to two earlier patterns in Portuguese expansion that of the western I ndian Ocean to North Aft'ica, and that of the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia to the west coast of Africa. By this, it is meant that in the 1(>I'I11er case, the military aspect dominated the commercial one, and the upper nobility was a relatively strong presence; while in the IattTr case the mercantile impulse dominated the military onc, with the middle and lower nobility and the marginal elements in Portuguese society being more in evidence. The processes of the period 1525-40 served (lr the most part to entrench rather than disturb this distinction. It may be llseful here to take stock briefly of the human numbers involved in empire building at this point. As early as 1516, there were probably something like 4000 Portuguese in Asia; by 1540, Dom Joao de Castl'o stated that the number was lip to between 6000 and 7000. Of these, something like 400 were in Cochin alone, Melaka had some 250, and Hlll'I1lUZ less than 150. But a large number were also olltside the Portuguese state's control. In Ethiopia there may have been as many as 200 by 1550, and something like three to f(llll' times that

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number in all the ports of the Coromandel coast of eastern India taken together. But equally important were centers acquired on the Indian west coast after Albuquerque: Bassein, Daman, Chaul, and Diu. Two of these, Bassein and Diu, were reluctantly ceded to tlle Portuguese by Sultan Balladur of Gujarat in 1534 and 1535. The former seems to have been acquired for two reasons: first to secure the supply lines of Goa, which suffered from a deficit of food; and second, to provide a means to pamper tlle residual seignorial pretensions of tlle fidalgos, who were given estates (called prazos) in tlllS area, which came to be known as tlle Northern Province (proJlincia do norte). Chaul, where a fortress was built as early as 1521, was meant to act together Witll Diu in order to serve as a check on Gujarati mercantile activity between the Indian west coast and tlle ports that were identified as "enemies" of tlle Portuguese state. We may see these as supplementing, but not fundamentally altering, tlle Portuguese western Indian Ocean network as it stood in 1515. The fact tllat tlley yielded a not inconsiderable amount from land-revenue and commercial taxes was a furtller reason for tlleir acquisition. Similarly, tlle changes in tlle Portuguese presence in East Mrica in tlle 1530s were by way of consolidation ratller tllan fundamental restructuring. Already in Albuquerque's time, tlle Portuguese had abandoned tlleir fort at Kilwa, and in tlle 1530s tlley began to penetrate up tlle Zambezi, in an attempt to come to grips with the inland supplylines of the coastal ports. Small settlements were set up at Sena and Tete, and tllen, in 1544, in Quelimane. The western Indian Ocean was also where the major part of the Portuguese state's maritime resources continued to be concentrated. An anonymous text called the Lembranra das Cousas da india (Memorandum on India Mf.'lirs), authored in 1525, gives us detailed data on the shipping available to the Portuguese governor at the time, Dom Henrique de Meneses (the immediate successor to Vasco da Gama, who had died in office as viceroy in December 1524). The disposition of these vessels is of some significance. Three of the largest, totaling something like 1500 toneis, were in Hurmuz; several others were being deployed at Calicut. One galleon and a round-ship were at Melaka; another galleon was to go to Melaka. In the Bay of Bengal there was a single vessel, in which the captain of Coromandel had left for Pulicat. This is in itself a demonstration of the relative weight given to different areas by Portuguese officialdom in the period. Did these relatively weak shipping resources mean that the main Portuguese objective - securing the Asia-Europe pepper and spice trade - could not be attained? The curious fact remains that despite the relatively poor Portuguese position, trade to the Red Sea fi'om India and Southeast Asia was rather limited in this period. The Arabic chronicles from the Hadramaut (southern Arabia) in tlle late 1520s and 1530s suggest that the only vessels conspicuous enough for the Portuguese to chase and capture in these years were some pepper-bearing ships from tlle port ofBhatkal, south ofGoa. It is possible that there were others, from such ports as Kollam, Calicut, and Cannanore, to which the Pormguese

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

routinely turned a blind eye, but that remains in the realm of speculation. It is more or less clear, however, that tlle pepper and spice trade from South Asia and Southeast Asia to West Asia continued in tlle 1530s and 1540s after a rude shock in tlle 1500s, when the older trade route went into depression. Despite tlle fact that tlle Portuguese controlled Hurmuz, spices continued to pass through tllere; the key question is, however, tlle market for which tllese were destined. There appears to be a good case to be made for the fact tllat tlle spices tllat passed tllrough here were intended in good measure not for tlle European market but to meet Iranian, Turkish, and North Mrican consumption. Thus, in the case of the western Indian Ocean, tlle logic of tlle early years worked itself out, so tllat a species of compromise was attained. Once tlle basic network of fortresses was in place, and once tlle European distribution of pepper and spices was more or less in Portuguese hands, tlle true nature of Asian demand too could be gauged. By 1518, tlle return cargoes to Europe spanned a great diversity of products, unlike the rather pepper-centered cargo that was brought back, say, in 1505. The crown's fundamental trade revenues were tllllS assured, and continued to be substantial through tlle 1520s and early 1530s (Godinho 1990: 411-26). There remained the intra-Asian trade, run on the system of crown carreiras, and here tlle situation was ratller more complex. From the late 1520s, a tendency becomes manifest to limit tlle number of carreiras; some, such as the Bhatkal-Hurmuz route, ceased to function in about this period. Again, from 1521 to 1535, the clove trade from the Moluccas operated as a crown monopoly. But from the latter date, private merchants were also permitted to participate, provided they paid the crown a levy, and also gave over one-third of the cloves they brought back to the crown at a fixed price (lower than the market rate). But what of claims of generalized monopoly over Asian trade, sometimes inferred from the title taken on by the Portuguese monarch Dom Manuel after Vasco da Gama's return from Asia: "Lord of the Conquest, Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India"? It has been pointed out by scholars who have analyzed the content of these epithets in the light of juridical usage in medieval Portugal, that the generalized doctrine of closed seas (or mare clausum) was not adhered to by all in the Portuguese court, and could only be justified if one adopted a radical position - one that had, incidentally, been refuted by theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas - to the effect that the non-Christian powers were by definition illegitimate and had no standing. To the extent that the Portuguese ruler had sanction for his rights, it came fi'om the Papal Bull of Nicholas V in 1455, which was careful, however, to note that the monopoly was of navigation to India (that is, usque ad in dos) and not in tlle Indian Ocean. Thus, what was being discussed was the right over the Atlantic, and in particular in relation to other Christian powers like Spain or France. Those Portuguese who extended this to navigation within Asia were in fact taking a rather wide interpretation oftlle Papal grant (Thomaz 1994: 222-3). The only manner in which the larger claim could be justified was as follows:

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first, the Portuguese ruler, as a monarch, had the right to assert a monopoly in relation to his own subjects, and could thus forbid them from trading in certain goods. Second, the state of war could be used as a justification for the denial to certain ships of the right to navigate. From the latter stems the so-called cartaz system, a system of safe-conducts issued to Asian ships by the Portuguese, initially on the Malabar coast, and later on Coromandel, in Gujarat, and elsewhere. According to the chronicler Gaspar Correia, in 1502, cartazes were first issued by Vasco da Gama to ships from the Malabar ports of Kollam, Cochin, and Cannanore, in order to certify to the fact that they pertained to areas that were not at war with the Portuguese. In the first stages, it is hence clear that the cartaz was not really a revenue-raising measure, as has sometimes been claimed. The limited claims that the Portuguese monarchs in fact made in this period can also be seen from their preoccupation with pareas, or tribute. We have already noted that there is some basis to the idea that Dom Manuel wished to declare himself Emperor of the East in the years before he died, and was possibly waiting for the Jerusalem enterprise to be brought to a successful conclusion before doing so. His pretensions rested, however, not on the exercise of sovereignty over large territories (for the colonization of Brazil was still a thing of the future); instead, he wished to have himself declared suzerain over as many rulers as possible in Asia. Thus, in 1521, when the fortress at Chaul was constructed by Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, it was with the provision that the Nizam Shahi rulers of Ahmadnagar (to whom the port belonged) would pay pareas worth 2000 gold pagodas; this "tribute" was raised to 7000 pagodas after 1539. In Ternate, in eastern Indonesia, the pareas were in terms of palm-leaves and sago; in Kilwa, the Sultans were required in the early sixteenth century to pay pareas in gold. Though the sums of money (or quantities of goods) involved were thus often trivial, the point was much more the juridical f.1Ct of tribute than its amount. Harking back to the political concepts of the taifa (or system of "Party Kingdoms," deriving in turn from the Arabic notion of td)ifat), that had been in vogue in Iberia in the later Islamic period, the Portuguese monarch intended to assert a widespread rather than deep influence, as we see from other evidence as well. The most crucial evidence in this respect may be the fact that the Portuguese did very little explicitly to interfere with local administrative systems in the first years of their mle. In Melaka, at first they tried to persuade the Sultan to return as their vassal. Failing this, they strengthened the hand of the bmdahara (or "prime minister"), and eventually made the office a hereditary one in the hands of a Tamil family. Similarly, in Hurmuz, they established not full sovereign rights but a protectorate, permitting the Shah to remain in place, even though they gradually encroached on his revenue-base. Again in Goa, the cmcial post of tanadar-mor was held for over two and a half decades by a certain Brahmin entrepreneur called Krishna, who in the early 1520s visited Portugal, and managed to secure a number of plum posts for himself. The charter (fora!)

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

ofl526 in Goa, put together by Monso Mexia, reflects tlus "conservative" ideology, and is usually seen more as an attempt to record existing rights than to redefine them. However, as I have shown elsewhere, tlle longer-term effects of such a "museological" approach were not quite tllose tllat had been intended. Matters were already somewhat different in tlle case of the so-called provincia do norte (north of Go a), where the earlier prebend-holders oftlle Gujarat Sultanate were not displaced in tlle initial phase after the Portuguese takeover. Still further changes took place in the next phase, and particularly from tlle late 1540s. Unlike the earlier decades, the 1530s are a difficult period to characterize in tlle history of Portuguese Asia. This is partly because its main feature is of a period in which the logic defined in an earlier period seeks to work itself out consolidation, ratller than departure from the earlier trend, seems to be the rule. But it is also a period in which much is occurring at the fringes of the consciousness of Portuguese in Asia, processes that eventually impinged on their Asian enterprise in a major way. We can broadly sum these up under three heads. First, tlle 1530s mark the creation in Brazil of the donatory-captaincy system, owing to which the colonization of the Brazilian interior truly gets under way; the man initially given charge of this, Martim Monso de Sousa, was later to be governor of Portuguese Asia in the 1540s. Brazil as a competitor of Asia for resources, both human and financial, was thus on the verge of coming to life. Second, the Ottoman rulerSuleyman (1'.1520-66), whose expansionary focus had mainly been to the west in the 1520s - in Egypt and Hungary - turned his attention in the 1530s and 1540s to the southern "underbelly" of his domain. The first major Ottoman fleet, constructed at Suez, had been ready from the early 1530s, but it was only after the Ottoman conquest of Basra that the fleet was sent out, under the command of Hadim Suleyman Pasha in the celebrated "first siege" of Diu of 1538. The expedition had mixed results, helping to consolidate Ottoman control over the Red Sea littoral, but being unsuccesshll in its attack on the Portuguese stronghold of Diu. But this expedition was only a portent of things to come in the next phase, as Portuguese-Ottoman rivalry continued to fester into at least the 1570s. Third, the 1530s saw the gradual emergence in the Bay of Bengal of a new complex of trade and political power. As the Husain Shahi Sultanate in Bengal declined in the early 1530s, two processes became visible. On the one hand, the 1530s witnessed the emergence of two aggressively mercantilist states: Arakan in northern BUJ'ma, under Minbin (I'. 1531-53), with his capital at the city of Mrauk-u, and the Toungoo empire in lower BUJ'ma under Tabin-shwei-hti (I'. 1531-50). Trade on the BUJ'mese coast, which had earlier proceeded in fits and starts, became relatively stable, and the ports of Cosmin (in the western Irrawaddy delta) and Martaban (at the mouth of the Salween river) vied with Mrauk-u in the trade to Coromandel. At the same time, Bengal and Burma became the f.wored hunting ground oflarger and larger numbers of Portuguese, perhaps several hundred by 1540 (Subrahmanyam 1990a).

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THE MID-CENTURY INFLECTION AND AFTER Much evolved in the next three decades, years that were also marked by a profound fiscal and economic crisis in Portuguese Asia. The roots of this crisis must be sought in a number of separate phenomena that came together in a conjunctural pattern: poor weather and failed crops in the 1540s leading to large-scale famines in India and a shrinkage of commerce; pernlrbations in the patterns of trade in Europe as well as on the Cape Route; political difficulties faced by the Portuguese on a number of fronts; as well as the development within Portuguese Asia of virulent forms of internal opposition to official trade. Private trade expanded apace in tlus period, as tlle official carreira system gradually lapsed into apatllY. Private traders pushed frontiers furtller and furtller, opening up tlle Japan trade (and as a consequence creating Japan as a missionary field for tlle Jesuits) by about 1543. In the late 1550s, tlle troubled Portuguese presence off the soutlleast coast of Cluna at last found an official blessing from tlle Ming dynasty, Witll tlle creation of tlle settlement of Macau. It began to appear in tllese years tllat tlle center of gravity of tlle whole Portuguese enterprise in Asia had started to drift eastward, Witll a major sluft from the network offortresses defined under Monso de Albuquerque. Thus, by 1570, the Portuguese had a presence in almost every region of Asia tllat tlley were to penetrate in tlle course of tlle sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a sense tllerefore, tllis period marks a limit to tlle geographical extension of Portuguese Asian expansion, Witll what remained being tlle more intensive exploitation of spaces that had been explored by 1570. Small colonies of Portuguese -missionaries, private traders, renegades or crown representatives - were to be found by now in Japan, China, mainland Southeast Asia, the Indonesian archipelago, the South Asian landmass, Iran and the Ottoman domains, and East Mrica. The historian of almost any part of coastal Asia can by this period be certain that some Portuguese sources and accounts exist of his or her region of interest, some of them impressionistic and wildly inaccurate, others more based on detailed, empirical, materials. This is what makes possible the creation in this period of such compendia as the celebrated and oft-reproduced COdice Casanateme, a portfolio of seventy-six watercolors, depicting the racial characteristics, customs, and costumes of the peoples of coastal East Mrica and Asia. Beginning with tlle "Kaffir of [the Cape of] Good Hope," the anonymous painter takes us through Ethiopia, the Red Sea, Iran, Gujarat and Goa (to both of which he devotes several watercolors), the K'\I1ara and Malabar coasts, Coromandel and Orissa, Bengal, Burma, the Malay world, Sumatra, Java, the Moluccas, eventually ending his visual odyssey in China. We are now far from the fantasies of tlle ancients, and even the medieval Italian travelers; what has now been imposed on tlle area is a vision in which the experiences of tlle sixteenth cennlry have made their mark. Still, most materials generated by the Pornlguese up to tllis period - the politico-military chronicles of Ban'os and Castanheda, for instance - still stick

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India fairly close to tlle littoral in what they retail. The Portuguese Estado da indiaas tlle settlements and territories under tlle control of Go a came to be called from roughly tlus period - remained therefore essentially a maritime affair. Even the little official expansion and conquest undertaken in tlle 1560s continued to be in line Witll tllis conception oftllings. In 1568-9, tlU'ee Kanara ports - Honawar, Basrur, and Mangalore - were taken by tlle Portuguese, for quite traditional reasons, such as the need to control tlle Kanara pepper trade, and tlle need to secure Goa's supply lines from these rice-producing areas. The fact tllat tlus period was chosen was fortuitous, since tlle defeat of tlle Vijayanagara empire in SOUtll India in 1565 by her northern rivals - tlle Sultanates of Bijapur, Allmadnagar, and Golconda - created a political vacuum in tlle area tllat the Portuguese were quick to exploit (see Morrison, tlus volume). It was tlus essentially littoral character tllat was put into question in tlle decades tllat followed 1570. To sum up a complex process very rapidly, the four decades after 1570 are characterized on tlle one hand by a growing interest in the land and territorial adventurism, and on the otller by tlle rise of a set of maritime networks to rival tllose of the Portuguese Estado. But one must not neglect the changes tllat took place in official Portuguese intra-Asian maritime trade eitller; when Philip II of Spain became ruler of Portugal in 1580-1, tllese changes were already under way, and they accelerated further in the next three decades (Parker 1998). As an information-obsessed ruler, Philip appears to have commissioned, in the very first year of his reign over the Portuguese empire, a compendium on the extent and nature of his Asian possessions. This text, the Lilwo das Cidades e Fortalezas ("Book of Cities and Fortresses") is somewhat misnamed, for at least a quarter of it deals with neither cities nor fortresses, but instead with maritime trade within Asia. We do not know who its author was, but it is very likely to have been a former fiscal official in Portuguese Asia. It provides a detailed description of the changing f.1ce of the Estado in an epoch when the old carreira system was giving way to the private concessionary-voyage (or Jliagem), when new frontiers of trade and settlement were in the process ofbcing established, and when speculative (at times, f.1r-fetched) projects of territorial conquest were being mooted in places as diverse as East Africa, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Cambodia. These complex changes of the late sixteenth century have often proved difficult for historians to digest. Thus, it is sometimes asserted that, after the midcentury, the Portuguese Asian enterprise lost its vigor, falling into a pattern usually summed up as that of imperial decline (decadencia). In this view, then, the crisis that we have discussed briefly in the context of the mid-century can be seen as a decisive one, which left the Portuguese Asian empire hollow on tlle inside, and ripe for demolition by the Dutch and English. Such a reading oftlle record is based in good measure on the great chronicler of the epoch, Diogo do Couto (1543-1616) in texts such as his Soldado Pratico, of which at least two quite distinct incarnations are known (Martins 1985). However, recent writings on the idea of "imperial decline" in tlle early modern period should give tllOse

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historians who have accepted Couto's vision uncritically some pause, for it emerges that "decline literature" was in fact itself a sort of literary genre that emerged in the development of historiography in even the broadly contemporary Ottoman and Mughal cases as a reaction to social realignments that were taking place.

THE ASIAN BACKLASH The first phase of the Portuguese presence in Asia was, coincidentally, one of rapid political transformations in the western half of the continent. In the first thirty years of their presence in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese were witness to Selim I's expansion into Egypt and the Red Sea (arguably one of the most important phases in Ottoman history), to Safavid consolidation in Iran under the founder of the dynasty Shah Ismail, to the setting up of Mughal rule in northern India by the Timurid dynast Babur in the 1520s, and to the apogee of the power of Vi jayan agara in southern India under Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509-29). As the Portuguese themselves saw it in around 1530, the major political powers in Asia were the Ottomans, Vijayanagara, and the Ming Chinese; they actively feared and combated the first, dealt by diplomatic means with the second, and kept a wary distance from the third. The next four decades were relatively less momentous ones, with the only truly significant political shift in the western Indian Ocean from the Portuguese viewpoint being the realignment in power in the Deccan (or south-central India) with the decisive defeat in 1565 of Vijayanagara forces by the rulers of the Deccan Sultanates. Goa, whose trade was linked to the demand ofVijayanagara city, felt the aftershock of this shift, but soon the trade to Bijapur grew in order to compensate partially for this decline. Furthermore, by the 1560s, trade in the Bay of Bengal was of growing interest to the Portuguese private merchants, who brought back news of the great new state machine being built up there. Burmese rule became a prepossessing presence in Portuguese accounts of these decades, until its temporary collapse in the 1590s. But from the 1570s, a new political order came into being in the arc stretching from Bengal, through northern India and Iran, to the Red Sea, which endured - with some relatively small realignments - into the early eighteenth century. The single most important f.1.ctor that influenced this new order was the expansion of the Mughal state from a landlocked kingdom astride the Gangetic valley in northern India to an empire with maritime access not only into the western Indian Ocean, but into the Bay of Bengal. The shift took place during the reign of Akbar (I'. 1556-1605), the first of his lineage consistently to be called the Great Mughal ("Grao Mogor") by the Portuguese, and was the culmination of earlier attempts by his father Humayun in the 1530s to gain control ofGujarat and Bengal. In 1572-3, Akbar's forces easily conquered Gujarat, and the Mughals signed a treaty with the Portuguese in March of tlle following year. Then, in 1575-6, the Mughals conducted a successful campaign in Bengal,

Desig1lS and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

bringing tlle ports of Pipli and Satgaon under Mughal control, and permitting the creation of the Mughal siiha (province) of Bengal. Finally, in 1591-2, the Mughals took lower Sind from its ruler; tllis gave them control over Thatta and its port Lahori Bandar, at the mouth of the Indus. However, until about 1610, the Mughals were largely content to use the tlll'eat they posed to Portuguese settlements on land as a way of keeping the Estado da india from pursuing policies that were indiscreet. It is significant that in a phase dominated by grandiose projects of conquest, no one really thought to venture the conquest of Mughal territories as a possibility. The most the Portuguese hoped for was tllat the Jesuit presence in Akbar's court might tempt him to convert to Christianity and tllltS make him more malleable; but in the event, this conversion project too was shown to be chimeral. As New World silver, and especially the rea/es de a ocho coined from the produce of the mines of PotoS! (once the mercury amalgamation process had been perfected), began to flow into Goa via the ships of the Carreira da india, Gujarat and Goa acquired a comfortable trading link. Equally, in the late sixteenth century, ships from Gujarat continued to trade to the Red Sea, and bring back precious metals from there in exchange for Indian textile exports. This silver, like that from Goa, served to feed the mints of the Mughal empire. A far greater immediate worry than the Mughals was their western neighbors and sometime rivals, the Saf.1.Vid rulers ofIran. Portuguese official relations with the first rulers of this dynasty, Ismail, Tahmasp, and Muhammad Khudabanda, seem to have been relatively trouble-free. But all this was to change in the reign of Shah Abbas I (1587-1629), who established trade links with Moscow, sent ambassadors and trade representatives to Emope, and began to resent Portuguese control over Hurmuz, which effectively dominated the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Safavid military power, earlier put into question by successes enjoyed against them by the Ottomans on the frontier, was given a new lease of life as a professional army was built up by Shah Abbas from the far smaller force that had been maintained by Tahmasp. Abbas and his advisers set out an elaborate strategy, to combat the Ottoman threat and to deal with the Portuguese. In July 1599, he thus sent out an embassy with letters to the Czar Boris Godunov in Moscow, the rulers of Poland, Hungary, France, and Scotland, Queen Elizabeth I of England , the Doge of Venice and the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Philip III of Spain. He suggested an anti-Ottoman alliance in these letters, a theme taken up again by Englishmen acting as his ambassadors in Europe, in 1608. The proposals met with a lukewarm response, particularly from the Habsblll'gs, forcing Shah Abbas to consider moving against Hurmuz, the only other means he had of conducting external trade freely. The matter was neatly summed up about this time by an English diplomat, the Oxford-educated Sir Thomas Roe, who wrote that Shah Abbas must "constantly resolve to go through with the Spaniard, or to make peace with the Turk; one of them he must do." The exchange of embassies between Madrid and Goa, and Isf.1han, continued

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Sanjay Subrahmanyam through the 1610s, but it soon emerged that this was merely a way for Shah Abbas to bide his time while waiting for English support to come through. The setting up of an English factory at Jask in 1616 signaled the beginnings of the Anglo-Iranian alliance against the Portuguese. Thus, trade was a resource to be taxed and from which funds could be raised, enabling Shah Abbas to free himself and his court from dependence on the original support-base of his dynasty. One of his first steps therefore was to declare the lucrative trade in silk a state monopoly, and to attempt to control its sale price. But so long as the two silk routes one heading northwest over land, and the other southeast via the Persian Gulf were blocked, tllis strategy had strict limitations. Tllis tllen is what eventually led to the conflict between Safavids and Portuguese over Hurmuz. I have so far concentrated on developments in SOUtll and west Asia in tile decades leading up to 1610, from wllich it has emerged tllat the new political configuration in tllese areas boded ill for tile Portuguese. The same was true in tllese years for tile far corner of the Portuguese Asian enterprise - Japan. As has been noted above, tile entry of tile Portuguese as intermediaries between Cllina and Japan in tile 1540s and 1550s was largely tile result of local circumstances. Again, tile purely coincidental expansion of silver mining and production in Japan in these years facilitated the groWtll in Portuguese trade, so tllat the "Great Ship from Amacon" became one of the major intra-Asian lines of tile concession system. Between 1560 and 1600, it has been estimated that tile Portuguese carried between 22,500 and 37,500 kilograms of silver from Japan every year. But managing tile political and cultural situation was by no means simple. The early years of their presence had seen local lords (daimyo) vie with each other for Portuguese trade, in a situation of internecine conflict. But in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, matters began to stabilize, under first Oda Nobunaga, then Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu - the so-called "Great Unifiers." Troubles between Hideyoshi and the Portuguese arose on two counts, one religious, and one to do with reasons of state. The years since Francis Xavier's arrival in Japan had seen the Jesuit mission grow from strength to strengtll, Witll the conversion of many thousands ofJapanese, ranging from peasants to members of Hideyoshi's own entourage, to Christianity. Important Christian daimyo took to destroying shrines of the native tradition, and some went so far as to convert peasants forcibly in territories under their control. It is evident that Christianity had to be tolerated up to a point by men like Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, given the fact that its "carriers" - the Portuguese - had their uses. It was, after all, under Portuguese influence that firearms had been introduced into Japan, and had become an important part of military strategy under the Great Unifiers. But the Jesuits began, by the 1580s, to threaten to be too assertive. This led Hideyoshi to issue an edict in 1587 declaring that since Christianity was a pernicious doctrine, it could not be permitted in Japan, "the land of tile Gods." However, in reality, tile missionaries were not expelled, but instead forced to tone down their activities considerably. Nevertheless, conflicts persisted, as we see from tile well-known case of the public execution of twenty-six

Desigm and dynamics ill the Portuguese Estado da India Christians (including three Jesuits and six Spanish Franciscans) in Nagasaki in early 1597. In sum, by 1610, tile Portuguese had a taste of the changed circumstances that obtained in post-Civil War Japan, and what the new, relatively centralized order, as distinct from tile old daimyo-dominated dispensation, meant. But it is likely, nevertheless, that they underestimated the seriousness of intention of tile new order put in place by Hideyoshi and his successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu. The relative absence of persecutions in the first decade of tile seventeentll century was however illusory, as the Portuguese learnt in 1614, when tile definitive order for tile expulsion of all missionaries was promulgated. Thereafter, the Portuguese conducted tlleir trade on borrowed time. Their eventual expulsion from Japan in the late 1630s was nevertlleless a particularly serious blow for tile network of private trade that tlley had put in place witllin Asia. Paradoxically, the first real blows came however neither in the Mughal territories, nor in those of the Safavids, nor indeed in Japan. Rather, they came fi:om tile Dutch, who, in 1605, took Ambon, and also occupied a Spanish fort at Tidore. The Spaniards recovered soon, making inroads into Ternate, wllile the Portuguese continued to procl\l'e cloves and spices via Makassar, which emerged by 1610 as a major entrepot in eastern Indonesia. Far more telling and significant a blow came from quite a different quarter, namely Burma. Taking advantage of political strife there in the late 1590s, a private Portuguese entrepreneur called Filipe de Brito e Nicote had managed to carve out for himsclf(and for the Estado da india) a position in the Irrawaddy delta port of Syriam, from where he collected customs on shipping from India and sought to restrict regional navigation. However, despite his success in staving off a number of threats, Filipe de Brito was ultimately unable to make common cause with the greater part of the Portuguese and mestifosofthe area, who might otherwise have provided him with the necessary manpower to sustain his enterprise. The tUl'l1ing point came however with a shift in the political situation in lower Burma itseW After about 1600, the focus of political power for the ruling Toungoo dynasty shifted upland to Ava, and they began the process of reconsolidation. By 1612, Syria m was a besieged enclave in a unified political zone. When the fort eventually surrendered, Brito was brutally killed, while many of his companions were carried off as prisoners to Ava and tied to the crown on a hereditary basis as military specialists. The fall of Syriam opened the way for the free expansion of trade between India and Burma, which reached substantial dimensions by the 1620s. In the medium term the Dutch too benefited ft'om this change in trading conditions, as did a number of local Asian networks of traders. In f.1Ct, to see the decline of the Portuguese presence in Asia in the seventeenth century purely in terms of the rivalry with the Dutch would not be just. For even the Luso- Dutch conflict in Asia was not a two-dimensional affair but rather a multi-dimensional one. It involved not only the Portuguese and the Dutch but also the rulers of a vast number of states, ranging fi'om Iran to Japan. We should bear in mind that some

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of the major losses that the Portuguese suffered in the half-century after 1610 had little or notlling to do witll tlle Dutch: tllis is tlle case with first Syriam (1612), then Hurmuz (1622), followed by Hughli (1632), then tlle Japan trade (1638), and finally tlle Kanara ports (1654).

Designs and dynamics in the Portuguese Estado da India

Asian empire had already led to spatial diversification in tlle years from 1515 on. It was again spatial diversification, into China and tlle Japan trade, tllat had given a fillip to tlle Estado in the context of the crisis of tlle mid-sixteenth century; still once more, in tlle years between 1570 and 1610, pushing back tlle, fr~ntier had a crucial role in defusing tensions at tlle margins of tlle Estado da Indza.

SURVIVAL AND PRIVATE TRADE Nevertlleless, tlle Portuguese sought and found strategies to survive in tlle 1630s and 1640s. Some of their more ambitious projects, such as tlle short-lived East India Company founded Witll New Christian capital in tlle late 1620s, failed miserably on tlle Cape Route. But tlle private trade carried out by private casado merchants in the Indian Ocean continued to find new markets and centers of operation. Besides, a number of Portuguese chose from tllls time on to reside outside the ambit of the Estado da india, in mestifo commUlllties that survived into far later times. We are aware tllat tlle Portuguese presence in Asia in the sixteentll and seventeentll centuries was not based on emigration on a mass scale by tlle Iberians, and tllls serves to differentiate it to an extent from Brazil, especially in the latter part oftlle period under consideration. Furthermore, the official Portuguese presence was for the most part an urban one Witll the exception of a few areas - such as tlle proJlf:l'tcia do norte, Sri Lanka, and the Zambezi valley. The institutions tllat defined tlle matrix of social interaction with the local context were hence largely urban ones, and frequently had precedents in peninsular Portuguese practice. Some of these institutions like the Cdmara Municipal (City Council), or the Santa Casa de Misericordia (Holy House of Mercy) are furtllermore to be encountered elsewhere in the Portuguese empire as well, be it in Angola or Brazil. In his Fatalidade historica da ilha de Ceiliio ("Historical Tragedy oftlle Island ofCeylon"), the Lisbon-born soldier Joao Ribeiro (1622-93), veteran of some two decades of fighting in Sri Lanka, summed up the years with which the present chapter has been concerned in the following fashion: .',

"

~I

From the Cape of Good Hope onwards wc were unwilling to leave anything outside of OUl' control; wc were anxious to lay hands on everything in that huge stretch of 5,000 leagues from Sof.1la to Japan; and what was worse was that we set about this without calculating OUl' strength, or thinking that even with the natives themselves this conquest could not last for ever. (in Subrahmanyam 1993: 179-80)

No doubt benefiting from hindsight, Ribeiro also offered his views on what he thought should have been the Estado's strategy, namely concentration on Goa, Hurmuz, Melaka, and Sri Lanka. Such an approach, which we may term "intensive" ratller than "extensive" in character, was what the Estado had perforce to adopt in tlle years after 1665. But Ribeiro may really have missed the point in arguing tllat tllis should have been tlle Portuguese strategy from the very outset. As we have seen, the logic ofinterests and pressure groups within the Portuguese

CONCLUSION The elements that have been presented above, albeit in a ratller schematic manner, allow us to return to tlle question posed at the outset. To what extent can tlle Portuguese presence in Asia in tlle sixteentll and seventeenth centuries be understood as an "empire"? If, indeed, we insist on tlle idea of territoriality as central to tlle notion of empire, then we must probably exclude tlle Estado da india from this category, for the phase between 1570 and 1610, when a clear territorial drive is visible, is brief and rather inconclusive. Nevertheless, tllls did not prevent a certain number of contemporary authors from using tlle term, most notably Frei Serafim de Freitas, in his celebrated treatise De iusto imperio lusitanorumAsiatico (Freitas 1983). The reason for tllis was simple: to the extent that the Portuguese in Asia controlled a series of centers tllat were spread out, had claims of suzerainty over a number of Asian political structures through the idea of pltreas (whatever the precise reality on the ground), and used force to enforce these claims, it seemed natural to treat the Estado da india as an empire, albeit a rather "original" one, as one imagined might have been the case for the Phoenicians. There are thus three possible conclusions that this chapter potentially leaves open. Onc would be to argue, as has been the brunt of the chapter for the most part, that the Portuguese did have an empire in early modern Asia, but that in order to recognize this, wc need to adopt a rather more flexible view of empire than has been espoused by some. A second, and perhaps more devious, position might be to argue that the Portuguese in the period had an empire on a worldscale, if onc takes into account the Atlantic islands, Brazil, the few North African garrisons and West Africa, as well as Asia. The weight of Brazil from the closing years of the sixteenth century would thus lend more territoriality to the whole, and a greater demographic weight to the view that this was indeed an empire; we could then propose that the Estado da india was not by itself an empire, but rather part of onc. If, however, onc opts for the third conclusion, and rejects these two propositions, the onus must surely be on the skeptic to explain what the Portuguese Estado da irldia indeed was. It was certainly not a trading "diaspora" in the usual sense (for it had a significant military and fiscal dimension, and quite large subject populations), nor was it a unitary state. Perhaps it is the example whose destiny it is to destabilize olll' comfortable generalizations that are based on the preconceived view that we, as historians and social scientists, really do know what empires are. Empires do strike back, and in unexpected, even epistemological, ways.

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The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru

DEFINITIONS OF EMPIRE AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL CORRELATES

3 The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru: the epistemological challenge of documenting an empire without documentary evidence Katharina Schreiber

70

The Wad empire of prehistoric Peru expanded from its capital in the central Andean highlands approximately AD 750, controlled territory presently located t11roughout most of the highlands and the coastal desert of Peru, and collapsed some time before AD 1000. Unlike t11e other examples of empires reported in t11is volume, Wari was an aliterate society and produced no written documents. Nor are t11ere eyewitness accounts, such as exist for the Inka, because Wari collapsed and disappeared long before the European invasion of the New World. Wari presents a nearly unique case of an empire with no documentary source material upon which the historian or archaeologist may draw. Undocumented empires may be quite rare. In the Old World, the known empires, beginning with the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia, arose after the development of systems of writing, so all are amenable to historical study as well as archaeological investigation. In the New World, the Aztecs are known on the basis of their own writings, on Spanish eyewitness accounts, and on archaeological data (Brumfiel, Smith, this volume). In South America the Inka are likewise known from Spanish documents (MacCormack, this volume), and archaeological data (D'A1troy, this volume), but the Inka themselves are mute l except for a few native documents written many decades after the European invasion. For the earlier Wari empire we can rely only on archaeological data. We have no literary record of the words or thoughts of the people ofWari; we do not even know what they called themselves. The questions fi'amed by the historian and the archaeologist about empires are by necessity conditioned by the source material utilized by each. While the written words and ideas of a long-gone people are available to, and trusted by, the historian, only the material remains of the actions of those people are available to archaeologists of preliterate empires. The archaeologist is challenged to interpret those data not only to discern the various aspects and processes of prehistoric imperialism, but even to defend the existence of prehistoric empires.

I

For some, empire is a state of mind, and empires are self-identified as such. Put simply, t11e Assyrians in the Near East (Liverani, this volume) or the Portuguese in Asia (Subrahmanyam, this volume) were empires because they themselves said they were. But autodefinition cannot be used as a defining characteristic by the prehistoric archaeologist, who has no direct access to the written words of the empire. Rather we must turn to definitions of empire that contain material elements amenable to archaeological methods of discovery, such as that provided by Barfield (this volume). Empires are states that expand, usually rapidly, and at least initially by conquest. Empires are subcontinental in size and have a population in the millions. Empires control diverse ecozones, and they are diverse culturally; they are organized to handle this diversity. Empires have central administrations; they support themselves through t11e extraction of tribute or the payment of taxes. Empires maintain standing armies. Empires maintain sovereignty over all people and territory in their realms.

The rapid military expansion of empire Empires grow so rapidly that to an archaeologist it may appear as a single episode: a full-blown empire where before there was nothing. There are many areas in which archaeological data are less than satisfactory, and perhaps the most critical of these pertains to the temporal sequence of events. Archaeological chronologies are rarely sufficiently fine-grained to place events any more precisely than within a particular century, if that. Therefore, the detailed sequence of imperial expansion may be unknowable, and may appear to be even more rapid than it was. However, in some cases it may be possible to discern diachronic change within the total period of empire, although the details of individual events will rarely be knowable. Whether an expansion was military or not is also difficult to know, although usually assumed to be the case. What the archaeologist sees is the result - a province consolidated under imperial control - and a negotiated result will look no different than a coerced one. However, a military infrastructure will often leave material remains. The presence of military garrisons provides direct evidence of the existence of standing armies. Permanent garrisons are to be found in strategic locations, often located apart from local population centers, and often associated with roads. They may have limited access from the outside, and may be fortified. Inside there will be sufficient space to house large numbers of men, and f.1cilities for the preparation oflarge quantities offood. Storage areas for material are expected. And the location of garrisons should change through time. Empires expand in a cycle of offense, and collapse in a cycle of defense. During the initial expansion, garrisons are established as the empire expands witl1in the

71

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eventual territory or margins of the empire; in the later stages of empire, garrisons will be found on the boundaries of the empire, as the enemies now are those on the outside. Certain forms of imagery may indicate military action as well. Aliterate societies may produce images that survive in ceramic, textile, or statuary art, among other forms, and we may regard such imagery as a form of text in these cases. For example, depictions of individuals in distinctive costume and wielding arms may indicate not only military action, but also what garb distinguished the people or soldiers of the empire from its enemies (or allies), and the types of weaponry used. Depictions of battle scenes may further indicate military strategy or tactics.

Size and diversity

li'i

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru

Katharina Schreiber

While estimating exact populations of sites or regions can be fraught with difficulties (e.g., Schreiber and Kintigh 1996), archaeological methods of analysis can be quite efficacious in defining the spatial extent of an empire. Empires develop tlleir own styles of material culture, including artifacts of various types (ceramics, textiles, metal objects, etc.) and one might look first to the distribution of these portable items to estimate the spatial extent of the empire. But the fact that these are indeed portable can also yield misinformation as well. Items may easily be traded or exchanged, and thus found by the archaeologist outside tile actual boundary of imperial sovereignty. Clearly a single isolated object in a foreign cultural context can be seen as a trade piece, but even large quantities of imperial style artifacts may occur outside the boundaries in areas connected tl1l'0ugh economic ties or trading relationships to the empire. More accurate in determining the spatial extent of an empire is defining direct imperial investment, especially in the imperial infrastructure. I have already treated the issue of military garrisons above, but here it is useful to emphasize the locations of those garrisons; rarely if ever will a military garrison be located outside the boundaries of an empire (but see Sinopoli, this volume). The spatial extent of military posts should approximate the extent of imperial control. Roads are another important element of the imperial infi'astructure, needed both to move military forces efficiently around the empire, and also to facilitate the transport of tribute and trade items. While roads themselves are difficult to date with any precision, roads connect places. And those places, or sites, can be dated to particular periods. Roads connecting towns and villages dating to a particular period can therefore be assumed to have been used during that period. Roads connecting military garrisons and other imperial facilities can not only be dated to the period of empire; they can also be identified as imperial roads. These may make use of preexisting routes, but the empire coopts their use and maintenance. The level of investment in paving and improvements may also identify tllem as imperial in construction. Inka roads were often paved, provided with drainage or stone steps, and bridges were built and maintained (Hyslop 1984).

The extent of the imperial road network is an excellent measure of the size of the empire, if the archaeologist can clearly define imperial roads and distinguish them fi'om others. Anotller element of tile infrastructure tllat indicates direct imperial investment and tile spatial extent of power is tile construction of regional capitals or administrative centers. Empires are typically too large to be run from a single capital, and local centers are established to house administrators, maintain control over local polities, organize and store tribute for later transshipment, organize labor for tile construction and maintenance of imperial facilities, etc. Typically these centers will be located near local population centers or production zones. The size and internal diversity of a regional administrative center will depend on tile variety of functions carried out there, and perhaps tile size and diversity of the region under its control. Physically these centers will be permanent establishments, usually Witll limited access and sometime fortified. They will include domestic areas in which imperial bureaucrats lived, and areas for food production and storage. Indeed, tlley will appear very similar to military garrisons, and in some cases may be one and tile same. The extraction of tribute and its movement from the provinces to the imperial centers can be seen directly and indirectly in a number of ways. These include movement of goods from one region to another in imperial-associated contexts, changes in production and consumption patterns at the local level, direct control over or limited access to particular resources or production zones, etc. Major investments in the intensification of agricultural production indicating imperial investment may include land reclamation, construction of extensive irrigation systems, or the building of terracing in the case of the Andean highlands.

Centralization Finally, all of these attributes of empires imply central administration: a capital. Certainly there are polities termed empires that were acephalous, such as the empire of Alexander the Great, or the Xiongnu (Barfield and Moreland, this volume), but these are the exception rather than the rule. Most political empires had capital cities from which the empire was administered. In the case ofundocumented empires there are a number of lines of evidence that the archaeologist can follow to identify the imperial capital. One might expect that centralized administration implies a capital located spatially centrally in the empire. However, the location of the capital is more likely tlle result of the location of the home territory of whatever polity expanded and grew into an empire, and the sequence and extent of conquest in different directions. Indeed, some empires grew spatially in such a way that they needed to establish second capitals, such as Constantinople in the case of tile Roman empire, or Quito in the case of the Inka. The imperial capital will be diverse, and probably the most complex archaeological site in the empire. Capitals will have a large resident population including

73

74

7hc Wari cmpire

Katharillrl Schreiber

all social classes, from peasants to artisans to the ruling elite. Domestic architecture will reflect this diversity, ranging from simple dwellings to the palaces of rulers. The capital will be the primary residence of the ruling elite, so the most elaborate houses in the realm will likely be located in the capital. In those empires based on market economics, the largest central markets in the empire may be found in the capital. Major temples, the focal point of state religion, will be located in the capital, as was the Templo Mayor located in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan or the Coricancha in Inka Cuzco. Onc expects large areas given over to storage, but with restricted access. Ethnic diversity will set the capital apart from other large centers in the realm: f()l'eign elements representing the diverse groups under imperial control may be {()lInd in the capital, while perhaps the only ftlt'Cign elements {()lInd in provincial cultures will be those pertaining to the empire. Finally, over time onc might expect a gradual depopulation of the surrounding countryside as the "neon lights efIect" attracts the country f<>lks to the big city, with all of its excitement and things to do. Finally, the capital is likely to be very large in terms of absolute size, and may very well be the largest city in the empire.

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Sovereignty While sovereignty may seem to bc, on the tace of it, a difficult concept to elucidate from material cultural remains, scholars can turn to the effects of imperial control on people at the local level. Establishment of sovereignty may be seen in at least three ways. First, local political centralization may be reorganized in order to establish imperial control. In some cases, empires may make use of/ocal leaders and infi'astructure and establish what is often called hegemonic control; in other cases they may establish entirely intrusive and (lreign administration. And there arc numerous strategies of control that lie between these two extremes (Schreiber 1992: 17-27). Second, local economics may be reorganized in order to provide tribute (H' the empire, thereby intensifying or changing local production. Such reorganization in turn restructures economic pllI'slIits of individuals in the region, and such changes persist (X the dlll'ation of imperial control. Third, empires both co-opt local sacred beliefs, artif:lCts, or even landscapes, and replace them or augment them with imperial ideologies. The nature of interaction with the sacred regime changes profcHll1dly (lr the local individual, trying to accommodate both local belief systems and imposed imperial state religions.

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I turn now to the case of the Wari empire of Middle Horizon PCI'll (Pig. 3.1), an empire known only on the basis of archaeological data. Wari i:l11s within a f()llr-millenniuI1l sequence of complex societies in the Andes, and was preceded by at least two millennia of complex chiddoms and the emergence of state-level

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THE PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL MILIEU OF WARI 3.1 The Wi~l'i empire (dmhed lillc depict.!' the political bOlllldflf), a/modem Peru).

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76

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru

Katharina Schreiber societies. The physical setting within which this early empire arose conditioned in many ways the opportunities and limits to expansion.

Physical environment The actively growing Andean cordillera of western South America is the second highest mountain range in the world (after the Himalayas), and the result of the subduction of the Pacific oceanic plates under the South American crustal plate. The proximity of the mountains to the coastline creates a series of distinct environmental zones that serve to enhance or limit human occupation and development. The rain-shadow effect created by the mountains, combined witl1 a cold offshore current, causes the coastal plain of northern Chile and Peru to be the driest desert on earth; it is also tl1e coldest low-elevation desert on earth. (Preservation of archaeological remains is exceptional under such conditions.) Until only the last half-century, human occupation has been limited to the coastline and to tl1e narrow valleys of tl1e rivers tl1at flow westward out of the Andes and provide the only source of fresh water for human consumption and for irrigation. WitllOut irrigation, extensive agriculture is impossible on the coast of Peru. However, the seemingly harsh coastal environment has supported the highest population densities in the Andean region for centuries. In part, this is due to the rich maritime resources produced by the upwelling of nutrients through the cold Humboldt Current from warmer currents below. The modern capital city of Peru, Lima, contains one-third of the population of the country. And in prehistoric times, such cultures as Moche and Nasca arose in the fertile irrigated valleys of the coast. Life on the coast, especially in the north, is disrupted periodically by bouts of flooding, the results of ENSO events 2 (Thompson et al. 1985). The Andean highlands also supported substantial populations, despite the extremes of altitude with the concomitant problems of hypoxia and cold temperatures. Rainfall is regular, occurring between the months of November and May; the northern Andes receive the most precipitation, while the climate gradually gets drier to the south. Owing to the steep gradient of the Andes, environmental zones arc arranged vertically along valley sides (Murra 1972), ranging from tropical to arctic. Below the permanent snowfields of the very highest ranges lies the puna, a zone of rolling grasslands supporting native camelids domesticated llamas and alpacas, and wild guanacos and vicuna. Moving down into agricultural zones, native Andean tubers (potatoes, oca, ttlluco) and qllirma are grown at higher elevations, and maize is cultivated on terraced fields below. At even lower elevations are chili peppers, other vegetables and fruits, and coca. The traditional adaptation to this highland environment involved the control of a single family or village over several vertical zones, or the reciprocal exchange of produce between villages in different zones. Market systems did not develop, or were only very weakly developed, in the Andes prior to the Spanish conquest. The Inka capital ofCuzco, today a large city, is located at an elevation of3300 m,

at tl1e ecotone between the tuber and maize zones in tl1e southern Peruvian Andes. To the east of the Andean cordillera lie the Amazon lowlands, an area of low agricultural productivity and population density, both today and in the past. The eastern slopes of the Andes are subject to substantial rainfall, and these zones have served for millennia for the production of coca. Coca served important ritual functions in the past, as it does today, and is also chewed during all major labor projects to prevent hunger. The Inka, and perhaps the Wari as well, invested heavily in ensuring continued coca production for the state. The cultural effects of these environmental consu·aints are threefold. First, higher population densities are limited to the coast and highlands; therefore these are the locations of the major prehistoric cultures of interest here. Second, areas of high population density are very often spatially isolated from each other. On the coast the fertile river valleys are separated by expanses of barren desert of varying extent. In the highlands, cultivated valleys are separated by broad expanses of high-elevation puna. And third, all the prehistoric cultures can be classed as coastal- or highland-based. While a coastal culture might trade for access to highland products, or vice versa, no culture clearly occupied and controlled both coast and highlands. Only in the situation of empires - interestingly, highland-based do we find political and economic control of both coast and highlands.

The cultural milieu Humans have occupied the Andes for at least 12,000 years. By 2500 BC they were growing cotton on the coast of Peru. By 1800 BC sedentary, agriculturebased villages were found in most areas of the coast and highlands, and construction of monumental platflxm mounds was underway on the central coast of Peru. Archaeologists divide the last 4000 years of Andean prehistory into six major periods: an initial period, /()llowed by three "horizons," which in turn were separated by intermediate periods. Horizons are periods in which a single well-defined style of material culture is f(Hlnd broadly distributed through the Andes. The clearest case is the Late Horizon, the period of the spread of the Inka empire. In this case, imperial expansion explains the presence of Inka-style material culture /1·om Ecuador to Argentina. As we shall sec, the preceding horizon styles did not enjoy nearly as extensive a distribution as the Inka horizon. The Initial Period (l800-800 BC) saw the emergence of complex societies on the coast of Peru, organized at the level of what anthropologists term chidaoms. These societies organized the building of massive platform mounds and pyramids, as well as their regular renewal and rebuilding (Pozorski and Pozorski 1988). These mound sites range in location from the central to the north coast. Little is known of the Initial Period in the sierra, owing in part to a lack of research and in part to poorer preservation of early remains. However, the area around Cuzco and south to the Titicaca basin saw the emergence of a religious tradition based on pilgrimage (Chavez and Chavez 1975).

77

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78

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru

Katharina Schreiber

The Early Horizon (800 B C-A D 100) was characterized by the presence of complex chiefdoms on the coast and in the north highlands, and the emergence of an important pilgrimage center at Chavln de Huantar (Burger 1992). Ceramic offerings in its subterranean galleries indicate that people journeyed great distances to the temple to leave their offerings (Lumbreras 1977). The iconography associated with Chavln is found, either in pure form or in related forms, throughout northern Peru and on the coast as far south as the Ica valley. Carved in great stone monuments at Chavln, the images depict what may have been a shamanic cult, with emphasis on animals of the jungle regions below and to the east. Human forms also appear, including one that is of relevance to the understanding of the iconography of power in the later Middle Horizon. This image, carved on what is called the Raimondi Stone, is a human figure with an elaborate headdress, holding a vertical staff in each hand, and standing on two human heads. This "staff deity" was an important image in Andean thought by the first millennium BC, and continued right on to Inka times and after (see below, p.92). The Early Horizon distribution of similar styles can be seen as the result of the exchange of a particular style of artifacts used by elites to mark their status, coupled with widespread participation in a single religious tradition. It was the first time that a single cultural tradition transcended local boundaries, and provided some sort of unifying elements for multiple cultures. There is no indication that Chavln influence had any political component; rather it was the center of a shared belief system. This belief system was in turn reinforced by pilgrimages made by individuals from a variety of cultures to the center at Chavln. Chavln influence ceased around 200 BC when several regional cultures began to emerge, for example the sudden expansion of Para cas culture in Ocucaje phase 8 on the south coast or the developments of the Salinar phase on the north coast. These and other developments coalesced into a number of well-defined regional cultures in the Early Intermediate Period (EIP, AD 100-750). The EIP is especially relevant to studies ofWari because it was the expansion ofWari that led to, or was correlated with, the collapse of these regional cultures. Archaeologists have defined a series of regional cultures in the EIP, on the basis of their very distinctive, and clearly distinguishable, artifact styles. The best known and most complex of the EIP cultures is Gallinazo- Moche of the north coast. Moche can be regarded as the very first Andean state (Billman 1996). The eponymous Moche capital (also called Cerro Blanco) in the Moche valley combines enormous mound structures, with a large complex population, and evidence of centralized administration. While artifact styles perhaps indicate a northern and southern half of the polity, it had only a single capital. Warfare played an important role in the emergence and maintenance of Moche power. Moche controlled the entire north coast - some nine or ten river valleys, stretching a distance of350 km from north to south by Moche IV. In Moche V, in the Middle Horizon (MH, AD 750-1000), the state underwent some critical changes, discussed below.

On the central coast, the Lima culture of the EIP was probably composed of a series of interacting, and sometimes competing, chiefdoms that continued the mound-building tradition of earlier periods. Both the culture and the building of mounds came to an abrupt halt in the MH. The south coast Nasca culture was organized as a series of simple chiefdoms that participated in a single ceremonial-mortuary complex centered around the site ofCahuachi during Early Nasca times (Silverman 1993). Nasca produced some of the most spectacular ceramic and textile art of the ancient world, and its ceramic style and technology strongly influenced the later Wari culture. Nasca underwent a cultural upheaval around AD 500, at which time the society was reorganized into a series of more complex chiefdoms, and warfare became more prevalent (Schreiber and Lancho Rojas 1995). Nasca society underwent another great upheaval again at the beginning of the MH around AD 750, correlated with the expansion of Wari into the region. In the sierra, a number of EIP regional cultures have been defined, although none of them quite as distinct as Moche or Nasca. In the north highlands the Cajamarca culture is known mostly for its fine white kaolin ceramics. Settlement evidence suggests a series of chiefdoms rather than a single centralized polity (Julien 1988). In Huamachuco a single large site, Marca Huamachuco, dominated the political landscape and was probably capital of a small polity there (J. Topic 1991). The Recuay culture of the Callej6n de Huaylas produced a distinctive style of ceramics; settlement distributions suggest a series of chiefdoms. In a tributary of the middle Mantaro valley, the Huarpa culture occupied the entire Ayacucho basin. Settlement patterns suggest a series of complex chiefdoms, or perhaps a single unified polity. Toward the end of the EIP, Huarpa ceramics show marked influence from the Nasca tradition, which coalesced into the distinctive horizon markers of the Wari style. The EIP Pucara culture of the northern Titicaca basin was centered on a large site with religious architecture, but with its sphere limited to the very northern part of the altiplano. Most of the altiplano fell under the control of the Tiwanaku culture. The site ofTiwanaku had served as a pilgrimage center for many centuries, and in the EIP it emerged as the capital of a large regional polity. New evidence from settlement s\ll'veys around the basin strongly suggests that Tiwanaku was organized as a state-level society in EIP Tiwanaku IV times (Stanish 1997). There is also evidence that Tiwanaku colonies were established in the Moquegua valley some 200 km to the southwest in Tiwanaku IV, perhaps to provide resources not available in the very high elevations around Lake Titicaca (Goldstein 1989, 1993). Artifacts in Cochabamba, Bolivia, also about 200 km from Tiwanaku, indicate a strong presence there as well.

Discussion By the end of the EIP, two probable states, Moche and Tiwanakll, and at least six other regional polities organized at least at the level of chiefdoms or complex

79

t

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,1

80

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru

Katharina Schreiber chiefdoms, were established in the Andean region. At the very end of the EIP there is also evidence for an increased level of interaction between some of those polities. For example, as noted above, Huarpa ceramics began including motifs derived from Nasca ceramics. In turn, Nasca potters depicted Moche warriors on their vessels, and copied Moche color schemes as well. As research progresses it is not unlikely that archaeologists will find even more evidence ofincreased interregional interaction immediately prior to the Middle Horizon. Smith (this volume) argues that, in the Aztec case, a Mesoamerican world system was well in place before the emergence of the Aztec empire, and he suggests that this may have been true of all empires. The evidence presently available from the Andes is equivocal on this issue. The Middle Horizon Wari empire emerged from a situation in which interregional interaction was just beginning. There was little direct interaction between these regional cultures, minimal evidence of trade, and there were no markets to draw groups together. Perhaps it is the lack of markets in the Andes that explains the absence of a single world system such as Smith documents for Mesoamerica. We do have an intriguing glimpse into the beginnings of interregional interaction at the very end of the EIP, but the Wari empire almost immediately came to control most of the central Andes.

"

THE WAR! EMPIRE The Wari empire is so named because Wari is the modern name of the presumed capital city; Wari simply means honored ancestor. The name of the capital city at the time of the Spanish conquest was Vinaque (Cieza 1984 [1553]), but this may not have been its name in the previous millennium. Legends recorded in the sixteenth century about two Wari sites, Wari and Jincamocco, report that the installations were built by a people called "Viracochas," but this word can refer to any foreigner and does not necessarily indicate the prehistoric name of the empire. The existence of an empire was first suspected in the early twentieth century when the widespread distribution of a very distinctive iconography was noted by a variety of researchers (Uhle 1903; Kroeber 1944; Larco Hoyle 1948); this iconography formed the basis for the definition of the Middle Horizon. Initially thought to have originated from the highland site of Tiwanaku in Bolivia, it quickly became apparent that the horizon style fell into two spatially and stylistically discrete groups. The northern of these styles, stretching some 1300 km through most of the Peruvian sierra, was thought to be the result of either the spread of a religious movement or the expansion of an unknown empire (Menzel 1964, 1968a, 1968b). The southern style did indeed pertain to the site of Tiwanaku and its area of influence. The source of the northern horizon style - Wari - was finally identified by Peruvian archaeologist Julio C. Tello in the 1930s (Tello 1970; see also Bennett 1946). By the 1950s, the distinctive architectural style at Wari had been linked

to similar constructions found far-flung tluough the Peruvian highlands (Rowe et al. 1950), and excavations had been undertaken at Wari to c1arit)r its chronological associations (Bennett 1953, 1954; see also Isbell and McEwan 1991 for a summary of tile history of research on Wari).

Identifying the capital As discussed above, the core region, the upper Huanta drainage or Ayacucho basin, was home to the Huarpa culture of the preceding Early Intermediate Period (Benavides 1971; Lumbreras 1975; Knobloch 1976). Huarpa included several large sites that may have been political centers, and the culture was probably organized as a series of chiefdoms. In MH phase 1 three Huarpa sites coalesced into a single large city, Wari, that grew very rapidly at about the same time the empire began its expansion. Wari therefore may present a case in which an empire did not grow out of an existing state, but rather the state and the empire arose as part of the same process. Wari is one of the largest sites known in the Andes (Lumbreras 1960, 1975, 1980; Isbell and Schreiber 1978; Gonzalez Can'e 1981). Its architectural core, characterized by densely spaced structures, many of them monumental in size, covers about 250 hectares. The greater extent of the site, including areas ofhabitation with less durable structures and trash disposal, covers up to 15 square kilometers (Isbell et al. 1991: 24). The architecture of the site core is of the distinctive planned cellular forms characteristic of all Wari imperial sites. Although the site had a long earlier occupation, all of the standing buildings in the core date exclusively to the Middle Horizon, indicating a complete remodeling of the site and a huge investment oflabor. The core comprises areas of great rectangu1ar enclosures, most at least two stories tall, along with areas set aside for special purposes. One area of typical rectangular architecture was excavated by Isbell and his students in the late 1970s (Brewster-Wray 1983; Knobloch 1983; Isbell et al. 1991). Recent work by Peruvian archaeologists has revealed the construction of a religious precinct, and the location of the Templo Mayor (Gonzalez Can'c and Bragayrac Danilla 1986; Bragayrac Danilla 1991; GonzaIez Can'c et al. 1996). The earliest structure was a large U-shaped mound that may date to the first millennium BC E. Later, probably in the Middle Horizon, one of the wings of the temple mound was truncated by the construction of a large enclosing wall that created an orientation along a north-south axis. Within the arms of the old Ushaped mound, a large D-shaped temple was built. Additional small D-shaped temples were built around the precinct, oriented to cardinal directions (A. G. Cook n.d.). D-shaped temples are located throughout the core of the site, at other sites in the immediate hinterland, and at MH2 installations in the provinces, such as Honco Pampa (discussed below). Adjacent to the religious precinct is an area of extensive subterranean stonelined galleries, currently undergoing excavation. Nearby is an area with cut stone

81

TIJC Wari cmpirc afMiddle Horizoll Pcnt

Kathal'illa Schreibel'

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Jincamocca, n propillcin! Wari Jitc. Note the rigid grid

layo1l t, as welt as the to/lg narrow gal/cries sIII'ro1l11ding ope1l

celltrn! patios. With fcw exccptio11J, tlJt: intcrior width I~f'thc gallerics is 2.2 Ill.

chambers that may have served as royal tombs (Iknavides 1979, 1991); unfortunately these chambers were completely looted, probably in prehispanic times, so their exact content may never be known. Many habitation sites were located throughout the immediate hinterland during MHl, but in MH2 there was a marked drop in the number of sites, while Wari grew to enormous proportions (sce Benavides 1978; Ochatoma 1989). Like the area around Teotihuacan in Mexico, it appears that the countryside was nearly depopulated, and everyone moved to town, perhaps owing to the "neonlights eHect." At the cnd of M H2 Wari was completely abandoned; the population of the region dropped drastically and the empire collapsed.

E.xtent and

ir~f'raJtr1tcttt1'C

The extent ofWari control can be best estimated li'om the distribution of its built inliastructure: an extensive series of administrative centers or military garrisons, and a network of roads (Schreiber 1987b). Wari administrative architecture is very distinctive (Schreiber 1978; Spickard 1983). A typical site comprises a large rectangular enclosure, regularly subdivided into square or rectangular cells; the individual cells include onc or more open patios, surrounded by long, narrow galleries (Figs. 3.2, 3.3). This architectural style is unique, unmistakable, and clearly associated with Wari. Many of'the sites arc in tUI'll associated with prehistoric roads, some of which were later incorporated into the Inka system of royal highways (Schreiber 1984, 1991 a). Indeed, some of the vVari installations were first discovered and identified during investigation of the Inka roads (Hyslop 1984: 271-3). Most known sites arc I
identified: El Palacio, Yamobamba, and Ichabamba (Hyslop 1984: 61; Williams ct al. 1985; }uliell 1988: 163). Moving southward toward Wari, there is Viracochapampa in the Huamachuco region (McCown 1945; Topic and Topic 1985; J. R. Topic 1986, 1991; T. L. Topic 1991), and then three sites in the CaIJejon de Iluaylas: Pariamarca, Honco Pampa, and Tocroc (WiIJiams et al. 1985; [sbell 1989, 1991). Between the CaIJejon and Wari are I
3.3 A pic", I!f Pihillllqta, ill ",hich lIlt: eflltm! OjlCII patio.\'

aNd SIII'/,OIl1ldill/T II Il/TO 11' /TIII/t:l'ics

CIIII

Ill: delll'~Y SI'CII. 'fl)(: walls III'C jll'cJCl'l'cd 10 "ei/TIJI of'tIJ!o Jtol'ics IIbll)J(: tIlt: !Jl'oll1ld

11

sllI/ilec; !'isib/e III'C I'OIJ!S I!{'eo/,III:!J t!J1I1 stT!'cd IIs/lool' SlIjljlol'ls fill' 1Ij1j1tT slol'ieJ.

84

KMhal'illa Schreibcr

Tbc Wari empirc ofMiddlc HorizoN PCi'll

Investigations in valleys to the cast (Grossman 1983; Meddens 1984, 1989, 1991) and west (Vivanco and Valdez 1993) of Son don do also indicate extensive vVari occupations. Moving north tt'om Moquegua, vVari sites in coastal drainages include several in Arequipa: Sonay (Malpass, personal communication) in the Camana valley, Nllll1ero Ocho in Chuquibamba (Sciscento 1989), two sites in the Cotahuasi region (Mary frame and Adriana von Hagen, personal communication 1996; Justin Jennings, personal communication 1998). Two vVari sites have been identified in the Nasca region: Pacheco (Menzel 1964) and Pataraya. A ceramic production site was located in the Pisco valley at the site of Maymi (Anders 1990) by the late Martha Anders. Near Lima, the site of Pachacamac (Uhle 1903; Shimada 1991; Rostworowski de DieI'. Canseco 1992) rose to become a major center of religion and a pilgrimage center, and still functioned as such during the Inka empire. The site dates originally to the Middle Horizon, but it is not clear what degree of sovereignty Wari held over the site, ifany. North of Lima, the last clearly identifiable Wari installation is Socos, in the Chi1l6n valley (Isla and Guerrero 1987), although impressive tombs and artif~1Ctual remains arc found in Anc6n and the 5upe valley (Reiss and Stuebel 1880; Menzel 1977). Wari remains arc rare on the north coast of Peru, and whether or not Wari controlled this region is a matter of some controversy (Mackey 1982; Wilson 1995). There arc Wari artif~1Cts in varying densities in most valleys, but no clearly definable imperial centers or garrisons, so I do not include it here in estimating the size of the empire. Given this distribution ofWari imperial installations, the extent ofWari control reached 800 km north and 525 km south through the sierra. East to Cuzco, Wari control extended 275 kill, and west 350 km to the coast at 50cos. Thus, the empire extended over 1300 km along its north-south axis; it varied in width ri'om only about 100 km in the north to about 400 km in the south. The total spatial extent of the empire, not including the north coast, I estimate to have been some 320,000 square kilollleters.

Expwnsio'fl: speed tu/A Htilittrrisrn

3.4 D)c 1Il1lfC-SCII!t:, illljlc/'iala/'chitcctll/,t' ld'Pillilll1lJtll jI/'CJc/'PCJ its ril]id grid layout. III SOIIIt' portiolls ld'tbc sitt', SlIcI) ITJ this OIlC, gill/cries were tlm:c stories in hCLlJhtj pllt ios werc IlIlr(}(!fi:d alld opcn.

From archaeological data, it appears that the vVari expansion was very rapid, but this may also be an artifi\Ct of the lack of precision of available chronometric methods. Based on the well-developed relative chronology, most of the major known sites were built, or initiated, during Middle Horizon phase I; this phase is thought to have lasted no longer than a celltmy. Whether or not the conquest was accomplished as a single continuous evellt or involved a series of separate campaigns cannot be known at this time. Most or all of these M H I sites were probably built f()r political purposes, serving both as administrative centers and as military garrisons. Some of the sites continlled to be occupied into Middle Horizon phase 2 times, while others were abandoned. New sites built in MH2 thus fill' appear to have been primarily economic in purpose, suggesting a shift in Wari strategies, and/or were situated on the borders of the empire.

85

Krrtharina Sc/Jrciber

The Wari eJJljJirc Id'lvliddlc Horizon Pcru

87

Political Jopereignt)' Issues of sovereignty arc closely tied to the identification of the extent of the empire and its control when the sole source of infiJrlnation is archaeological data. In this section r shall discuss the details of the Wari occupation in a number of regions, with two goals. First, I argue that the presence of imperial installations and infrastructure provides evidence for an investment by the empire of resources and personnel in establishing and maintaining its control over a region. Second, by looking at the effects of imperial control over each region, wc can elucidate changes in political, economic, and ideological organization at the local level, and arrive at a sense of the sovereignty of the empire over subject peoples. Bcf()I'e beginning this treatment of the data, it is useful to point out that the imperial control does not mean that imperial installations were necessarily established in every region under its control. While the presence of imperial inti'astructme is a direct indication of imperial control, the reverse is not always true. The presence of large Wari installations is a clear indication of the presence ofWari, and some sort of intent on its part (Fig. 3.5). The size of the installation may be related to the diversity of activities carried out there and/or the size of the region or population under its aegis. Various writers have dealt with the issues of direct versus indirect control on the part of empires (D' Altroy 1992; Sinopoli 1994a), and I have dealt with {()!'Ins of control intermediate between those extremes (Schreiber 1992, 1993). Dealing with purely archaeological remains wc make the assumption that when the empire established its own infl'astructlll'e administrative centers, roads, etc. the existing infi'astructlll'e was insufficient {()r its needs. This in turn implies that the particular region was not politically centralized and that there existed no controlling authority that had established the intl'astructlll'e necessary {()r political control of the region. The study of settlement patterns in the region can also indicate an absence of central places, or only weakly developed centralization. However, in those areas with an existing centralized political system and hence, with an extant infi'astructure an empire need not establish a wholly new infl·astructlll'e. The study of settlement patterns can reveal the presence of central places, levels ofcontl'Ol hierarchy, and extent of the region controlled. It is theref()re ironic that, when dealing with purely archaeological data, and in the absence of written records, we are most certain of imperial occupations only in regions in which the empire invested heavily in building the infi·astructure. Conversely, some of the most important occupations those that coopted existing complex societies may be the ones least visible to the archaeologist. That said, I tUl'l1 next to some of the better-studied Wari occupations to get a sense of the range of integrative strategies used by the empire. The first of these occupations is a small, unremarkable valley in southel'l1 Ayacucho, the Sondondo valley, where Wari created a new infi'astructure (Schrciber 1991 b, 1992). Prior to the arrival ofWari, the valley was occupied by

people living in a handful of small villages, most of them at very high elevations near the llpper limits of tuber cultivation. Dlll'ing the vVari occupation, an administrative center was built at Jincamocco, three satellite centers were built, and the local people were moved to newly established villages located at lower elevations. In this case it is clear that the local cultlll'e was not centralized, and that political centralization was imposed by Wari; there was vcry little political alltonomy IeH to the people. As [ discllss below, Wari control increased markedly in M 1-12, owing to a new f(>cus on economic concerns. At the opposite extreme is perhaps the case of' Iluamachuco, location of' onc of' the largest Wari sites, Viracochapampa. The Huamachuco culture was well centralized around the site of Marcl Huamachuco, and almost certainly hostile to Wari takeover (Topic and Topic 19X5; J. R. Topic 19X6, 1991; 'l'. L. Topic 1991 ). Only 3 km fi'om that site, and in plain view fl'om it, Wari began construction of the large square compound at Viracochapampa, measuring nearly 0.5 km on a side. But the site was never finished. The only evidence ofWari in the region remains a handful of imperial style artibets and a possible Wari mausoleum at Marca Huamachllco, a set of storerooms at the site of Cerro All1arll, an aqueduct, and various ceramic pieces (Thatcher 1975, 1977). This evidence suggests that although Wari was present, Marca I-luamachuco remained essemially autonomous. The remains f<>ltnd within that site may represent only the trappings of office due to a local ruler cooperating with the empire.

3.5

'/7)C

cClltml core

I!i' PillilllTqllT. 77)c !1II~fTe o/Jell arm at CCIIlcl' oflhe photo, IIIm.wriT/efT sOllle 75 11CI'O,l)~ 11111)' hape

HI

scrpcd as 1I cen/m! plaza .fill' ritllll! or

militllry IlCtiJlitics. noli's {!f'.1'II1Il1I hoh'S iNto which bfl1lflS II'Crf iT/sertcd 10 slIpport IIpper slories ITrc

I'isiblt: ill Ihe 11'11/1.1' ill thl: Jill't;tlrOII lid.

88

Katharina Schreiber And what ofViracochapampa? Why was it never finished? It is clear that Wari changed strategies, perhaps when the local rulers agreed to collaborate (see Robinson 1972 for a discussion of collaboration theory). The site was no longer needed. But perhaps it had actually served an important purpose; construction ofViracochapampa in plain site of the Huamachuco capital was a direct and open threat to the locals: capitulate or be taken over. The Inka did just this when they built "Little Cuzco" on tile central coast (Hyslop 1985). In the far SOUtll, tile site of Cerro Bald was established on the top of a high, formidably steep butte, Witll extremely difficult access (Lumbreras et al. 1982; Watanabe 1984; Feldman 1989; Moseley et al. 1991). The existing Huaracane population was located fartller down the valley, as were colonists from Tiwanaku (Goldstein 1989, 1993), and there seems to have been minimal contact between tllem and the Wari residents (Bruce Owen, personal communications 1997). Several smaller Wari sites were located around the base of Cerro Balll, and agricultural terracing and irrigation systems there may be Middle Horizon in date. The Wari occupations date only to MH1. In tllis case, tile Wari presence seems to ignore the local population entirely, leaving them autonomous and outside imperial control. Indeed, control of the impressive Cerro Balllmay have been an effort to establish ideological sovereignty by taking over a most sacred part of tile landscape. Moving up the coast, there was a major Wari site established in MH1 at Pacheco in the Nasca valley. Settlement studies in Nasca indicate that the existing Nasca culture had undergone political upheaval and reorganization about two centuries before the Wari expansion. At that time, the people moved from many small villages into a few very large sites or clusters of sites. This was apparently the result of climatic deterioration, the development of new water sources, ncw power structurcs, and increased warfare within the region (Schreiber and Lancho Rojas 1995). During Latc Nasca timcs a shift in sitc location had bcgun, with pcoplc moving out of thc Nasca vallcy propcr, and moving to vallcys to thc south. Thc southward shift of Nasca occupations continucd in thc Middle Horizon, and mayor may not bc relatcd to thc Wari prcscncc in Nasca. Thc sitc of Pachcco is bcst known as thc location of a major offering of tons of smashcd fancy ccramic vcssels (Mcnzel 1964), but thc sitc apparcntly also contained extensive architecture, only faintly visible on old aerial photographs. The site today has bcen completely buried and lies under a large tract of cotton fields. The prcscncc of a large Wari sitc in an area of relative cultural complexity may indicatc a relatively direct form of control, at least in the Nasca valley itself. A small polity was ccntcrcd around the site ofHuaca del Loro (W. D. Strong 1957; Schrcibcr 1989; cf. Paulscn 1983), in thc Trancas vallcy, but thcrc is littlc cvidcncc that this polity fcllundcr Wari control. While Pachcco was abandoncd in MH1, thc Wari prcscncc continucd in thc uppcr Nasca vallcy in MH2, whcrc a small impcrial sitc was cstablishcd. Waristyle burial chambcrs havc bccn idcntificd in thc uppcr vallcys of both Nasca and Trancas, and may mark thc physical boundarics of Wari control in MH2. Thc

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru abandonment of Pacheco and the shift to tile upper valleys may signal a change in Wari strategies to a new conccrn with agricultural production, as will be discussed below. On the ccntral coast, a few Wari sites havc been tentatively identified, but tile major cultural event of the Early Intermediate-Middle Horizon transition is the collapse of the Lima polity (Stumer 1956). This cululre was relatively complex, probably organized at the level of multiple chiefdoms, and its large sites include massive adobc mound constructions. Whilc all of these sites were apparently abandoned by the start of the Middle Horizon, it is yet unclear whether the Lima collapse was due to Wari conquest or to othcr factors, such as climatic deterioration. No clearly Wari sites are known in thc Lima area, but the Nieveria ceramic style of the Middle Horizon cxhibits a blending of local and Wari elements. The site of Pachacamac (Uhle 1903) in the Lurin valley had a religious rather tllan a political focus, so is somewhat outside the scope of tllis paper. The Wari may have coopted a local religious center, which then grew into an influential pilgrimage center with a distinctive Wari-related ceramic style in MH2 (Shimada 1991). By Inka times Pachacamac was perhaps the most powerful and revered oracle in the Andes (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1992). The north coast presents an interesting problem. It is clear that the Mochc polity underwent serious upheaval in the Middle Horizon (Bawden 1982), but whether or not this was the result of Wari invasion is matter of great debate (Mackey 1982). Thcre are no clear examples ofWari imperial sites, yet many artifacts arc present (sce Donnan 1968), and burial pattcrns changed from cxtended to seatcd and flexcd (Donnan and Mackey 1978); thc latter is charactcristic of the south coast and Wari. Thc Mochc culturc was thc most cxtensive and complcx culturc cxisting at thc timc, with a wcll-developcd infrastructurc including administrativc centcrs and roads. Wc must cntcrtain thc possibility that this may be a casc in which an empire simply uscd existing facilitics, and had no nccd to build its own. Interestingly, G. E McEwan (1990) points out that thc subscquent Chimll culture apparently borrowed many aspects ofWari imperial architecturc, so thcy werc certainly awarc ofWari.

Economic reorganization: a change in focus While the initial expansion ofWari in MH1 seems concerned with both political and economic control, preliminary data suggcst that during MH2 Wari began to focus morc intcnsively on economic control, specifically agricultural production. Near Wari, the site of Azangaro lies at an elcvation of about 2400 m, in comparison to Wari's elevation of 3200 m, and was located within a productive ecozone in which lower-elevation crops could be grown. Azangaro was established in MH2, probably to organizc and control agricultural production (Anders 1986, 1989a, 1989b, 1991). Fully one-third of the site comprises storehouses, an indication of its use for economic concerns. Within its core territory Wari was making increased efforts to control agricultural production in MH2. A

89

90

Katharina Schreibu' small site located to the east of Wari, Jargampata, was also established for the purpose of extracting and storing agricultural produce (Isbell 1977). A second case in point is the Sondondo valley (Schreiber 1992). Although Jincamocco was built in MHl, its three satellite centers were built in MH2, and Jincamocco was greatly enlarged, from its initial 3.5 hectares to more than 15 hectares in size. Local villages located at the boundary between the tuber and herding zones were moved downward to about 3300 m or lower, in order to exploit the lower maize-producing zone. Extensive tracts of agricultural terraces were built below 3300 m. The labor investment in this project was extremely high, and certainly beyond the capacity of tlle small local population, which numbered fewer than 1000 people. The total volume of Middle Horizon terracing in tlle valley is equivalent to the building of a single retaining wall 300 m high and 8 km long, plus all tlle cutting and filling of soil that tllat entails. Wari's investment in the intensification of maize production in this valley was remarkable. The enlargement ofJincamocco may have been due to the need to provide quarters for imported laborers, as well as storage areas for the increased volumes of produce. While tlle exact phase of village movement and terrace construction cannot be specified, two of the small satellites were built adjacent to terraced zones suggesting that they came into production in MH2. The third satellite is located along the Wari road to the north (leading out of the valley toward Wari) and adjacent to a small obsidian source (Burger et al. 1998). In sum, in this region agricultural production was greatly increased at the behest of the empire in MH2. Whether this was for local consumption or for shipment elsewhere is unclear, but I suspect the latter. Certainly more maize was being produced than was needed to support a local population and Wari occupation. The city ofWari is located some four days' walk to the north, a rather long distance to carry foodstuffs, but it may be that the rapid growth of the capital in MH2 outstripped the ability of its immediate hinterland to supply all of its needs. A third example of increased economic control comes from Nasca. Pacheco, possibly the MHl Wari political capital of this region, was abandoned and a new occupation was established in the upper Nasca valley in MH2. The recently discovered site ofPataraya is located adjacent to a tract of agricultural fields that was probably used for the production of coca. Earlier sites dating to the Nasca culture were abandoned, and new sites occupied by highland people were established in the Middle Horizon. This evidence suggests that Wari co-opted this coca-growing zone for its own use, moved out the local people, and moved in its own allies. Pataraya may also mark the border ofWari control in MH2, with the lower portions of the Nasca drainage now outside the empire. The establishment of other new state installations in MH2 may also reflect a concern with protecting the empire from enemies outside. Honco Pampa, in the Callej6n de Huaylas, is located adjacent to one of only three passes through the formidable Cordillera Blanca, and the architecture of the site indicates that it was built very rapidly. While Wari provincial sites were usually built as a single, large,

The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru subdivided rectangular enclosure, Honco Pampa is a series of individual cells, each built independently. Not only is it much faster to build in this fashion, it also requires less planning or architectural expertise. When he excavated the site, Isbell (personal communications 1988) was surprised to find that the associated ceramics were MH2 styles, when he expected the site to be of much earlier date. (See Isbell's later publications [1989, 1991] for his reconsideration of the dating of tlle site.) I would argue tllat the late (and rapid) construction of the site is entirely consistent with its being a border outpost, dating to fairly late in the empire's history, at a time when areas to the north and east were no longer subject to Wari. The newly discovered site at Huaro (Glowacki and Zapata 1998), also built of individual cells in this rapid manner, may be a border settlement on the boundary nearest to the territory ofTiwanaku.

SUMMARY OF WARI EXPANSION AND REORGANIZATION Wari appears to have emerged very rapidly as an enormous urban center in its core region, and expanded its political control to a vast geographic area in a period probably not much longer than a century. The initial construction of sites such as Jincamocco in tlle eighth century AD gives us a good approximation of tlle timing of the expansion. The focus of the expansion seems to have been primarily political at the beginning, moving into and taking over or establishing hegemony with local cultures. In MH2, the empire's political control was greatly reduced. Various imperial centers built in MHl were abandoned, especially those at the northern and southern extremes of the empire, suggesting a reduction in the polity's overall size. At the same time, in the parts still under imperial control, economic control took on much greater importance. Efforts were made to bring new regions and environmental zones under production, and control over maize and coca cultivation was given high priority. And new installations may have been built on the now established borders of the empire. At the end of MH2 the empire collapsed, for reasons yet unknown. Data from Jincamocco suggest that the site was abandoned gradually in MH2, with sections of it f.'llling into disuse and used for trash disposal. Dating collapse is a complicated task for the archaeologist, as chronometric techniques tend to date construction and occupation, not abandonment. We can probably assume the empire lasted no more than two to three centuries.

COMPARISON WITH TIWANAKU Contemporaneous with Wari was a state centered at the impressive site of Tiwanaku, located on the Bolivian altiplano near Lake Titicaca. Tiwanaku emerged, probably as a pilgrimage center, by early in the Early Intermediate Period. By the late EIP (Tiwanaku IV in the local chronology), it was a state that

91

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.,

i'1 '1

Katharina Schreiber dominated the altiplano around Lake Titicaca. Tiwanaku colonists also relocated to the Moquegua valley at that time (Goldstein 1989, 1993), and Tiwanaku style artifacts are found to the south in Cochabamba, Bolivia. In the Middle Horizon (Tiwanaku V), Tiwanaku control increased in intensity, and it is usually assumed to have been an empire (Kolata 1993). For the most part, studies of Tiwanaku control of distant areas have been confined to its immediate core valley and the adjacent altiplano. There are as yet few data regarding horizontal or vertical integration, nor is there clear evidence of political or economic control outside the altiplano. Until research is specifically directed toward identifying evidence of Tiwanaku political control, we cannot be confident that the term "empire" is appropriate. Certainly, though, Tiwanaku was a political capital of a regional state (McAndrews et al. 1997), and it did directly control the entire altiplano region. Some oftlle confusion between Wari and Tiwanaku arose because of the similarity in tlle politico-religious iconography tllat the two cultures shared (Uhle 1903; Isbell 1983). Botll cultures prominently depicted images of the "staff deity," a distinctive human figure, with elaborate headdress, holding two long staffs, one in each hand. This image has its origins at least as early as the Chavln culture of the first millennium BC, and throughout the Andes was probably recognized as an important ultimate symbol of power even through Inb times. Careful analysis of the iconography of Wari and Tiwanaku indicates both striking similarities and differences (A. G. Cook 1983, 1985, 1987, 1992, 1994). There are some clear differences bet:ween Wari and Tiwanaku in terms of the medium of display of this power iconography, as well as in their respective architectural styles, that have been pointed out by William Conklin (1991) and merit emphasizing here. Tiwanaku is a large open site, with empty spaces and plazas designed to accommodate hundreds of people at a time. The iconography is carved on great stone monuments. People came to Tiwanaku to participate in its religious rituals, and to see the powerful icons. The sitc had been a pilgrimage center for centuries, and still played this role in the Middle Horizon. On the other hand, Wari architecture, whether at thc capital city or at the provincial centers, was designed to keep people out. Wari sites are charactcrized by large, formidable stonc cnclosures, sometimes three stories tall, with few entrics and no windows. Wari depictions of the staff dcity, and other religious symbols, are not carvcd in stone but rather arc depictcd on portablc artifacts such as ceramics or textiles. There was no central place to which people needed to travel to appreciate these religious monuments and symbols. Indecd, this is quite thc opposite ofTiwanaku. I would argue that this striking difference in the way Wari interacted with its subjects indicates that it and Tiwanaku were profoundly different in terms of their political organization. It is clear that Wari was an empire that established political and economic sovereignty over vast regions and large populations. Tiwanaku's influence and control over its subjects seems rather more benign.

4 The Achaelnenid Persian empire (c. 550-c. 330 BeE): continuities, adaptations, transformations Amclie Kuhrt

INTRODUCTION The Achaemenid empire was the earliest and largest of the known "world empires." It developed around a tiny core in the modern southern Iranian province of Fars, the modern form of the Old Persian name for the region, Parsa. "Achaemenid" derives from Achaemenes, the eponymous founder of the ruling dynasty and was the name of the Persian royal clan (Herodotus 1.125) that ruled the empire for nearly 200 years. Its formation began c. 550 BC E, with the conquests ofCyrus 11 (the Great) and Cambyses 11 (for regnal years, see Table 4.1); it was brought to an end by the conquests of Alexander the Great of Macedon between 334 and 323 BCE (see Table 4.2 for a chronology of major events in Achaemenid history). For over 200 years, it was the largest empire the world had seen, spanning from the Hellespont to northwest India, including Egypt (most of the time) and extending into Central Asia up to the fi'ontiers of modern Kazakllstan (Fig. 4.1). The Achaemenids had no contemporary peers, a marked contrast to later imperial formations in the region. Indeed, it is probable that the emergence of ncw strong states along Achaemenid frontiers during the last decades of Achaemcnid ruic (e.g., Macedon to thc northwest and Mauryan India to the southcast) was, at least in part, a response to Persian imperial pressures, although this remains to bc fully analyzed. Becausc of the empirc's vast sizc, problcms inhercnt in the evidence for studying it, and its fairly rapid destruction, scholars have long regarded the Persians as weak, ineffective rulers. A pervasive imagc of Achaemenid history portrays thc first decadcs of the great conqucrors (559-486 BC E) as a period of creative innovation and vigorous activity. In contrast, thc subsequent 150 or so years are charactcrized as a pcriod of stagnation and declinc: markcd by threatening uprisings by members of the royal f.1mily or govcrnment, the loss of Egypt, military weakness, increased (and fatal) reliance on mercenary forces, replacement of cuitic freedom with religious intolerance, a corrupt bureaucracy, degenerate court life, and oppressive taxation. In short, by the fourth century the empire was perceived as dying on its feet and hated by its subjects (e.g., Frye 1984). Further, the difficulty of tracing a Persian presence beyond the imperial heartland has been taken

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The Achaemmid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE)

Amelie Kuhrt

95

Table 4.2. Achaemmid empire: chronology of main political epents

Table 4.1. Regnal years of the kings of Persia Ruler

Regnal years (BCE)

Date (BCE)

Event

Teispes (of Anshan)

650-620

Cyrus I (son)

620-590 590-559

550 540s 539 530 525 522

Cyrus 11 defeats the Medes Cyrus' conquest of Lydia Cyrus conquers Babylonia Death of Cyrus; accession of his son, Cambyses Cambyses conquers Egypt Revolt of Bardiya, Cambyses' younger brother: assassinated by Darius and six Persian nobles; Darius seizes throne; major series of revolts through large part of empire. At some stage: northwest India and Thrace added to empire Building of Persepolis begins Ionian revolt begins Battle of MaratllOn Egypt revolts; death of Darius: succeeded b}, his son, Xerxes Revolt in Babylonia Persian invasion of Greece; revolt in Babylonia Xerxes assassinated; followed after short period of confusion by his son, Artaxerxes I Death of Artaxerxes I; succeeded by his only legitimate son, Xerxes 11. Xerxes assassinated by his half-brother Sogdianos who claims throne Sogdianos murdered by his half-brother Darius 11, who accedes to throne Darius 11 dies; Artaxerxes Il (his son) accedes to throne Attempt by the king's younger brother (CYl'lls) to topple him; Cyrus the Younger killed in battle ofCunaxa Egypt secedes Artaxerxes Il dies; succeeded by Artaxerxes III Egypt reeonquered Artaxerxes III poisoned; fu'ses (=fu·taxerxes IV) accedes to throne Arses murdered; Darius III (not a direct descendant) accedes Battle of Issos between Alexander of Maeedon and Darius Ill: Persians defeated Banle of Gaugamela ends in Macedonian victory: Alexander takes over the main royal Persian centers Darius III murdered by two Persian nobles (Bessos and Nabarzanes) one of whom proclaims himself king of Persia in eastel'l1 Iran and Bactria; Alexander arranges fOl' Dm'ius Ill's burial at Persepolis and proclaims vengeance on Bessos for the murder of Dm'ius I-lard fighting in eastel'l1 Iran and Central Asia by Alexander Alexander completes his conquest of the Persian empire by conquering Achaemenid-held regions ofIndia Alexander returns fi'om India through Persia to Babylonia; dies in Babylon

Cambyses I (son)

Cam byses 11 (son)

559-530 530-522

Bardiya (Smerdis) (brother)

522

Cyrus 11 the Great (son)

Darius I (son of H ystaspes, grandson of Arsames, descendant of Achaemenes) Xerxes (son)

522-486 486-465

Darius 11 (son)

465-424/3 423-404

Artaxerxes 11 (son)

405-359

Artaxerxes III (son)

359-338 338-336

Artaxerxes I (son)

Artaxerxes IV (Arses; son) Darius III (second cousin) Alexander of Macedon

336-330 330-323

to mean that, in the absence of effective rivals, they made no effort to root their power in the imperial provinces and create an effective and durable infrastructure of rule. In reaction to this negative stereotype, a new approach has emerged in the last twenty years, and is now beginning to dominate perceptions of the Achaemenid empire (see, in particular, Achaemenid History, I-VIII, 1987-94;1 WiesehOfer 1993; Kuhrt 1995: 647-701; Briant 1996). Scholars have stresscd that, despite internal revolts, recurring problems along frontiers, attempts at seccssion (including the loss of Egypt for nearly sixty ycars), sllcccssion crises and regicidcs, thc Achaemcnid empire held its enormous territorics and divcrsc subjcct populations together for more than 200 years. The question thus becomes not why did it comc to an end, but rathcr how was it so succcssful? Two fundamcntal points should be noted. First, aftcr a serious crisis in the formative decades of the empire, when Darius I violently usurped the thronc (522/1 BeE), the Achaemenid family never lost its exclusivc hold on the kingship. Second, in view of this, it is more helpful to see the empire in the rcigns ofDarius I and his son Xerxes as moving into a new phase of maturity and stability. In other words, the "vitality" of the foundation decades gives way, not to "stagnation" and a process of terminal decline, but to imperial consolidation. After this transition, "nationalist revolts" scarcely occl1l'red;2 from then on, the aims of rebels centered on who should sit on the impcrial throne, not on establishing separatist states. Also, from Xerxes on there was no further territorial expansion; efforts were directed

509 499 490 486 484 480/479 465 424 423 404 401 405-400 358 343 338 336 333 331 330

330-327 327-325 324-323

to tightening and adjusting thc administration of thc provincial system (Horn blower 1982; Stolper 1989; Pctit 1990). Grcater uniformity in taxation and accounting provide evidence of this (Descat 1985, 1989). Not all of the many problems that besct understandings of the Persian empire can be fully cxplorcd in this brief discussion. I shall therefore focus on a few central aspects: the formation and cohesion ofthc cmpire; imperial governance;

77JC A c/}(fcJIlwid PCl'Jitlll

C1II pirc

(c. SSO-c. 330 BeE)

and the continuity and change in the balance between imperial power and local particularisl11. Understanding all these issues, however, is inextricably linked to the problematical evidence of our sources.

-

THE SOURCES

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Classical writers The written sources for studying the empire present particular difficulties, not so much because they arc sparse but because they exist in several different languages and genres. Before excavation and the subsequent decipherment of ancient Near Eastern scripts in the last century, the Achaemenid empire was primarily known through classical Greek writers, especially Herodotus. His writings celebrate the victories of the mainland Greeks over the Persians between 490 and 478 BeE, so his valuable inf
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The AchacllIwid PerJiaN empire (c. 550-c. 330 BeE)

99

"western" bravery and masculinity (Said 1978; Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1983, 1987a, 1987b; E. Hall 1989, 1993). In studying the Persian empire, it is important to remember that the popular and widespread impression of its political system is thus fundamentally flawed (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1983).

Old Tcstrt1'ftertt hoolu The Old Testament has bequeathed two divergent pictures of the Persian rulers. In Ezra and Nehemiah they appear as restorers of the Jerusalem temple and active supporters of the Yahweh cult." The image is positive because Persian kings ushered in the period of the "Second Temple," ordering the return of people who had been deported (I'om Judah to Babylonia in 587/6 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II had conquered this small Palestinian state. The Persians allowed the returning exiles to restore the temple and city ofJerusalem, and were thought later to have supported the rebuilding with imperial funds. The book of Esther, almost certainly written in the Hellenistic period (second century BeE, Bickerman 1967), diverges 6'om this rosy image. Here, Persian comt lite is described similarly to its treatment in Greek writings (Momigliano 1977).

Royal inscriptions The Persians of the Achaemenid period spoke an early (>1'111 0(' Persian "Old Persian" a member of the lndo- European language (:lInily. Texts in Old Persian were written using a wedge-shaped script, quite distinct (i'ol1l the much older Mesopotamian cunei(>1'In system. Its deciphennent began in the early nineteenth century, when squeezes were made of the longest Old Persian inscription known the text (with accompanying relief) of Darius I, carved high on the rock face dominating the main road leading (i'om the Mesopotamian plain to Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) at Ikhistun (Fig. 4.2). Darius' inscription gives a detailed account of the circumstances smrounding and f(lllowing his accession to the throne. The contents circulated through the empire, as an Aramaic version on papyrus (i'om Egypt and an Akkadian inscription (i'om Babylon prove. But the Behistlln text is exceptional; material written in Old Persian is largely limited to monumental inscriptions, intended to reflect the unchanging majesty of Persian imperial power. Thc royal texts thcret(lI'c provide less insight into the Achacmenid empirc than originally hoped. Political events, historical changes, and administrative structurcs are not (apart fi'olll Behistlln) recorded in them (Kent 1953; Lecoq 1997). The Old Persian script was probably an artificial royal creation (cf. Herrenschmidt 1985); intended to make a visual impression and providing a script unique to the Persians that stamped the empire as Persian, it was not used outside the /clI'lnal public sphere. All inscriptions appear on buildings and rock f:lces in Iran, or on smaller portable objects probably emanating {I'om the court (e.g., stone vascs, metal vessels, seals):l Old Persian inscriptions are virtually always accompanied by versions in

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imcl'ijltioll Illld relicf (!f' J)aritlJ /, Crtn'cd in tlJt: clur 11 t llchiJtllll, dominlTtill[f thc mllin rlllld IClldiWI./hJlII Iillbylollill III

Rc/lIltmlll. other languages normally Elamite and Babylonian Akkadian, and occasionally Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Administratipc doc1mtcnts Documents in other languages - Babylonian, Egyptian, Aramaic, and Elamite illuminate socioeconomic aspccts of the empire. The Aramaic texts are especially important. Aramaic was widely used in the Near East bdc)I'e the Persian conquest and perhaps fClr this reason was adopted by the new conquerors as the most

100

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The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE)

Ametie Kuhrt

widely used administrative language. There is evidence for its employment in Persepolis, Babylonia, Egypt, the Levant, and Asia Minor (Greenfield 1985). Its appearance in the former eastern provinces of the Achaemenid empire during the Hellenistic period (Schlumberger et al. 1958), and among the Parthians, who used an Aramaic script to write contemporary Middle Iranian languages, demonstrates that the Achaemenid bureaucracy used Aramaic throughout the imperial territories (Naveh 1982). Among the most important texts, central to gaining an insight into the workings of the empire, are two groups ofElamite texts from Persepolis. One set of just over 100 texts, dating between 492 and 458 BC E, contains records of silver payments made to workers instead of their regular rations (Cameron 1948). These were termed the "Treasury Texts," after their discovery in a building on the palace terraces identified as the treasury. A much larger group consists of tablets dating from 509-494 BC E that were stored in the northwest fortifications at Persepolis. 5 They record authorizations for all kinds of food rations to workers (women, men, and children), to cultic functionaries (for sacrifices), and to high-ranking Persian nobles - including even Darius' queen Artystone. This material is extraordinarily rich in its potential for understanding taxation, storage networks, labor systems, agricultural production, landholding, demography, diet, settlement, travel routes, and provisioning (Hinz 1971; Koch 1977, 1986, 1990, 1993; Hallock 1985; Lewis 1990; Aperghis 1996, 1998, 1999; Briant 1996: ch. 11; Brosius 1996: ch. 5). So far, just under 2200 texts of this corpus have been published (Hallock 1969, 1978); transcriptions of approximately another 2000 exist, and a very large number of texts and fragments (possibly another 25,000, housed in the Oriental Institute in Chicago) have yet to be studied and published. Another important archive of material (in Akkadian) comes from Nippur in Babylonia and dates to the second half of the fifth century BC E. It reflects the transactions of a Babylonian business firm, the Murashu family. They engaged in leasing and managing military land grants made to soldiers and landed estates belonging to members of the royal family and high court personnel, and carrying out associated commercial transactions. This material accords insights into some of the most basic and crucial aspects of imperial functioning, which was replicated, in its essentials, elsewhere in the empire (Cardascia 1952; Stolper 1985; van Driel 1989). Almost contemporary with the Murashu documents are the Aramaic texts from Egypt (Grelot 1972; POl·ten and Yardeni 1986-93; also POl·ten 1997). They come from three distinct contexts. One is an enormous and disparate collection of papyri and ostraca (now scattered across the museums of the world) generated by a small community ofJewish soldiers and their families who served as part of the Achaemenid frontier garrison on Elephantine (at Aswan). Some individual family histories emerge with great clarity, as well as the religious life of the Jewish soldiers and their relations with Persian authorities (Porten 1968). Another, much smaller group comes from Hermopolis; they are letters written by soldiers to their families (Bresciani and Kamil 1966).

Fragments of an archive from the Persian bureaucracy have been found at Saqqara, near Memphis. Some 200 are in Aramaic (SegaI1983); many more are in demotic Egyptian and unpublished, so it is not clear whetl1er tl1ey date to the Achaemenid period. The texts are, unfortunately, very damaged, but do provide some glimpses of administration in Egypt. Most important is a pouch containing a collection of sealed letters written on leatl1er; unfortunately, tl1ey were acquired on tl1e antiquities market and their exact find spot is unknown. The documents (now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford) contain correspondence between the Persian satrap of Egypt, Arsames, and his estate-manager(s) and provide detailed insights into the structure of great landed estates (Driver 1965). These are merely the largest and most important concentrations of documents. Smaller collections6 and more scattered finds help to amplify this material.

Archaeological finds Archaeologists have explored the far-flung regions of the empire in only a partial f.'1shion. The chief sites that have been excavated and studied for their Achaemenid remains are the great royal centers in Iran: Pasargadae (Stronach 1978), Persepolis (Schmidt 1953-70; Tilia 1972-8), Susa (cf. Boucharlat 1990), and the associated rock-cut tombs (at Naqsh-i Rustam and Persepolis; Schmidt 1970). Recently, more attention has been paid to the Achaemenid levels oflongoccupied sites such as Sardis in Lydia (Greenwalt 1995; Dusinberre 1997), Daskyleion in Hellespontine Phrygia (Bakir 1995), and Achaemenid settlements in the Levant (Moorey 1975, 1980; Stern 1982; see also the journal Transeuphratc1'le)/ central and eastern Turkey (Summers 1993; Voigt 1997: 430; Blaylock 1998: 118) and Central Asia (Francfort 1988; Briant 1984). Extensive modern towns cover several sites known to have been important in the period (e.g., Arbela [modern Erbil], in northern Iraq, Damascus, and Ecbatana [modern Hamadan]), making excavation difficult. Monuments with Iranian motifs have been documented in western Turkey, reflecting the presence of Persians or local dignitaries influenced by Persian court practices (Jacobs 1987; Mellink 1988; Nolle 1992; Calmeyer 1992). Analogous evidence has been found on Phoenician sites, particularly some magnificent relief sculpted sarcophagi made for the kings of Sidon (Bivar 1975; Stucky 1984). Most important is the recent find of a nmerary stele at Saqqara in Egypt (Mathiesen et al. 1995; see Fig. 4.6). This material illustrates the enormously rich cultural interaction that took place within the empire - especially striking is the strong influence of what is usually called "Greek art," which begins in the time of the Persian empire (Root 1991).

Implications As with many of the empires discussed in this volume, there is a mass of material dating to the Persian empire, but it is uneven and often difficult to use. For

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Amelie Kuhrt reconstructing political history, scholars largely depend on the problematic Greek historians. Administrative material is available in substantial quantities from Fars, Babylonia, and Egypt, but it is largely restricted to the fifth century; the fourth century is particularly poorly documented (though see van der Spek 1998). The eastern imperial regions are also scantily known; archaeological material is the primary source here and its interpretation is much disputed (Briant 1984).

THE FORMATION AND COHESION OF THE ACHAEMENID EMPIRE

I

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I

The Achaemenid empire was created through a series of conquests beginning with Cyrus 11 "the Great" of Parsa who, in 550 BC E, defeated the ruler of the Medes, a political entity about which numerous debates rage, not least about the degree of its influence on Persian sociopolitical structure and imperial institutions (e.g., Dandamaev 1997; Summers 1997; Sancisi-Weerdenberg 1988, 1994b). With this defeat, the territory to the north over which the Medes claimed hegemony - the western Iranian plateau, Armenia, Anatolia up to the Halys river (which formed the frontier with Lydia) - came under Persian domination and their capital Ecbatana and its treasury fell into Persian hands (Grayson 1975: no. 7, ii.I-4). How any of this territory had been controlled by the Medes and was then organized by Cyrus is unknown. But one result was that some time in the 540s, Croesus, the king of Lydia, came into conflict with his new Persian neighbor. Cyrus' subsequent victory over him meant that the entire territory from the old Halys frontier to the Aegean coast was added to his conquests (Kuhrt 1995: 658-9; Briant 1996: 44-8). In 539 BCE, Cyrus won a major military victory against the Babylonian king and the large Neo- Babylonian empire (including Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the northern ends of the Arabian caravan routes) was incorporated (Kuhrt 1995: 659-60; Briant 1996: 50-5). It is not certain, but seems likely, that the last seven to eight years of Cyrus' life were spent conquering eastern Iran - certainly by 522 BC E the region was part of Persia's imperial territory. According to some traditions, Cyrus was killed while campaigning in Central Asia. On Cyrus' death, the empire stretched from the Egyptian frontier and the Aegean coast to Uzbekistan (Fig. 4.1). In 526/5 his son and successor, Cambyses, added Egypt to this area (L1oyd 1988; Kuhrt 1995: 661-4; Briant 1996: 61-72). Persian control in Egypt extended to Aswan in the south and included the oases of the western desert. It was secured through agreements reached with Cyrene, Barca, and Libya to the west of Egypt (Herodotus 3.13) and the wealthy Nubian kingdom to the south (MOl'kot 1991a and this volume). Evidence from Babylonia and Egypt shows that both Cyrus and Cambyses made use of a range of Mesopotamian and Egyptian conventions and rituals to cast themselves in the role of legitimate rulers in the newly conquered territories (Kuhrt 1983, 1987; L10yd 1988). Persian conquerors also coopted members of

The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) defeated elites to represent their interests and help integrate the foreign invaders into the local fabric (see below). There is no contemporary evidence from Lydia, but Herodotus' account suggests a similar pattern of be havi or there. The great conquests of Cyrus also found physical expression in his new royal center of Pasargadae in his homeland, Parsa. Its palaces, set in a spacious park, reflect the adaptation of the iconographic repertoires and use of architectural and building techniques of the conquered peoples, primarily Assyro-Babylonian and Lydian (Nylander 1970; Root 1979). The very rapid acquisition of empire created internal problems in Persia, which led to a revolt by Cambyses' younger brother Bardiya, during the former's absence in Egypt. The serious nature of the internal Persian conflict is strikingly illustrated by the fact that, despite being a legitimate son of Cyrus, founder of the empire, Bardiya was assassinated after a few months by a small group of Persian nobles, onc of whom - Darius I - then acceded to the throne, claiming relationship with Cyrus' f.1mily. The turmoil unleashed by these events is known from the massive and, in some cases, repeated revolts against him, particularly on the Iranian plateau, in Babylonia, Armenia, Elam, and Parsa itself (Dandamaev 1976; Kuhrt 1995: 664-7; Briant 1996: 109-35). These were efficiently and ruthlessly put down and Darius was able to consolidate control in Central Asia, to add the Indus valley to his realm, and to begin exploiting the maritime routes between north India and the Persian Gulf (Herodotus 4.44). Fairly early in his reign, Darius founded a new dynastic center at Persepolis (Parsa) and recast the old city of Susa as a distinctively Persian city. He further strengthened his northwestern frontier, by adding Thrace and several Aegean islands to his direct control, and creating close links with Macedon in northern Greece (Briant 1996: 154-6). His son Xerxes' attempt to consolidate this hold by adding more of Greece in 480/479 BCE was not successful, although the setback was slight and proved to be temporary (Kuhrt 1995: 670-2; Briant 1996: 545-59). From this point on, and despite changes and developments that arc scantily known, the empire can be considered a stable matl\l'e entity.

Royal rhetoric and imagery At the center of the imperial system was the Persian king. The great god Ahuramazda had set him over the varied lands and peoples of the earth and given Persia supremacy over them; without his divine support no king ruled in Persia. The king was Ahuramazda's creatl\l'e, part of his bountiful creation that ensured happiness for all humanity. All, therefore, owed reverence, obedience and "tribute" (Old Persian baji-, cf. Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1989) to the Persian king. Such loyalty strengthened Ahuramazda's plan for maintaining perfect order. King and god were complementary in the universal scheme and worked for t11e same ends. The inscription on the f.1cade ofDarius 1's tomb at Naqsh-i Rustam (Fig. 4.3; Kent 1953: DNa) illustrates this symbiosis:

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The Aclmcmcuid PCI'Jirtll empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) A great god is Ahuramazda, who created this earth (bI/1IIi-), who created yonder sky, who created man, who crcated happiness t()l' man, who made Darius king, onc king over many, onc lord of many. I am Darius thc great king, king of kings, king of countries containing all kinds of men, king on this great earth far and wide, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, having Aryan lineagc. Says Darius the king: By the t~lVor of Ahuramazda these arc the countries which I seized outsidc Persia; I ruled over them; they bore mc "tribute"; what was said to them by me, that they did; my law (dl1tl1-) - that held them firm; Media, Elam, Parthia, Aria, Bactria, Sogdiana, Chorasmia, Drangiana, Arachosia, Sattagydia, Gandara, India, Scythians who drink haoma (an intoxicating ritual drink), Scythians with pointed caps, Babylonia, Assyria, Arabia, Egypt, Armenia, Cappadocia, Sardis, Ionia, Scythians who are across the sea, Thrace, jlctl1JoJ-wearing IOllians (type of hat), Libyans, Kushites, men of Maka, Carians. Says Dal'ius the king: Ahuramazda when he saw this earth in commotion, thereafler bestowed it upon me, made me king; I am king. By the favOl' of Ahuramazda r put it down in its placc; what I said to them, that they did, as was my desire. If now you should think: "How many arc the countries which King Darius held?" look at the sculptures (of those) who bear the throne, then shall YOll know, then shall it become known to you: the spear of a Persian man has gone {()l·th {ill'; then shall it become known to you: a Persian man has delivered battle fi1l' indeed f"om Persia. Says Darius the king: This which has been done, all that by the will of Ahuramazda I did. Ahuramazda bore me aid, until I did the work. Me may Ahuramazda protect fi'om harm, and my royal hOllse, and this land: this I pray of Ahuramazda, this may Ahuramazda give to me! 0 man, that which is the command ofAhuramazda, let this not seem repugnant to you; do not leave the right path; do not rise in rebellion!

4.3 ROc/I-cllt tolltb (!f' DI11'it/J I at NI1IJJh-i RI/Jtlllll,

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PCI'JCjlo/iJ.

The message of the text is mirrored in the reliefs carved on royal tomb fiKades from the time of Darius I onwards (Root 1979). The king stands on a stepped podium with a bow resting on the tip of his f()ot; opposite him is a fire altar. He raises his hand in a gesture of salutation to a divine figure who hovers above in a winged disc. The god liKes the king and raises one hand in an identical gesture of greeting; with his other hand he holds out a ring, an old symbol of' kingly power. The figure in the disc is almost certainly Ahuramazda. Other important motifs of Persian kingship emerge fi'om Darius I's tomb inscription and relief: The podium and the fire altar are set on a kind of'throne; its struts are suppOl'ted by representatives or the diffcrent subject peoples, all carefully dirtcrentiated by their clothing and labeled. The viewer is exhOl'ted to look at them in order to be awed by the Persian achievement. Wars have been fought by Persians at the distant boundaries or the earth, and, with Ahuramazda's help, the depicted peoples were delivered into the Persian king's hand. They retain their individual character, but are now united in service to the king, whose mastery they uphold and whose law they obey. It is a recurrent theme of the royal inscriptions to dwell on the variegated nature of the king's subjects. The Persian king dominates the divine creation in all its colOl'ful variety, combining their various skills and resources to serve his and Persia's ends. The

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4.4 l)po groups I!f' subject pcojlles (Blamitcs abope; Armeniam below) bl'illgi1~f/ lfUts to tbe fling: mst stttiI'CtJ.w:, Apttdmta tit Perscpo/is.

Amelie 1(1Ih1't

motif is echoed at the dynastic center of Pcrsepolis. The sides of the platform and great staircases leading up to the columned ajladrtrla (palace) arc decorated with reliefs showing deputations from Persia's subject lands waiting to present the king with precious gifts acknowledging his power and their subservience (Fig.

4.4). The Persian identity of the king and his realm is another feature of the royal inscriptions, stressed repeatedly. The king is a Persian, descended (I'om Persians, and has conquered lands outside Persia. The "Persian man" has /()ught 1:,1' (i'om home to create the present perfect state. The continued well-being of Persia "a good country, possessed of good horses, possessed of good men" (Kent 1953: D Pd) is onc of the king's prime concerns. Lf Persia and its people arc kept sale, by the continued adherence of its subjects to the Persian imperial order, then happiness will reign supreme (Kent 1953: DPe). The Persians arc clearly distinguished from subject peoples on the IT/ltu/mm staircases, \00. They arc the courtiers, officials, soldiers; they hold back the gifl-bearing ambassadors until the moment comes to usher them into the king's presence. Some bear items off()()d, perhaps t<)r the royal table. In every respect, their relationship to royal authority is markedly different (I'om that of the conquered. The inscription on Darius' tomb notes that one reason Ahuramazda gave him the kingship was because the earth "was in commotion (ytl1ldati-)" and Darius

The Achaemellid Persiml

(c. 550-c. 330 BeE)

put things to rights. The theme of the king as a detense against disorder recurs in several of Darius' inscriptions, most notably the great Behistun inscription (Fig. 4.2; sec also Fig. 4.5). There, the motif of rebellion causing unrest is linked to the growth of the "lie/falsehood" (drat/;[Ta): as things start to go wrong, the lie takes hold in the land (Kent L953: DB I, 32-5): "When Cambyses had gone off to Egypt, after that the people became evil. After that the lie waxed great in the country, both in Persia and in Media and in the other provinces." As the rebellions start, Darius invariably describes the leaders as arising and "lying" to the people. The concept of t:,lsehood is thus linked to revolt against the divine and royal order. To misrepresent oneself is to mislead people so that they stray fi-cHn the path of righteousness, which is obedience to the Persian king and Ahuramazda. It is likely that the Old Persian word encapsulating the concept of correct behavior, and hence acceptance of the imperial order, is "truth" (arta). Onc way of understanding Herodotus' statement that Persian boys were taught three things only "to ride, to shoot with the bow, and to tell the truth" ( 1.136) is that part of the education of young Persians consisted of learning the duty of total devotion to king and country (cf. Briant 1982b: 449). In a text of Xerxes (Kent 1953: XPh, 28-56), the restoration of imperial order may be equated with worship of Ahuramazda and al'ta in the sense of "order/truth." The king was thus portrayed as an absolute monarch; all were subject to his power and his law. But he did not" exercise power in an arbitrary manner. As guardian ofAhl1l'amazda's creation, ruling over "this earth" with his aid, he himself was bound to uphold the ethical fi'amework and his actions were determined by the demands of appropriate high principles. He presented hil1lselfas an embodimenl of positive virtues that fitted him to rule. Two identical royal inscriptions (Kent 1953: DNb; Gharib L968: XNb), onc of Darius and onc of Xerxes, arc the best expression of these royal ideals. The f:,ct that both kings had the same text inscribed Jlc1'lmtim shows that the semil11ents expressed central tenets of Persian kingship: A great god i~ Ahuramazda who creatcd this cxccllcnt work which one see~; who created happiness ()r man; who bestowed wisdom and energy upon Darius/Xerxes the king. Says Darius/Xerxes the king: by the (iwor of Ahuramazda I am of sllch a kind that I am a fi'icnd to what is right, I am no fi'iend to what is wrong. It is not my wish that to the weak is done wrong because of the mighty, it is not my wish that the weak is hurt because of the mighty, that the mighty is hurt because of the weak. What is right, that is my wish. I am no Ii'iend of the man who is a ()lIower of the lie. I am not hot tempered. When I feci anger rising, I keep that under control by my thinking power. I control firmly my impulses. The man who co-operates, him do I reward according to his co-operation. He who does harm, him I punish according to the damage. It is not my wish that a man docs harm, it is certainly not my wish that a man if he causes damage be not punishcd. 'What a man says against a man, that does not convince mc, until I have heard testimony (?) fl'om both parties. "Vhat a man does or pert()rms according to his powers, satisfies mc, therewith I am satisfied

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T1;c Aclmclflwid PCI'Jian cmpirc (c. 550-c. 330 BeE) and it gives me great pleasure and I am very satisfied and I give much to E1ithful men. I am trained with both hands and keto As a horseman I am a good horseman. As a bowman I am a good bowman, both at(lOt and on horseback. As a spearman I am a good spearman, both af(lOt and on horseback. And the skills which Ahuramazda has bestowed upon me and I have had the strength to use thcm, by the [WOI' of Ahuramazda, what has been done by mc, I have done with thcse skills which Ahuralllazda has bestowed upon me.

Hcre the king's qualities as a just ruler are the central motif: Ahuramazda has equipped the ruler with the insight and ability to distinguish right from wrong, making him a guarantor of justice and maintainer of social order. Because he does not react unthinkingly and is able to control his temper, the king metes out reward and punishment absolutely f~lirly, and only after due consideration of a case. He judges services rendered according to the potential of the individual, and is ready to reward loyalty. At the same time, not only the moral, but also the physical abilities of the king arc stressed; he is a supremely able rider, who can wield the bow and spear with consummate skill. The preservation of the same text fix two different kings implies that this package of royal virtues encapsulated what it meant to be a Persian king, and was an important part of the broadcast ideology of kingship. The cnd of the text exhorts subjects to spread abroad the superiority of the Persian king. Part of the text, in Aramaic translation, is preserved on papyrus at Elephantine in Egypt (late f,Hh century; cf. Sims-Williams 19R I). Very similar qualities are ascribed to Cyrus the Younger by Xenophon (Anabasis 1.9), who significantly precedes his encomium by saying that Cyrus was the most kingly of men and the most fitted to exercise power. The conclusion must be that this image of kingship circulated widely in the empire.

1)Y'fIf'tJtic cotttirmity Royal descent was of' prime importance in the king's legitimacy. Frol11 Darius I on, the Persian kings traced their genealogy, and stressed that they were descended through their bther, ideally in a direct line, "'om Achaemenes. The futlll'e king was, thus, nOl'l11ally selected "'om a tight-knit f~\lllily group. The reigning king was acknowledged to have total power over choosing his successor, as shown in an inscription of Xerxes (Kent 1953: Xpf):

or

4.5 Royal He}'o Jtahbi1l.!!lio1l, Jymbo/izi1l.!! thl: lu·II.!! aJ IIp/){}/dcl' %rdcr pcrmJ the jim:cJ I!f' chlloJ; "'f.rt door 11' "Harem, " PITJCjlO/iJ.

Says Xerxcs the king: othcr sons Darius there wcre, (but) thus unto Ahuramazda was the dcsirc Darius my (ilther made mc the greatcst after himself. "Vhen my (ilther Darius wcnt away (i'om the thronc (i.e. died), by thc will of Ahuralllaztia I became king on my (i1thcr's throne.

The king was thus not subject to laws of primogeniture. Political considerations might lead him to select a younger son. In the case of Darius I and Xerxes, Darius' choice may well have been dictated by the 1:1Ct that the mother of his eldest son (Artobazanes) was herself' the daughter of the Persian noble Gobryas.

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Had Darius promoted him, his maternal family could have gained considerable influence, and might ultimately have undermined the Achaemenid hold on the throne. By choosing Xerxes, grandson of Cyrus, from whose family no male offspring survived, Darius circumvented such a danger. This anxiety to keep power within the inner Achaemenid royal group explains several later instances of apparently arbitrary murders of royal wives and tlle practice of royal endogamy (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1983). Several Persian kings had more tllan one wife. Darius I had six, Artaxerxes 11 tl1l'ee, and Darius III two; polygamy was probably tlle norm for all. Greek writers' references to princes as bastards (nothoi, Herodotus 3.2) imply tlle existence of different grades among the king's spouses, altllOugh how tlley were ranked remains unclear. Ctesias names three Babylonian women who, he says, bore Artaxerxes I's bastard offspring (Jacoby 1923: 688, FlS). As tlle crucial factor in establishing legitimacy of claim to tlle tlU'one was paternal descent, it is hard to understand what tlle criteria were for dubbing some children "bastards" and otllers "legiti;nate." The impression is that tlle first-ranking royal wives were Persian; but t\lat cannot be completely confirmed (see also Brosius 1996). Two things seem certain: first, tllat tlle position of royal wives was dependent on tlle status oftlleir sons (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1983); second, tllat tllere was a group of royal sons among whom the king expected normally to select his successor. Only if tllere were no male offspring in this preferred circle, did it become possible for other sons to become eligible. The young princes were educated, along with the children of the nobility, from an early age (five years) to adulthood by the "wisest men" (Strabo lS.3.18). They were the magi, associated with divine worship and guardians of Persian lore - stories of gods, heroes, and past noble deeds. They instilled this Persian oral tradition into their young charges, along with training in military skills, hunting, and survival techniques. The duties of, and to, a king formed part of the teaching (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1993). The royal princes formed fi'iendships in this environment, which provided the crown prince with his later close intimates. When the king died, the sacred fire (associated with him in a way not well understood) was extinguished throughout the land (Diodorus Siculus 17.94.4-S). A period of public mourning followed. The Persians shaved their hair and put on mourning garb; the manes of horses were clipped. How long the mourning lasted is not certain. The heir designate was responsible for the funeral of his f.'uher. This could be a major operation, because the body had to be transported to Persia for burial in the royal tombs cut in the rocks at Naqsh-i Rustam and Persepolis. A mule-drawn hearse conveyed the royal corpse back to the Persian homeland, which gave the ruler-to-be tlle opportunity to display his filial piety and stress his legitimacy as tlle official successor. When Alexander arranged for Darius Ill's body to be sent to Persia for burial, he declared himself publicly to be the official heir to the Achaemenid throne. The main source for tlle accession ceremonial ofthe new king is Plutarch's Life ofArtaxerxes, 3:

The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) Soon after the death ofDarius II, the king (se. Artaxerxes II) went to Pasargadae to take part in a ceremony ofroyal initiation, performed by the priests in Persia. It takes place in the sanctuary of a warrior goddess, rather like Athena: the person who is to be initiated has to go here, take off his own dress, put on that which Cyrus wore before he became king, eat a cake of figs, chew terebinth and drink a bowl of sour milk to the last drop. It is possible that there were other rituals as well, but they are unknown to olltsiders.

Unfortunately, Plutarch gives no more details of tlle coronation ceremonial, beyond tllis rite de passage paving the way for the king's son to be transformed into a king. Nevertlleless, the passage contains some very significant points. First, the king goes to Pasargadae, tlle city ofCyrus, heroic founder oftlle empire. Part oftlle ceremony involves tlle king-to-be linking himself even more explicitly witll Cyrus. He takes off his old identity, symbolized by his personal garments, and puts on Cyrus' dress "before he became king." Thus, he becomes in some sense Cyrus tlle man, whose rise to power and great conquests are still to be accomplished. Perhaps his consumption of fig cake, terebintll, and sour milk encapsulated in ritual form the training undergone by young Persians, including tlle future king, which fitted them to exercise power. The ritual also had a military aura by its location in the sanctuary of a warrior goddess, probably tlle Persian goddess Anahita, a martial patron of warriors (Malandra 1983: 117-19). At some point following the initiation, the king was presumably robed and crowned in the special royal coat (lzandys) and head covering (tiara, Izidaris). He may have also received on this occasion the shield, spear, and bow depicted on coins, seals, and tomb reliefs. It is possible that the king's governors formally surrendered their office to the king on this occasion an acknowledgment that they owed their position to him, and an opportunity for him to express his trust by reinstating them or, conversely, dismissing them (Diodorus Siculus 11.71.1; et: Briant 1991). Another act of the new reign may have been the remission of outstanding debts of taxes (Herodotus 6.S9) - alongside the stressed continuity, the king's accession also marked a new beginning for his subjects.

King and nobility How did the king maintain his position of preeminence? How did he secure tlle support of the Persian aristocracy? Darius' seizure of the throne created a problem. According to Herodotus, anyone of the group of regicides could have become king. Darius' claim was no stronger than that of his peers. Further, Darius, in his own account of his accession at Behistun, names the people who helped him in tlle struggle, and commends their families for all time to future Persian kings. So they were certainly prominent individuals. In addition, one of them, Gobryas, is depicted (and named) standing behind Darius on the facade of the king's tomb at Naqsh-i Rustam. Another Persian noble, Aspathines, also appears with his name on Darius I's tomb. Everything suggests that there was a

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Amelie Kuhrt powerful established group of hereditary Persian nobles, whose support the king needed to harness and whose political ambitions he had to curb. They had, after all, with his personal assistance, assassinated a legitimate king - if they were antagonized they might do so again, with Darius their victim. Herodotus (3.84) records that, after the murder of Bardiya, the conspirators agreed among themselves certain privileges that the one who ultimately became king was bound to grant. They were to be allowed free access to the king, without going through the formal court ceremonial (unless the king was with a woman), and the king agreed to take his wives exclusively from their families. It is possible that they were also granted tax exemptions on their estates (Herodotus 3.97). In effect, then, the Persian king was compelled to accede to pressure from his nobles as a price for their support and loyalty. But what happened in practice? One point already mentioned is that the Persian kings managed to keep the nobility at a healthy distance from royal power. Darius excluded the grandson of Gobryas from the kingship, promoting instead Xerxes, whose maternal family was extinct. A century later, Darius II, to gain support in his bid for the throne, married two of his children to members of the family of the Persian noble Hydarnes. When his oldest son, Artaxerxes II, acceded to the throne, his mother, Parysatis, worked to remove his Hydarnid wife and persuaded him to marry one of his daughters instead. The motive behind this was probably to ensure that the throne stayed firmly within the inner Achaemenid family. So the king did not openly backtrack on his agreement to intermarry only with the families of the six noble helpers - he subverted it, by marrying members of his own family, and giving those offspring preference, where possible, in selection for the throne. The free access granted to the nobles was also a privilege rapidly curtailed. According to Herodotus (3.118-19), one of the conspirators, Intaphernes, insisted on seeing Dat'ius although he was told that the king had withdrawn with one of his wives. Suspecting that Darius was not honoring the agreement, Intaphernes mutilated the guards. When they reported to Darills, he sllspected a plot to topple him and had Intaphernes together with his family imprisoned and sentenced to death; virtually the entire clan was wiped out. Darius' rapid action served as a warning to the remaining five nobles not to presume on their privileges; it effectively robbed them of any real advantage. The result ofDarius' handling of the nobility was to demote them from a peer group to servants, dependent, like others, for their status and position on the king. Their names were famolls, their past deeds celebrated, and their families remained highly honored among the Persians. To be descended from the f.1mily of one of Darius' helpers continued to carry great prestige. But, in relation to the king, they had no special rights, no greater claim on his person than anyone else. They were all the king's bandalza, an Old Persian word that means, literally, "bondsman" or "servant." This, significantly, is the word Darius repeatedly uses to describe them in the Behistun inscription. It expresses their dependence and the personal bond of loyalty that tied them to the king.

The Achaemenid Persian empire (c. 550-c. 330 BeE) While all were the king's subjects, what mattered within Persian society was an individual's relative position in the social scale. There was considerable ranking according to birth and privilege within the Persian elite. Only the elite underwent the Persian education system, part of which consisted in replicating the social status quo and Persian aristocratic ideals. According to Herodotlls (1.134), ranking was signaled by the way in which people greeted each other: equals kissed each other on the mouth; if one was slightly inferior to the other they kissed on the cheek; in the case of great social difference the inferior prostrated himself before his superior. What precisely determined position is difficult to make out. Family descent clearly played an important role, and provided access to high office. Members of the Persian nobility held key positions in the imperial government and army, with members of the Achaemenid royal f.1mily predominating. But noble birth was only one factor. Crucial was royal favor. Those whom tile Icing publicly honored - whom he kept close to him, turned to for advice, entrusted with special missions - were the most eminent (cf. Xenophon, Anabasis 1.9). Their status is expressed by the Aramaic term br byt' (Akkadian mar biti) which means literally "son of the (royal) house" and renders the Old Iranian term *llith(a)pufa = "prince." Although the apparent meaning is that they were royal offSpring, it is clear from its usage that this title was reserved for highly honored members of the Persian aristocracy and does not necessarily indicate a blood relationship to the king. Nonetheless, the high position of such "princes" made them eligible husbands for the king's daughters and other female relatives, so that they could become, literally, "royal sons" by marrying into the royal family. Subtle distinctions in rank were marked in various ways. There were distinguished Persians "who had special chairs" (Herodotus 3.144); the soldiers close to the king carried spears decorated with golden apples (Herodotus 7.41); the Persian governor of Armenia, TiribaZlls, is described as "a personal friend of the king, and when he was present no onc else had the right to assist the king in mounting his horse" (Xenophon, Anabasis 4.4). Physical proximity to the king was a highly sought favor - hence to become onc of the king's table companions (slmtrapezos, sU'ndeipnos, sllmpotos) was a great honor. The king normally ate in a room separated by a curtain from his fellow banqueters, and invited individual guests to drink with him afterwards. The opportunity this offered for personal advancement and for onc's standing Jlis-n.-Jlis lesser folk was highly valued and eagerly sought. The king's favor was expressed through the bestowal of gifts. Rewards for loyal service, such as conspicuous acts of bravery in war or outstanding personal service, were noted in royal lists (Herodotus 8.90; Esther 6.1-2). In addition to giving a royal daughter in marriage (an exceptionally high honor), royal gifts could include appointment to high office, the grant of a landed estate (or rather, its revenues), and (most commonly) items for use and wear, which the honoree displayed daily on his person. The latter included a horse with a gold bit, gold

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necklaces, bracelets, a Persian robe, a gold dagger (akinakes), a gold bowl (sometimes inscribed with the king's name, cf. Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1989). Several of the stunning items in the "Oxus Treasure" (originating in Tadjikistan, now in the British Museum) show in detail the elaborate workmanship and precious materials that went into these objects (Dalton 1964; Pitschikijan 1992). The reliefs at Persepolis, the brightly colored, glazed brick reliefs from Susa, and provincial sculptures show honored individuals displaying these public marks of royal esteem. The persons wearing such items were publicly recognized as belonging to tile highest ranks of tile court. Given tile politically symbolic role the royal gifts fulfilled, it is probable tllat the presentation ceremony was public (although the evidence is slight; SancisiWeerdenburg 1989). Public distribution of gifts by the king guaranteed their source; public acceptance served to stress the loyalty of tile recipient and his dependence on tile king for all social advancement. The system of royal rewards tl1l1S worked to strengthen tile king's preeminence in the political system and place the recipients under continuing obligation to tile donor. Conversely, rebellion, betrayal of trust, or corrupt practice led to the public withdrawal of royal favor, signaled by the offender being stripped of his court ornaments (Grelot 1972: no. 102). In very serious cases, tllis was followed by public and horrific executions or slow death by torture.

.I

GOVERNING THE EMPIRE The territory of the Persian empire was divided into provinces, usually called satrapies (from Old Persian khshafapaJlan "protecting the kingdom"); the governors were satraps. This terminology is not always precise: the word can be used of less powerful governors and Greek writers apply it on occasion to any officers surrounding the king. But the general pattern of satrapies is fairly clear, although their precise boundaries are uncertain (Petit 1990; for Central Asia, see Briant 1984). The diverse areas of the empire were united in a single political structure, with the satrapal pattern creating an administrative uniformity. Exceptions were areas where the physical environment made direct rule by a satrap inappropriate (e.g., the pastoralists of the Zagros mountain chain, Arab tribes, or the Scythians), leading to a measure of regulated independence that worked to the mutual benefit of king and "subject" (Briant 1982a; see also Bohmer and Thompson 1991; Lerner 1991).

Satrapics Each satrapy covered an extensive territory; each satrapal governor was, to judge by the names, virtually always a Persian (or at least Iranian) noble. The satrap conducted aff.'lirs fi·om the provincial capital, often the old capitals of the states that had been conquered. In Egypt, for example, the satrapal center was at Memphis, in Lydia at Sardis, in Media at Ecbatana, in Babylonia at Babylon (see Fig. 4.1).

The Achaemenid Persian empire (c. 550-c. 330 BeE)

Some new governmental centers were also created following subdivision of very large provinces: Damascus was (probably) the administrative center of the new province "Beyond tile River" (i.e., tile region west of tile Euphrates); Daskyleion became tile satrapal seat of Hellespontine Phrygia. The satrapal capital was a microcosm of tile royal centers. Provincial taxes were collected and stored here (some were sent on to tile center) to provide resources for tile satrap and his staff. Some taxes were in kind and could be used directly to feed and maintain local garrisons. The soldiers at Elephantine, for example, were entitled, togetller Witll their f.'lmilies, to draw rations from tile provincial storehouse. The workmen in tile Persepolis region were generally supplied with rations in kind from royal storehouses. Taxes paid in precious metals, usually silver, were kept in reserve for exceptional expenditure (cf. Descat 1989).8 The Alexander historians give some idea of the enormous surpluses garnered in Persian government centers. Harpalus, for example, who was put in charge of the treasury of BabyIon in 331, after five years of high living was still able to take 5000 talents of silver away with him (Diodorus Siculus 17.108.4-6). The treasuries were well protected in tile citadel of tile satrapal center; otller fortified centers served as additional treasuries, under tile control of treasurers (gazophylakes, a Greek word linked to Old Persian *ganzabara "treasurer"; cf. Aperghis 1999). The satrap himself could probably only use tllis stored wealtll Witll royal authorization (cf. Briant 1982b: 29 n.3) . The satrap's residence was palatial. The provincial capitals had palaces, often taken over from the earlier kings. Palaces were also maintained for use by the kings when traveling through the empire (Briant 1996: 196-207). The Persianstyle building in the citadel of Babylon (probably built by Artaxerxes 11; Vallat 1989) provides physical evidence of how part of one of these official buildings looked. Xenophon (Rel/enica 4.1.16) paints a vivid picture of the residence at Daskyleion, belonging to the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia; the palace was set among well-provisioned villages and there was a park with wild animals - objects of exotic display and the quarry of aristocratic hunting parties. Provincial palaces contained archives to store orders received by the satrap (Ezra 5.17-6.2). Royal decrees were identifiable by the king's seal attached to them (Herodotus 3.128; Xenophon, ReI/mica 1.4.1; Esther 3.13). Seal impressions with iconographic links to Achaemenid court art have been found in quantity at Daskyleion (AkurgaI1956; Kaptan 1996a), Babylonian Nippur (Bregstein 1993), on the Wadi Daliyeh papyri from Samaria (Leith 1997) and, in smaller numbers, at Artasat in Armenia (Santrot 1996: nos. 2l0-11a-b). The regional bureaucracy operated fi·om the satrapal center. Petitions to the satrap were sent here and copies of satrapal resolutions, endorsing local decisions that affected city land and income, were stored for future reference (Briant 1986: 434-7). In the excavations of Old Kandahar (satrapal center of Arachosia) in Afghanistan, archaeologists found fragments of an Elamite tablet, indicating that the bureaucratic practices attested at Persepolis were replicated in the eastern part of the empire (S. W. Helms 1982; McNicoll and Ball 1996). A palace is attested in

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AmClie Kuhrt Samarkand (Arrian, Anabasis 3.30.6) across the Oxus in Uzbekistan (part of the sat:rapy of Bactria-Sogdiana); it is described as a royal residence, but could have been used on occasion by the satrap. Because of the nature of the surviving sources the evidence is most complete for the government of the western empire, but there is every reason to suppose that the eastern regions were governed in broadly similar fashion (Briant 1984).

Roads The Persepolis tablets support this conclusion. They record the movement of groups or individuals traveling to Persia. India, Arachosia, Carmania, Bactria were all linked into the extensive Achaemenid road system made famous by Herodotus (5.52-4; 8.98). He provides valuable information on the road linking Sardis to Susa, documenting way stations along the route at one-day intervals, where a courier on urgent state business could get food and new mounts. At strategic points, such as river crossings and mountain passes, soldiers guarded the road, monitoring travelers. Satraps were responsible for maintaining the supplies and guard posts, since communication was crucial for efficient government (cf. Jursa 1995). The Persepolis texts show that the network of roads criss-crossed the immense territory of the Persian empire, so that the system of guards, supply points, and associated governmental control operated in all provinces, from cast to west (Grafl994). Use of the way stations along the highways was limited to individuals bearing a scaled authorization (Elamite halmi) from the king or recognized official (Whitehead 1974; Aperghis 1996). There arc hundreds of reports from way stations that document the passage of travelers and their permits, but only onc example of such a "passport" has survived. It was issued (in Aramaic) by Arsames, satrap of Egypt, to his estate manager and companions for a journey from northern Babylonia (Driver 1965: no. VI) Regional superintendents along the route arc ordered to supply the satrap's party with precisely stipulated quantities of food for themselves and their horses, and debit the amounts expended to Arsames' "account."

Landholding and labor Arsames refers in this document to his estates, some of which were located in Egypt. The collection ofletters making up the Arsames correspondence (Driver 1965 [1957]) gives a valuable insight into the landholding there of members of the Persian nobility. The Murashu archives (Stolper 1985) show that many Persians, including the Persian royal house (and Arsames), held substantial estates in Babylonia as well. The Persepolis texts, too, refer to the ownership of estates in Persia by royal women, among others. Several Greek writers mention Persian landowners and other recipients of revenue from land in western Asia Minor. The king himself owned estates the length and breadth of his kingdom.

The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) It has been thought in the past that royal grants ofland undermined royal power and diminished the monarch's disposable wealth. But reexamination of the evidence suggests that when the kings "gave" land, it did not include full possession, but was limited to the revenues produced (Briant 1985). The "ownership" of estates by the king, his family, the high nobility, and favored subjects spread the Persian presence throughout the empire, and helped to strengthen imperial control. Xenophon (Anabasis 7.8) provides a wonderful vignette of a Persian estate on the northwestern imperial ft'ontier: it was strongly fortified, with a tower serving as a lookout, heavily manned by well-equipped soldiers; beyond the fortifications were fields with herds tended by slaves. Another Persian landholder with troops was close enough to respond to torch signals when his neighbor was attacked and rush to his aid. Moreover, a substantial force of cavalry and heavy- and light-armed soldiers was also within signaling distance and approached swiftly when danger threatened. Further, unlike royal estates and those belonging to the highest echelons of the aristocracy, whose owners were not permanent residents on their land, this estate belonged to a middle-ranking Persian who had settled in the area with his family. Even in the case of absentee landlords, the Egyptian material and the Babylonian Murashu archives show that the basic structure of landed estates was similar to the onc described by Xenophon. On Arsames' estate in Egypt, for example, there was an estate supervisor who held a grant of land (on which he owed tax) with servants, a Syrian sculptor with his own household staff, a groom (?) also with his own staff, a garrison commander and the soldiers under him, and further servants and laborers (Aramaicgrd-'). The Babylonian material provides some information about the organization of modest land parcels granted to individuals in return for military service; some, but not all, were attached to large estates (Stolper 1985, 1994). The military grants were of three different types, according to the type of service and equipment expected: horse-land, bow-land, chariot-land - the basic fighting units of the Achaemenid army (Sekunda and Chew 1992). The grantees and their obligation were registered in a royal census, kept by army scribes at the main mustering points in the satrapy (Ebeling 1952; Stolper 1985: 29-30). As the empire stabilized and territorial expansion ceased, the necessity for constant empirewide call-ups receded. The descendants of the grantees were, therefore, expected to pay a silver tax when their personal service was not required. Many met this need by leasing their land to the Babylonian entrepreneurial family of Murashu, who sublet it to tenants. The tenants paid the Murashu their dues in agricultural products, which the firm transformed into silver by marketing it; some of the silver was then paid back to the original grantees' f.1milies so that they could pay their state taxes. But the basic obligation to supply a soldier never lapsed. The census ensured that grantees could not escape service - they may not necessarily have discharged their military duties in person, but the census officers made sure that a soldier matching the obligation of each land grant appeared at the call-up.

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The system explains the ability ofDarius III in 333 and 331 BC E to field large armies, comprised of all the peoples of the empire, against Alexander (also Artaxerxes I1's army at Cunaxa in 401 B CE). It is wrong to think of the Persian fighting machine as depending totally on Greek mercenary forces. Garrisons stationed throughout the empire were made up of many different ethnic groups (Tuplin 1987a, 1987b), as well as military colonists, ready at a moment's notice to take up arms in defense of the state. Elamite, Cilician, Syrian, Jewish, Median, Arab, and Babylonian soldiers are attested in Egypt; Greek material reveals the presence of Persian, Assyrian, and Hyrcanian troops in western Asia Minor; Scythian soldiers were stationed near Carchemish. How exactly the members of tile different population groups arrived in tile places where tlley appear as soldiers or military settlers is not always clear. The Jewish soldiers at Elephantine had already served tile Saite kings and were taken into Persian service subsequently. Some of tile many ethnic groups, attested by tile Murashu material as living in Babylonia, could have been descendants of people settled in the NeoBabylonian period. But tile Persians, too, used mass deportation at times to weaken centers of resistance; tllis may explain the presence of some people far from tlleir traditional homelands, including in Parsa itself (Uchitel 1991). It is likely that the "colonists" were not only obliged to fight for the king: general government needs for labor (e.g., transport, construction work) were probably also met tllfough the system, at least in part. But that was not the only way in which tile kings had access to labor. People called kurtash (in the Elamite of the Persepolis texts) figure prominently as workers in the Persepolis archives. Similar groups also appear in Aramaic and Babylonian documents (Aramaicgrd'; Akkadiangardu). Who tlley were is debated. Opinions differ as to whether the term defines slaves, free workers, some kind of dependent element in the population, or whether it is simply a way in which the administration defined the labor force, recruited from a range of sources, at their disposal (Dandamaev 1976; Zaccagnini 1983: 262-4; Stolper 1985: 56-9; Uchitel1991; Briant 1996).

IMPERIAL POWER VERSUS LOCAL PARTICULARlSM: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE

,!

The top posts in the Achaemenid government were in the hands of a tiny group, drawn exclusively from the highest levels of tile Persian aristocracy. Was this an impermeable stratum of power holders defined by their ethnicity? Probably not (Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1990). There is evidence of at least onc non-Persian rising to the coveted position of sat rap, as a result of his loyal support during a succession crisis (Stolper 1989). Furtller, Herodotus (6.41) preserves a revealing anecdote about Metiochus, the son of the Athenian general Miltiades, victor at MaratllOn, who was captured by Phoenician sailors and brought to the king: Darius, however ... far from doing him any harm, loaded him with favors. He gave him a house and estate, and also a Persian wife, who bore him children who were counted Persians.

The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE)

Tllis shows that tile king could bestow the rank of "Persian" on people not of "pure" Persian descent. The interaction, at a regional level, between Persians and local e1ites should not be underestimated. Who the wives of satraps were is not generally known, nor the wives of lesser-ranking Persian commanders and officials. Yet there certainly were marriages between local nobles and Persian women, like that of the Paphlagonian prince Otys, and tile daughter of tile Persian noble Spithridates (Xenophon, Hellenica 4.1.6-7). The recently discovered funerary stele from Saqqara in Egypt attests that the dead man was tile offspring of a Persian and an Egyptian woman (Matlliesen et al. 1995; Fig. 4.6). Such alliances gave local e1ites a potential foothold in the Persian system of honors. Most interesting is tile fact tllat the king himself took women from among the subject peoples into his household as "concubines." The only instance known so far is Artaxerxes I, but there is no reason to think he was unusual: three Babylonian women bore him children, two sons and a daughter; the two sons struggled for the tllrone and the victor became Darius 11, who was married to the daughter, Parysatis. As it was possible for bastards to accede, it thus lay within the grasp of the local nobility to gain access to the highest office in the empire through their daughters. At the level below governor of a satrapy, the Persian system can be seen to depend very much on cooperation with local power holders. Subdivisions within each satrapy could be governed by local dignitaries (e.g., Casabonne 1995 for the Cilician dynasts). Further, many satrapies included a multiplicity of different political entities usually run along traditional lines by their own authorities. In "Beyond the River," for example, were the following districts: Jerusalem, with Yehud, retained its sacred laws, its priests, and was administered by Jews (Avigad 1976: 30-6); neigh boring Samaria was governed by the local family of Sanballat (Cross 1963); the Phoenician cities continued to be ruled by their traditional dynasts (Betlyon 1980); Ammon, cast of the Jordan, formed another provincial subdivision, probably under a local governor (Herr 1992); the Aramaic ostraca currently being published suggest the existence, at least by the fourth century, of the district ofIdumaea (Lemaire 1994). This mosaic of different sociopolitical units all came under the authority of the satrap, probably located in Damascus. The evidence for the existence of very disparate political structlll'es inside the Persian provinces can leave the impression that the Persians operated a policy of laissez-faire in which local potentates ran matters to suit themselves with little reference to the Persian authorities, and central control grew steadily weaker. The reality is rather different, with the Persians using the local institutions to work in their interests, and keeping a very tight watch on their internal machinations. Dependence by local potentates on the Persian authorities was always clearly acknowledged (sce, e.g., Xenophon, Hellenica 3.1.10-15). Individuals who had held power under former regimes and moved to support the Persian conquerors were recruited into the new king's entourage, with their authority definitively diminished. The Egyptian Udjahorresnet, for example (L1oyd 1982),

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Amelie Kuhrt had been a naval commander under the Saite rulers; following Cambyses' conquest, he was stripped of his military post, granted the rank of royal "friend," and assigned a prominent position in the Neith temple at Sais. In other words, he retained an honored social position within Egyptian society, but forfeited any effective political power (Briant 1988). Another problem has been how to understand the apparent continuity of regional cultures - artistic, linguistic, and religious. Local languages continue to be employed; local people carry on in positions of authority; local patterns of production show no discernible Persian impact; local cults continue undisturbed. But here, too, closer examination reveals that the Persians harnessed the diverse local forms to exercise power flexibly and to create channels of interaction with their subjects. Thus, with respect to language: although the Achaemenid kings used local languages for their decrees, they also employed Aramaic as a lingua fra-flea, and spread its use throughout the imperial ten'itories. Moreover, the form of Aramaic developed in the Achaemenid period reflects an underlying Persian bureaucratic usage. So, at the regional level people did not simply continue to use their own languages as though nothing had changed. Aramaic was employed alongside them regularly and set an official seal on royal and satrapal directives (Metzger eta!. 1979; Briant 1986). In the realm of religion, too, the Persian kings did not simply leave everything unchanged, through their (misnamed) policy of "religious tolerance." In Egypt and Babylonia they were careful to appear as active upholders of local cults in order to ensure control of the wealthy sanctuaries and the adherence of their staff. Yet things never continued precisely as earlier. For example, in Egypt, the office of "God's wife of AnulI1," an institution that had played a central role in consolidating claims to rulership of Egypt for over 300 years (Caminos 1964), came to an end under the Achaemenid monarchs. Cyrus, after his victory in Babylonia, installed his son as local sub-king in the comse of the Babylonian New Year Festival, a ceremony that reaffirmed annually the political contract between king and subjects (Kuhrt 1987). In the context of these traditional celebrations, Cyrus took charge after the formal investitme of his son and led the public procession dressed in Persian, not Babylonian, garments: i.e., he exploited the occasion to drive home Babylonia's new subordination to Persian rule (Kuhrt 1997: 300-2). The shrines of people who had rebelled could be, and were, destroyed (the Apollo sanctuary at Didyma, Herodotus 6.19; the Athena temple in Athens, Herodotus 8.53). Artaxerxes 11 is said to have introduced a statue cult of Ana hit a in the imperial centers (Berosssus, in Jacoby 1923-: 680, Fll). The aim was probably to reinforce the cohesion of the Persian communities living far from the imperial heartland, a way of strengthening their sense of identity as members of the governing elite (see Brumfiel, this volume). One effect was to distinguish the Persians of the diaspora through their cult by introducing Iranian shrines into the provincial capitals (Briant 1986). Persian ideology, court art, and practices also had an impact on conquered peoples. As already noted (pp. 98-9), Darius' message, enshrined at Behistun,

The Aehaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) was known throughout the realm, as were the ideals of kingship, which may be echoed in a poem celebrating one of the local dynasts in Lycia (Herrenschmidt 1985). Local seal types adopted Persian motifs (Collon 1987: 90-3; Bregstein 1993); local coins show Persian scenes (Betlyon 1980: pis. 1--4; Meshorer and Qedar 1991); precious metal drinking sets reflect the widespread adoption of Persian styles of banqueting by local elites (Moorey 1985).9 The small palace in the citadel at Babylon was typically Persian in layout and decoration (Haerinck 1973), and the seat of a local dynast in the mountains of Cilicia had carved reliefs imitating scenes from Persepolis (Davesnes et al. 1987). Egyptian private sculptme shows dignitaries in standard Egyptian pose, but wearing typical Persian comt jewelry (Bothmer 1960: figs. 151-2). One motif of the Persian iconographic repertoire is attested in use at several widely separated places and times and in diverse contexts: the "royal audience scene," showing the king seated on his distinctive throne, featmes several times in relief at Persepolis. The Daskyleion bullae show that the same scene was carved on royal seals (Kaptan 1996a); it also figures in the iconography of some of the Sidon sarcophagi and on the stelae of Lycian dynasts (see M. Miller 1997: 122). Both in Babylonia (Bregstein 1993: 612, no. 214) and Egypt (Mathiesen et al. 1995), scenes have now been found closely modeled on the royal figme of the "audience relief" (see Fig. 4.6).10 In the Egyptian case, it is clear that the image served to present a man, of mixed Persian-Egyptian descent on a typically Egyptian funerary stele, as a Persian dignitary with recognizable royal overtones (Briant 1996). Local modes of agricultmal production retained, of necessity, their basic forms. But the imperial grip on productive resomces was tight: the king, royal family, Persian nobles, and courtiers held extensive tracts of land the length and breadth of the realm. Villagers within satrapies were assigned duties, additional to the regular burden of tax and services, that affected the amount they were obliged to produce from their fields. They had to supply the satrapal court with food (Nehemiah 5.14-15; Herodotus 1.192), as well as the soldiers manning local garrison posts (Segal 1983: no. 24; cf. Hoglund 1992: 213). Perhaps most significant was the Persian king's control of access to water. Royal officials managed the crucial canal system in Babylonia, which was crown property (Stolper 1985). The kings are known to have constructed an extensive underground irrigation system (qannt) in northern Iran (Polybius 10.28); archaeological evidence shows that the same system was deployed by them in the Khargah oasis (Briant 1992). Herodotus (3.Il7) describes Darius blocking off a river, on which the slll'rounding people depended for water, and only allowing distribmion channels to be opened in response to petitioning and payment. Parsa, the imperial heartland, experienced a striking landscape transformation in the Achaemenid period. The two magnificent royal cities, Pasargadae and Persepolis, were founded. In the 400 to 500 years preceding the development of the Persian state, Parsa had been a sparsely settled region, with virtually no urban centers; subsistence was based on herding animals, rather than f:1rming.

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AmClie Kuhrt

The Achaemenid Persian empire (e. 550-e. 330 BeE) High land, blessed with a healthy climate and full of the fruits appropriate to the season. There were glens heavily wooded and shady cultivated trees of various kinds in parks, and also naturally converging glades hill of trees of every sort and streams of water, so that travelers lingered with delight in places pleasantly inviting repose. Also there was an abundance of cattle of eve!'}' kind ... those who inhabited the country were the most warlike of tlle Persians, every man being a bowman and a slinger, and in density of population, too, tllis country £lr surpassed the other satrapies .

.i

4.6 Ftmerary stele from the Persiall period, fouud at Saqqara.

Archaeological surveys show that this pattern ofHfe changed radically in the sixth to fourth centuries BC E, when settlements increased enormously in number (Sumner 1986). This is echoed lyrically in the late fourth century by the Greek historian Hieronymus of Cardia (repeated by Diodorus 19.21.2-4), who described Parsa as a veritable Garden of Eden:

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PART 11 EMPIRES IN A WIDER WORLD Terence N. D'Altroy

Empires are by nature unwieldy beasts, as difficult to capture descriptively as they are to manage. In contrast to the pristine states, which are typically described as though they were tightly integrated societies in which all dimensions of power had roughly comparable reaches, empires are marked by heterogeneity and shifting frontiers. Lattimore's (1962) neat conception of concentric radii of control (economic, civil, and military) notwithstanding, the outstanding feature ofpreindustrial empires was the continually metamorphosing nature of relations between the central powers and the societies drawn under the imperial aegis. Scholars often have difficulty in agreeing on what constitutes an empire precisely because they prefer to emphasize political sovereignty, economic control, or military domination as the essence of imperialism. Thus, for some analysts, the Roman polity of the first century C E constitutes the archetypal - and thus only legitimate form of - empire, while others prefer to emphasize forms of control that vary from loose domination to formal bureaucracy (see, e.g., Eisenstadt 1963; Luttwak 1976; Hassig 1985; Doylc 1986; Sinopoli 1994a). The chapters in this section - as well as most throughout this volume - illustrate Mal1l1's (1986) point that empires arc better understood as intersecting networks of power than as well-ordered polities. They are characterized by a host of interests: some constituted as formal institutions and some as ephemeral coalitions that pass as conditions change. The contingent nature of these relations is neatly illustrated by the dealings between the political and ideological institutions found in the Satavahana, Aztec, and Spanish American empires

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presented in this section. In the Satavahana and Spanish cases, the political organizations were embedded within macro-regions in which grand religious traditions held sway. Sinopoli observes that the royal sponsorship of Buddhist institutions marks an ideological flexibility of a kind common to many early empires. It also represents a cheap way for a political entity to buy legitimacy in a region where polities come and go, but religious traditions run deep. In an analogous fashion, the Spanish crown sought the Vatican's imprimatur for their American ventures. Deagan points out that the rights to conquer the New World were exchanged for an obligation to evangelize its residents - once they were recognized as being human beings with souls. In each case, one can see the jockeying for benefit between different institutional sources of power whose domains were not concordant. In contrast, the scope of the political and ideological institutions within the Aztec polity was essentially congruent. As Smith and Brumfiel show, secular and ideological authority appear to have been vested in the same core set of elites and they thus tended to reinforce one another rather than negotiate power. That does not imply that the Aztec polity was a neatly unified territorial empire, however. To the contrary, through his use of a world systems framework, Smith argues that the core Aztec state maintained a variety of relations with subject and client polities within a larger-scale economic network. Those relations resulted largely from strategies that were designed to meet the goals of the Aztec heartland in the context of an enormously varied - and often hostile political terrain. A related element of the study of empires raised by these (and other) chapters is an analysis of the local effects of imperial expansion, both on the incorporated peoples and among the front line members of the expansionist politics. In her analysis of the Spanish American empire, Deagan highlights how the adoption oflocal customs and intermarriage reflects a flexibility on the part of the individuals living at the intersection between the imperial and subject cultlll'es. She is able to show that the layout of settlements followed the imperial agenda at the same time that individuals pursued flexible local arrangements. A key inference is that the imperial presence would appear quite different, depending on where one looked for evidence. Smith makes a comparable point in his examination of the impacts of the Aztec expansion into MOl·eloS. His analysis emphasizes that a focus solely on the imperial heartland, on the life of elites, or even on relations between the core and provincial areas is bound to overlook the complexities of life among subject societies. Imperial incorporation often profoundly affected the lives of subject peoples, but a key point that is often overlooked is that the demands of daily life and cultural incongruities contributed mightily to the nature of provincial relations. Many studies concern themselves with the grand and the powerful, but the nature oflife for a vast proportion of imperial subjects revolved around f.1mily, kin, and making a living. Those are hardly the stuff of monumental inscriptions, but their consequences produced the bulk of the material record in the societies that we study.

Part If Empires in a wider world

That leads into a final point - the evidentiary basis for our analysis of the polities discussed here. In many ways, we are worse off than the proverbial blind men and tlle elephant. Instead of a firm grip on a tail, a trunk, or an ear, too often we have a few broken ribs in a bag, some fossilized droppings in a vial, and a corner of a circus poster under plastic. Less metaphorically, our analyses depend on intersecting lines of evidence from different sources - historical, monumental, dynastic, numismatic, and archaeological. Deagan, Sinopoli, and Smith all illustrate how reliance upon particular data sets or contexts of recovery heavily affects our interpretations. As they all point out, in most cases the basis for our knowledge remains appallingly sketchy and selective. It is to the credit of the contributors to this volume and of other scholars that we have come as far in understanding empires as we have. Even so, it is also clear that characterizations are going to change again soon, not simply because of shifting theoretical perspectives, but because investigators are still doing the hard and inelegant work of gathering data in the trenches and archives. Stay tuned.

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The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system

5 The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system Michael E. Smith

128

The Aztec empire expanded within the context of an already existing world system that linked independent city-states over most of Mesoamerica. The full development of the world system preceded the empire by only a century, and both took place within the archaeological period known as the Late Postclassic period (1350-1520 CE). Most archaeological chronologies have not been refined beyond this level, however, producing a conflation of world system and imperial dynamics. The analytical separation of the two macro-regional processes is fi.lrther hindered by the fact that they shared many of the same institutions and processes (e.g., marketplace exchange, professional merchants, the use of currency, and various patterns of interaction among elites). In this paper I attempt to disentangle the Aztec empire from the Mesoamerican world system by examining change in central Mexico using a refined chronological framework. In the Middle Postclassic period (MPC) the Aztec peoples arrived in central Mexico and established city-state dynasties and market systems (Table 5.1). The first half of the Late Postclassic period (LPCA) saw a series of innovations that transformed a long-standing Mesoamerican world system into a heavily commercialized network of exchange with highland central Mexico as a major core zone. In the second half of the Late Postclassic period (LPC- B), the key core region contracted to the Basin of Mexico and the Aztec empire expanded to conquer large parts of northern Mesoamerica. I begin with a consideration of the problems of studying empires and world systems with archaeological evidence. Next I review the chronological development of these processes within central Mexico. In the following section I focus on the strategies of Aztec imperialism to show how the empire both drew from and added to the larger Mesoamerican world system as it expanded. I then address the impact that these processes had on societies in the provincial area of MOl'elOS, using data from my excavations in that area. In this paper I use the term "Aztecs" to designate the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of highland central Mexico, and the term "Aztec empire" to designate the empire headed by the Mexica polity ofTenochtitlan.

Table 5.1. Chronology for Postclassic central Mexico Date (CE)

Period

Political-economic system

1600 1500 1400 1300 1200 1100 1000

Spanish Late Postclassic B Late Postclassic A Middle Postclassic

Spanish colonial society Aztec empire Postclassic world system Growth of Aztec city-states

Early Postclassic

Toltec state

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDY OF EMPIRES AND WORLD SYSTEMS My approach to the analysis of ancient imperialism begins with an observation made by Michael Doyle (1986: 46) in his book, Empires: Four intersecting sources account for the imperial relationship: the metropolitan regime, its capacities and interests; the peripheral political society, its interests and weakness; the transnational system and its needs; and the international context and the incentives it creates. An adequate understanding of any ancient empire requires attention to all four f.1ctors, and one of the goals of this chapter is to present a holistic view of Aztec imperialism from the perspective of Doyle's four factors.

A material-culture model of imperialism Before proceeding to the Aztec case, I first explore the use ofDoyle's framework to construct a material-culture model of imperialism. Here I will briefly outline a series of material indicators of empires that permit the identification and analysis of ancient empires from archaeological remains alone. For many of the cases described in this volume, such a method is not necessary. Archaeologists do not need to ask whether the Romans, the Chinese, or the Achaemenids really had empires, since their historical records clearly document empires and imperialism. But in the New World, where powerfi.ll states and empires rose and fell before the advent of native writing or foreign descriptions, the existence of empires centered at cities such as Teotihuacan, Tula, or Wari (Schreiber, this volume) are important empirical issues. Even in the case of the Aztecs, a polity described by Spanish writers, some scholars have claimed that it was not really an empire (see Berdan et al. 1996: 6; for a comparative case, see Subramanyam, this volume), and thus a purely archaeological approach to the question can help illuminate the issue. 1 I have adapted three of Doyle's four factors to the task of documenting the

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existence of an empire. Tills scheme, which is elaborated more fully in Smith and Montiel (n.d.), is outlined in Table 5.2. Tills admittedly simplistic formulation is designed to assess the likelihood tl1at a given ancient polity was an empire. This is a polythetic classification scheme; not every historically known empire exhibited all oftl1e traits listed in Table 5.2, and empires differed in the relative importance or expression of tl1ese traits. 1 The imperial capital (Doyle)s ((metropolitan regime))) Empires almost always have a large and complex urban center that serves as the imperial capital, although a few exceptions are known, such as tl1e Carolingian empire (see Moreland, this volume). Nearly all known capital cities exhibit public proclamations of an imperial ideology. Although tl1ere is considerable cross-cultural variation in imperial ideology, two common themes often produced material traces recoverable by archaeologists: militarism (see Brumfiel and Schreiber, tillS volume) and the glorification of the king or the polity.

I

The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system

Michael E. Smith

2 DominatiMl of a territory (Doyle)s «tranmational system))) This factor can be divided into economic and political processes. All empires exhibit processes of economic exchange of goods between capital and provinces. Although these can take many forms, from tribute and taxes through open commercial exchange, the basic existence of some form of exchange is crucial for the identification of empires. Fortunately, trade goods are readily identifiable in most archaeological settings. The political control of the provinces is at the heart of the imperial relationship (Doyle 1986), yet it can be one of the most difficult processes to document archaeologically. Variation within this process, as suggested by the five examples in Table 5.2, is a topic of active research by archaeologists working on ancient empires (e.g., Redmond 1983; Schreiber 1992; Sinopoli 1994a). Political control can be quite visible and obvious in territorial, or direct-control empires such as the Inka (D'Altroy, this volume), whereas it can be difficult to identify in hegemonic, or indirect-control empires such as the Aztec (see discussion below). Liverani (this volume) makes some excellent suggestions of possible archaeological measures of political control. 3 Projection of influmce in a larger international context The international context is important to Doyle tor the large-scale political and economic dynamics that affect an empire, and I follow this approach below in my discussion of world systems. For my present purpose, however, the significance of the larger international context in the archaeological documentation of imperialism lies in an empire's projection of influence beyond its borders. Empires exert economic influence on other societies, and this expresses itself in archaeological evidence tor trade across imperial frontiers. The projection of political influence can involve military activities along imperial borders, and the stimulation of political centralization or militarization among extra-imperial

Table 5.2. Archaeological criteria for the idmtification of empires Features

Examples

1 The imperial capital: Large, complex urban center

Proclamations of imperial ideology

2 Domillatioll of a territory: Economic exchange between capital and provinces Political control of provinces

1 Militarism 2 Glorification of king or of state 1 Provincial goods found at capital 2 Imperial goods found in provinces 1 2 3 4 5

Military conquest Construction of imperial infrasu'ucture Imposition ofu'ibute or taxes Reorganization of settlement systems Imperial coopting of local elites

3 Projectioll of illjlllCllce ill a tm;ger illtel'1latiollal COli text: Economic influence 1 Trade witll extra-imperial regions Political influence

1 Militaqr engagement and activities along enemy borders 2 Centralization or militarization of extraimperial polities

Cultural influence

1 Adoption of imperial gods or rituals by distant peoples 2 Emulation of imperial styles and traits by distant peoples

polities in contact with the empire. Finally, empires exert cultural influence over areas beyond their borders that leads to the archaeologically visible spread of imperial gods, rituals, and styles. These processes of extra-imperial influence have been particularly well documented tor the Roman empire in Europe (e.g., Whittaker 1994), but they are found in nearly all cases of ancient imperialism. Doylc's second factor - the peripheral political society - is not included in this scheme because it is not strongly implicated in the archaeological identification of empires. Empires typically conquered all sorts of provincial polities, and their analysis is important for understanding any particular case of imperialism. Because of this variation, however, the nature of provincial polities is difficult to use as a material marker of the presence of an empire. The majority of the ancient empires discussed in this volume exhibit most or all of the features listed in Table 5.2. The only prehistoric empire included - Wari - also conforms to these criteria, thus supporting Schreiber's identification of the Wad phenomenon as an empire. The application of this scheme to the pre-Aztec

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Michael E. Smith polities of central Mexico suggests that Classic period Teotihuacan was the capital of a small empire within central Mexico, whereas Early Postclassic Tula did not rule an empire (in spite of many assertions to the contrary, e.g., Diehl 1983). These case studies are elaborated in Smith and Montiel (n.d.).

Ancient world systems As pointed out by Doyle, empires do not exist in a vacuum. Events and processes outside of an empire can have profound effects on its expansion and organization. This "international context" is an area where the world systems concept can contribute to our understanding of imperial dynamics. Immanuel Wallerstein's (1974) world systems theory exerted a strong influence on the anthropological analysis of modern peoples in the 1980s (e.g., Wolf 1982). Although some archaeologists experimented with a world systems approach at that time (e.g., Blanton and Feinman 1984; Kohl 1987), it was not until the 1990s that world systems theory began to exert a significant influence on archaeologists studying ancient state-level societies (Algaze 1993; Hall and Chase- Dunn 1993; Peregrine and Feinman 1996). Some scholars object to the use of the world systems concept for ancient societies on the grounds that ancient systems differed greatly from the modern capitalist world system analyzed by Wallerstein (see Kohl 1987). Recent archaeological applications of the approach, however, have modified Wallerstein's model to better fit precapitalist conditions. Most archaeologists employ Jane Schneider's (1977) revision of Wallerstein's formulation to emphasize the importance of long-distance exchange in luxuries. A common trend in these studies is to relax the stipulations of Wailerstein's model of the capitalist world system to make it more applicable to ancient societies. For example, in place of the capitalist economic domination of peripheries by a core, ancient world systems had differentiated cores and peripheries without strong hierarchical relations; in place of a single core zone, ancient world systems had multiple core areas (Peregrine 1996). Nevertheless, two basic principles remain central to archaeological views of ancient world systems. First, world systems exhibited significant commercial exchange across political borders. Second, they contained a division of lab or that far exceeded the territorial extent of anyone polity (ChaseDunn and Hall 1997). These two principles are crucial to the archaeological analysis of ancient world systems. For archaeologists, a better starting point than Wallerstcin is Janet AbuLughod's (1989) study, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250-1350. Abu-Lughod provides an empirical study of a precapitalist world system that shows the value of the world systems concept without becoming mired in debates about the usefulness of Wailerstein's approach. The importance of the world systems concept is that it provides a fi'amework for analyzing economic exchanges at a large scale. All types of human societies engage in some

The Aztec empire alld the Mesoamericall world system form oflong-distance exchange, but only among some state-level societies does this exchange become crucial to the basic structure and functioning of individual polities. When a large number of independent polities engage in high volumes of exchange, and when the processes and results of that exchange exert strong effects on the social and political organization of those polities, we can speak of the existence of a world system. Archaeological methods for the analysis of ancient world systems are still underdeveloped. Although it is often relatively easy to document the existence, and even the magnitude of ancient exchange systems, it is quite difficult to demonstrate the local social impact of tllat exchange. Recent treatments of this issue make some progress (e.g., Kepecs et al. 1994; Sherratt 1993), but the analysis of ancient world systems with archaeological data alone remains difficult.

ECONOMIC CHANGE IN AZTEC CENTRAL MEXICO

Pre-Aztec bacleground Blanton and Feinman (1984) suggest that the operation of a world system provided distinctiveness and cohesion to Mesoamerica as a cultural area back to the Middle Formative period (1200-400 BC E) at least. The Mesoamerican world system underwent a series of transformations with changing political and economic processes through the Classic and Early Postclassic periods. City-states and empires rose and fell, long-distance trade routes underwent various changes, and religious and ideological expression was trans/()f'Jlled partly as a result of these changes. Some time between the twelfth and /omteenth centmies C E, the Mesoamerican world system underwent a fundamental qualitative and quantitative change, and by the time Cortcs conquered the Aztecs, Mesoamerican economics and politics had been greatly trans/()f'Jlled. A consideration of the Middle Postclassic period sets the scene f()r this tranSf()f'Jllation in central Mexico.

Early Aztec city-states (MPC) The arrival ofNahuatl-speaking populations in central Mexico dming the twelfth centlll'y C E, known as the Aztlan migrations, marked the beginning of Aztec cultme (M. E. Smith 1996). The Toltec state centered at Tula had recently collapsed, leaving no large politics in central Mexico. The twelfth century also saw a shift from a five-centlll'Y period of warm and dry climate to conditions of greater rainfall and cooler temperatmes in this area (O'Hara et al. 1994). The result of these events was the inception of several centmies of significant population increase accompanied by a variety of major changes in Aztec society, including processes of political expansion, the growth of marketplace trade, and agricultural intensification. Although the Aztec peoples were not isolated from

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developments in other parts of Mesoamerica, the lack of evidence for intensive economic and cultural interactions during this period suggests that they were not actively involved in the larger world system at tllis time. 2 Aztec pictorial histories tell a story of fledgling city-states whose rulers proclaimed tlleir legitimacy tlll"ough real or putative genealogical links to the Toltec kings of tile past. City-states expanded in size and scope and much of the native llistorical record is concerned with battles and dynastic intrigue (Davies 1980). When a city-state managed to conquer one of its neighbors, the loser was assessed for tribute in goods and services. The defeated ruler was left in power and his government remained intact so long as he agreed to tile victor's terms and paid tile tribute. As in otller city-state systems, the political situation was llighly volatile Witll constantly shifting alliances. No single city-state managed to conquer enough of its peers in tile MPC period to be considered an empire. At tile same time tllat city-state armies were fighting, however, their rulers were also cooperating Witll one another. Marriage alliances, visiting, and other forms of social interaction were tile norm among both rival and friendly dynasties, and tile various city-state elites soon forged a common social class or nobility that cut across political boundaries (Hodge 1997; M. E. Smith 1986). Anotller form of friendly interaction among tile Aztec city-states of the MPC period was commercial exchange. Archaeological research has documented patterns of exchange in ceramics and obsidian in MPC central Mexico consistent with tile operation of markets and merchants (Minc et al. 1994; M. E. Smith n.d.). The Aztecs of the MPC period were heavily involved in the production and exchange of two commodities that would later play important roles in the Mesoamerican world system and the Aztec empire: obsidian and textiles. Obsidian was the predominant cutting tool among the Aztecs, and all MPC Aztec households had ready access to this product. There are several geological sources of obsidian in central Mexico, and all were exploited at this time (Charlton and Spence 1982). Transport costs were high in the Aztec economy because of the absence of beasts of burden and the paucity of navigable waterways in central Mexico. As an exchange commodity, obsidian was particularly valuable because of the large number of tools that could be made from a given amount of raw material (Sanders and Santley 1983). Cloth served a variety of roles in Aztec society, including clothing, tribute goods, medium of exchange, royal gifts, and signals of social status (Berdan 1987a). Cotton thread was spun using small spindle whorls and miniature bowls, and maguey thread was dropspun with larger whorls (Fauman-Fichman 1997; Smith and Hirth 1988). Textile production and exchange increased greatly throughout Mesoamerica in the Middle and Late Postclassic periods (Stark et al. 1998). By the end of the MPC period in the fourteenth century, populations were growing, the economy was expanding (through agricultural intensification, craft production, and marketplace trade), the nobility was growing in numbers and power, and city-states were conquering tlleir neighbors to extract tribute. When this dynamic region tapped into large-scale Mesoamerican patterns of commerce

The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican JI10rld system

and stylistic communication in the LPC period, the Mesoamerican world system was transformed through the establishment of Aztec central Mexico as the major core area.

The Late Postclassic Mesoamerican JVorld system (LPC-A) Previous analyses of tile Mesoamerican world system in tile Late Postclassic period have relied upon documentary sources rather than archaeological data (Blanton and Feinman 1984; Blanton et al. 1992), and tllis has limited tlleir value in two ways. First, tllese studies have dealt only Witll tlle LPC- B period immediately before the Spanish conquest (since that is tile period described in most documentary sources). Second, these studies have confused the institutions of the Aztec empire (LPC-B) with the larger-scale and temporally earlier institutions of tile Mesoamerican world system (LPC-A). For example, Aztec imperial tribute in luxury goods such as exotic feathers, gold, gems, and fancy textiles is viewed as an example of world system exchanges. Commerce in these items long preceded tile expansion of the Aztec empire, however, and we must go back to the LPC-A period to examine the origin and operation of the Mesoamerican world system. The development of city-states in Aztec central Mexico was not a unique occurrence. Throughout Mesoamerica, the large states of the Classic period gave way to more numerous independent small polities in Postclassic times (e.g., Blanton et al. 1993; Chase and Rice 1985). In the Late Postclassic period, citystates throughout Mesoamerica became linked together through the processes of commercial exchange and stylistic interaction. In almost every region, archaeological research has revealed a dramatic growth of long-distance exchange in the LPC period (Blanton et al. 1993: 210-17). Ethnohistoric sources describe marketplaces all over Mesoamerica linked by professional merchants, and archaeology reveals widespread trade in both utilitarian goods such as obsidian, domestic pottery, salt, and bronze tools, and luxury items such as gold, jade, bronze bells, and fancy textiles (Scholes and Roys 1968; Berdan 1988; M. E. Smith 1990; Andrews 1993; Hosier 1994). Evidence for stylistic interaction is found in a style of mural painting that spread throughout Mesoamerica. During the MPC period, a distinctive polychrome painting style, the Mixteca- Puebla style, had developed at Cholula, an ancient religious center east of the Basin of Mexico. This style was first applied to painted manuscripts and polychrome ceramics, and Cholula polychromes became the f.1nciest and most highly esteemed ceramics in Postclassic Mesoamerica (the Spanish conqueror Bernal Diaz reported that the Aztec emperor Motecuhzoma would only eat from imported Cholula servingware). During the LPC period, the Aztecs adopted the Mixteca-Puebla style for tlleir painted manuscripts and stone sculptures (Nicholson and Quii'iones Keber 1994). Beyond central Mexico, peoples all over Mesoamerica adopted certain key elements of the Mixteca- Puebla style to create a single "International style"

135

The Aztec cmpire ami the Me.wJaJllcriCClIl world .I)'Jtem

Michaei E. Smith

136

Gulf of Mexico

Pacific Ocean

MAYAAREA

, I

N

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D L22l ''-_..:'''-:--:c''

0

250

.Ixlmcho

,

Tributary Provinces Strategic Provinces Southern extent of Maya area

500 km

S.l 'f7JC Aztec empire and the MC.\·oalllcriwlI wor/d .I),stclII. '/7JC world .I),stclII ((}pcrcd the Aztcc fllld 'lhl'llsCIllI empires 11 /Id the MI1)'11 IIl'ell, 11.1' lIoted b)' (he IICCIII'l'CIICC (~f'tbc

1I11t1'll/spailltcd ill tbc "/II(C1'IIIItiollll/ st),lc" (b/l1cli eire/cs).

of mural painting (Robertson 1970; Smith and Heath-Smith 1980). The spatial distribution of this style maps the sodal and economic interactions that structured the Mesoamerican world system (Fig. 5.1). LPC trade and stylistic interaction had a core-periphery structure characteristic of andent world systems (Chase- Dunn and Hall 1997; Peregrine 1996). In the LPC-A period a large part of the central Mexican highlands, fi'om Cholula to the Basin of Mexico, constituted the major core zone. The Mixteca- Puebla style had devdoped in this area and then spread to the rest of Mesoamerica as the International style. Compared to the peripheral regions, central Mexico at this time had larger and more dynamic polities, higher population densities, and greater accumulations of economic surplus in the f(lI'IllS of growing cities and increasingly sumptuous palaces fell' kings and other nobles. Exotic, high-value goods such as jade, turquoise, and bronze tools and jewdry were imported into central Mexico, and the Aztecs of the Basin of tvkxico exported large quantities of decorated ceramics (Aztec II I black -on-orange and other types), obsidian, and salt (M. E. Smith 1990). Central Mexico in the LPC-A period was the setting fllr a dynamic society typical of a world system core zone. Populations grew enorlllously fi'olll M PC times, and the entire landscape was transflll'llled by intensive agriculture in the f(ll'Ill of irrigation, terradng, and raised fidds (M. E. Smith 1996: 69-84). vVarf~lre among dty-states escalatcd, and several polities succeeded in conquer-

ing numel'ClUS neighbors to become mini-empires; these included Azcapotzalco and Texcoco in the Basin of lvkxico and Cuauhnahuac in Mordos. Cities grew and dites expanded in numbers and power. Regional marketplace trade expanded, as did long-distance commerce (sce bdow). The Mesoamerican world system of the Late Postclassic period ditlered fi'om a number of other ancient world systems in that commerce in luxury goods was not part of a "prestige-goods system.» I n prestige-goods systems, e1ites control or manipulate the production, exchange, and consumption ofluxury goods, and this control is a major source of their power (Blanton ct al. 1996; Peregrine 1996). Luxury goods such as exotic tCathers, jewelry, cacao, and fancy textiles certainly played important economic and social roles in Aztec society. They were widdy exchanged through trade and tribute (Berdan 1987b), and they were used as part of the political processes of elites (Brumfiel 1987). Nevertheless, Aztec dites did not control the production, exchange, or consumption ofluxury goods. Many luxury goods were produced by attached specialists who worked (lr noble patrons. In addition to production fllr their patl'On, however, these artisans also produced goods that they sold in the markets. Aztec nobles did not at all monopolize trade in luxury goods. Most oft-he trade of the well-known Aztec /,ochtcca merchants (professional merchants of the commoner class who were organized into guilds) was entrepreneurial in nature, with only a small portion carried out fllr royal patrons. In(lJ'Illation about merchants fi'om other areas of Mesoamerica suggests similar patterns of entrepreneurial trade (e .g., Scholes and Roys 1968). Although sumptuary rules did exist, most luxury goods, ft'om stone sculptures and jade necklaces to cacao and lCatherwork, were sold in marketplaces to anyone who could pay the price. At the provincial Aztec sites I have excavated, exotic luxury goods arc f(llllld equally at commoner and elite residences. Even Aztec peasants in provincial villages could obtain jade beads, bronze bells, and the same kinds of' Cholula polychrome plates used to serve dinner to the emperor tv\otecuhzoma. I think that scholars have been misled into giving luxury goods too Illuch importance by the exaggerated claims of'Aztec nobles (as described in the works of the Spanish chroniclers such as Sahagllll and DlII'an), and by the spectacular ort<.:rings excavated at the central imperial temple, the 'I'emplo Mayor (Lllpez Luj~ln 1994; Matos Moctezuma 1988). Commerce in luxury goods IJIIl.\' important in the Aztec economy, as it was in all ancient world systems (Schneider 1977), but the prominence of'merchants, markets, and money meant that the Aztec economy clearly was 110/ a prestige-goods system.

Expwftsiotl

(~f'the

Aztec empire (I,PC-B)

The specific historical events surrounding the establishment and expansion of the Aztec empire arc well known fi'om the pictorial and narrative records of Aztec native history (sce Davies 1973 ):1 The tv\exica people had been the last of the

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Mic/mc! E. Smith

138

Aztlan immigrant groups to arnve in central fvlexico. Their city-state Tenochtitlan became a subject of the ruler of the Tepanec polity Azcapotzalco, onc of the Aztec mini-empires of the LPC-A period. The Mexica paid tribute in the {()!'In of military service, and by the 1420s the Mexica armies were among the most effective in central Mexico. Tenochtitlan developed into a busy commercial center at this time, and the Mexica dynasty established a series of advantageous marriage alliances with powerful city-states. In 1428 the Mexica king Itzeoatl and several allied politics defeated Azcapotzaico. Although some sources talk of the (>l'Il1ation of a "Triple Alliance" of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan that ruled the resulting empire, it is likely that the Mexica were in finn control from the start (sec Gillespie 1998). The Mexica employed the traditional Aztec pattern of political expansion whereby conquered city-states were assessed f()r tribute in a variety of goods while local dynasties were left alone so long as they cooperated with the empire. Within a decade most of the Basin of Mexico had been subdued and the Mexica extended their conquests out of the Basin, starting with Cuauhnahuac and other politics in Morelos.

5.2 ilztc:c soldicrs JI'CIl1'illlf jlllTIIII1'

sllill

COSt/llllt:S 1I11d CII /'I'yilll!

obsidillll cdlled .fwords.

The empire expanded in two cyclcs or wavcs o['conquest (Fig. S.2). ltzcoatl's initial conquests started the first cycle, which was cOl1!inued in a series of wideranging campaigns by his successor, Motecuhzoma I of Tenochtitlan, and by Nezahualcoyotl ofTexcoco. These two powerful kings brought a large territory under control, fi'om Veracruz to Oaxaca. The next Mexica king, Axayacatl, devoted most of his energies to consolidating his predecessor's conquests through selective battles and the organization of an imperial tribute system. Axayacatl also attempted to extend the empire to the west at the expense of the Tarascan empire, where he incurred the most disastrous Aztec defeat prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. In 1486 the Mexica king Ahuitzotl embarked upon another major cycle of expansion and extended the empire to the Pacilic Ocean, to Oaxaca, and south

Thc Aztec empire

IInti

the lvlesollmcl'icrm world

into Maya territory. Tropical lowland areas were conquered, and city-states in these areas paid tribute in lowland luxury goods including quetzal feathers, jade, cacao, and jaguar pelts. The next Mexica king, Motecuhzoma II, consolidated Ahuitzotl's gains in Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz, and he made an unsuccessful eff()rt to conquer Tlaxcalla, an independent Aztec state cast of the Basin of Mexico. His reign was CLIt short in 1S 19 with the arrival of the armies of Hernando Cortes. As the empire expanded, the Mexica nobility grew more powerfld and wealthy, and Tenochtitlan was rebuilt in the {<:>I'm of the ancient imperial capitals Teotihuacan and Tula. The Mexica kings began a program of political consolidation within the Basin of Mexico, replacing the traditional Aztec patterns of indirect rule with more direct control over the subject politics in the Basin of Mexico core. In world systems terms, the central Mexican core zone took on a more complex structure, with several levels of hierarchy. Aztec central Mexico as a whole maintained its high degree of economic and political development relative to the outer parts of the empire, but the core zone of greatest control and influence contracted to the Basin of Mexico. For areas like Morelos in the larger central Mexican core but outside of the Basin, their privileged position in the world system was less advantageous, since they now paid tribute to the Basin of Mexico. This was not the only core zone in the Mesoamerica world system, however; several other areas exhibited patterns of accelerated political and economic growth beyond the rest of Mesoamerica (earmack (996). Economic activity in central Mexico reached new heights in the LPC- B period. Population climbed to the highest levcls of the entire Prehispanic epoch, with onc million people living in the Basin of Mexico alone. Agricultural intensification also achieved its highest development, and almost the entire landscape of central l\r1cxico was put under cultivation. Population was at the limits oC the environment, and [lInines were a regular occurrence in the LPC-B period. The market system continued to expand, and the size of the central marketplace in Tenochtitlan's twin city, Tlatelolco, completely astounded the lirst Spaniards to sce it. Several types of prolCssional merchants traded throughout Mesoamerica, and a variety OCI(>I'Il1S oCcurrency were used. The most popular 1(>I'I11s were cacao beans I;')r small purchases, and cotton textiles ()r most costly items. The imperial tribute system greatly enriched Tenochtitian, with large quantities of both raw materials and manu(:lCtured goods arriving several times a year, and merchants brought even greater quantities of goods !i'om distant areas (Berdan 1987b). Although onc sometimes reads that the Aztec empire had begun to decline bcl()re the arrival of Cones, there is no evidence to support such a notion.

AZTEC IMPERIAL STRATEGIES Scholars have been slow to identity the strategies employed by the Aztec rulers in the expansion, operation, and organization of their empire. Contemporary descriptions of the specific motives or plans of ancient imperial rulers arc few and

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Miclme! E. Smith far between, even for heavily documented empires such as the Roman or Chinese. For the Aztecs, a bias against hegemonic empires has hindered the study of strategies; this is exemplified by statements that the Aztec polity was "not really an empire)) (sce discussion in Berdan et al. 1996: 6). Onc popular account of the Aztec empire (Conrad and Demarest 1984) has even asserted that the Mexica had no plans or strategies at all, and merely sent out armies of religious fanatics to conquer haphazardly in search of captives fClr rituals of human sacrifice. The authors of a recent book, Aztec Imperial Strrtt(lJies (Berdan et al. 1996), employed a "bottom-up)) approach to reconstructing the territory and economics of the empire, resulting in a significant modification of Robert Barlow's (1949) classic "top-down)) approach. By reconstructing the empire from the ground up, the Aztec Imjlerial Strategies project was able to: (1) identif)' a variety of strategies or principles that guided imperial expansion and administration; (2) produce a new and more accurate map of the empire; and (3) identif)' a new principle of territorial organization that characterized lllany of the provincial towns not listed in the Codex Mendozrt (sec discussion of the fl'ontier strategy below). The resulting principles and strategies can be organized under fCllIr labels: the economic, political, frontier, and elite strategies.

The ecortornic strate)]), The basic motives of Aztec imperial expansion were economic. Starting with the M PC Aztec city-states, the goal of conquest was to secure tribute payments fl'om subordinate politics. As the empire expanded, the volul11e and geographical range of tribute payments expanded greatly and the Mexica put considerable effllrt into establishing and operating a system of regular imperial tribute payl11el1\:S. But the collection of imperial tribute was only onc of three types of economic strategy employed by the Aztec rulers. A second economic strategy (llCused on the pre-existing commercial networks of the world system, and a third strategy involved stimulatioll and manipulation of the Basin of Mexico market system in ways that both benefited the economy and kept rival city-state I'lIlers in check.

Imperial tribllte In Doyle'5 terms, the Aztec tributc system was the major institution of the transnational system. Although we have considerable inflJl'll1ation about what kinds of goods were paid in what quantities fl'om specific provinces (Berdan and Anawalt 1992), the organization of tribute collection in the outer provinces is poorly understood. Because provincial city-states each had their own internal tribute systems in effect long bctllre they were conquered, it would have been easy (cJr city-state rulers to pass on the imperial tribute quota to their subjects by simply raising taxes. A quantitative reconstruction of' tribute in relation to demography in the Cuauhnahuac and Huaxtepec provinces of Morelos shows

141

The Aztec empire alld the lvIesoaJlleriCl1l1 lI'orld system that imperial tribute was not a particularly heavy burden when spread among the commoner households of the provinces (M. E. Smith 1994). Aztec imperial tribute included fClOdstulIs, raw materials, utilitarian goods, and luxuries. Some provinces were assessed fCl!' tribute in local specialties, while in other cases 1110re generic goods were demanded fl'ol11 a province and the Mexica obtained local specialties through trade. Prances Berdan (Berdan et al. 1996: ch. 5) has remarked upon the very low quantities of tribute in war materiel, in spite of the fact that the Mexica sometimes provided politics on imperial fl'ontiers with arms. The key raw material fCl!' Aztec swords and spears, obsidian, was not part of the imperial tribute system, probably because it was more efficiently obtained through preexisting commercial networks. I n many provinces, imperial tribute acted as an economic stimulus beyond simply requiring increased production fllr the tribute goods. Two of the main tribute items warrior costumes and textiles - were manuf~lctured goods whose raw materials were not widely available. Both required goods ft'om the tropical lowlands (exotic bird fCathers (CH' the elaborate costumes, and cotton fllr textiles) and many city-states had to engage in commerce to obtain them. Although part of the motivation fllr requiring these goods was probably ideological (subordination to the empire was emphasized by the warrior costumes), I believe that this was part of a deliberate strategy fllr stimulating commerce in the outer provi nces.

5.3 Azh'C profcssi01lal pociltcca mcrclmllls: left: lIIac/mll/s 01/ tllc road; right: !IUTe/mll/s sdlill.!! IlIxlIl'Y.!!oodJ III

a

Wodd .1),stClII C01Il1I1Cl'ciailletwor/ts The commercial net works of the 1,1'<: world system long predated the flJl'lnation of the Aztec empire (Fig. 5.3). Towns all over Mesoamerica had active marketplaces, and profCssional traders were based in many areas that came under imperial control as the empire expanded (Scholes and !toys 19M1). The expansion of the empire acted to stimulate trade in the provinces in several ways. First, imperial conquest led to the reduction of regional warbre, and trade I\olll'ished in the jlllX Aztcw that fCll\owed. Second, the Aztec pochtcca merchants traveled and traded more easily within the empire than outside (although they were accomplished soldiers in their own right and served as spies outside of the empire). Third, the Mexiea emperor on at least onc occasion sponsored a commercial expedition to obtain lowland luxuries. Fourth, the Mexica sometimes required conquered city-states in key areas to hold markets (e.g., Tepeaca; Berdan et a/. 1996: 133). Fifth, some key market towns were conquered in order to protect

1I1111'11CI.

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Michael E. Smith

them from nearby enemies (e.g., Huexotla on the Metztitlan border and Tetellan and Alahuistlan on tlle Tarascan border; Berdan et al. 1996: 149). The Mexica were willing to put considerable effort into tlle promotion and protection of commerce in the outer provinces because of its direct benefits. This trade moved enormous quantities of obsidian to all parts of Aztec central Mexico, where it was needed for domestic tasks, craft production, and weapons. Commercial networks were also tlle major source of luxury goods for tlle Aztec nobility. Altllough many luxuries were included Witll imperial tribute, Berdan's calculations show tllat tlle volume ofluxuries entering Tenochtitlan far exceeded tlle amount listed in the tribute rolls (Berdan et al. 1996: 126). Given the importance of commerce, it should be no surprise tllat Aztec merchants operated largely independently of the state (Berdan 1988), in the same manner as other LPC merchants in Mesoamerica (Scholes and Roys 1968). The Mexica participation in the world system commercial networks involved two ofDoyle's factors, tlle transnational system and the international context. The Basin of Mexico market system Just as the imperial rulers encouraged commerce in the outer provinces, they also promoted marketplace trade at home. The Basin of Mexico market system expanded greatly in tlle LPC-B period, and by 1519 the central Tlatelolco marketplace was a very large and complex institution (Cortes reported that 60,000 buyers and sellers attended this market daily). A prosperous market system was a boon for the Mexica rulers, but it was also a potential source of power for their competitors in other city-states. The Mexica employed several strategies to encourage marketing without allowing the benefits to accrue to rival polities. First, tribute collection centers were established in secondary market towns, both to encourage growth in these towns and to prevent additional growth in established primary market towns with entrenched local elites. Second, a number oflocal dynasties were physically disconnected from their market revenues. This was accomplished by various means, including the relocation or destruction of the market (Cuauhtitlan), relocation of the dynastic scat (Chalco), or strategic placement of transport routes (Azcapotallco, Culhuacan). Third, the Mexica encouraged specialization and the spatial fi·agmentation of economic activities to prevent their concentration in established centers controlled by potential rivals. The growth of a prosperous market system in the LPC- B period not only benefited merchants and craft specialists, but also worked to the advantage of political elites, both imperial and non-imperial. Market taxes were a source of royal revenue, but perhaps more importantly the markets brought luxury goods needed by the elites. "Rulers took special pride in their markets if they offered a wide array of luxury goods which they needed both to adorn themselves and their surroundings and to participate in the high-level gift exchange that was so important" (Hicks 1987: 94). Attached specialists who produced luxury items, from stone sculptures to featller capes, depended upon local kings for patronage

The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system

and support, and they also depended upon markets as a source for raw materials, and as a place to sell surplus items not delivered directly to their patrons.

The political strategy The phrase political strategy is used to refer to actions taken by tlle Triple Alliance rulers to consolidate their power and control in the imperial core area. The Mexica had achieved more power than any previous Aztec state and tlley liked to tell the Spanish chroniclers about their superiority and invincibility. Nevertlleless, their control was still somewhat fragile, since rival dynasties remained in power in many city-states in the Basin of Mexico core area, and outside of the Basin major areas like Tlaxcalla remained unconquered. Mary Hodge (1984; Berdan et al. 1996: ch. 2) identified the strategies used by the Mexica in pursuit of political consolidation witllin tlle Basin of Mexico. In tlle decades after the formation of the empire in 1428, the Mexica eliminated local administrative positions, usurped old kingship positions and created others anew, and created parallel special-purpose tributary and political control hierarchies. Tribute provinces in the Basin of Mexico were defined to cut across boundaries oflocal city-states. Tribute was collected directly by imperial officials, keeping it out of the hands oflocal rulers. As Hicks points out, this let the imperial kings deal with subject rulers as allies and colleagues, not tribute-payers, at the same time that they were demanding heavy tribute payments from their colleagues' commoner subjects (Hicks 1992). Mter the initial conquest and imperial organization of city-states in the core area, the Triple Alliance rulers employed a second set of political strategies. Their encouragement of specific kinds of growth in the Basin of Mexico market system was onc example of this process. Others included granting income-producing lands to noble f.1milies and pursuing actively the ancient practice of marriage alliances with less powerful dynasties. Brumfiel (this volume) shows the importance of imperial ideology within the political strategies of the Mexica.

The frontier strategy The t1·ontier strategy, an important component of Doyle's "international context," describes the actions taken when the empire came up against powerful enemy states that could not be conquered. City-states along these frontiers were not incorporated into the tributary provinces listed in the Codex Mcndoza, but were treated as client states and granted a certain level offormal equality with the imperial rulers (in spite of very real differences in power). A number oflocal documents state that the client kings did not pay tribute to the Mexica ruler, but rather gave him gifts (Berdan et al. 1996: ch. 6). Their main contributions to the empire related to their border locations. They fought small-scale battles with the enemy states, often fi·om locally constructed fortresses. There is little information about these facilities in the documentary record, and archaeologists have only begun to identifY and study them (Hermlndez Rivero 1994). In a few cases,

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Michael E. Smith

the Mexica built fortresses (e.g., Oznlma), which nearby clients supplied with soldiers, weapons, and food (Hassig 1988). These border polities resembled in many ways the client kingdoms of the eastern Roman empire (Braund 1984; Sands 1908). These client states, labeled "strategic provinces" by Berdan et al. (1996), represent an alternative form of provincial organization to the better-known tributary provinces of the Codex Mendoza. The recognition of greater variability in the control of the Aztec provinces parallels recent scholarship on other ancient empires such as the Inka (D'A1troy, this volume) and Vijayanagara (Morrison, this volume). The identification of this variability in the Aztec empire was delayed for many decades because of two f.1.ctors. First, Robert Barlow's influential top-down approach to the empire simply lumped the client states with their nearest tributary province (Barlow 1949). A second reason for the long delay in the recognition of the frontier strategy is the success of Mexica propaganda. In spite of their failure to conquer Tlaxcalla and the Tarascans, the Mexica produced a variety of types of propaganda proclaiming their greatness. Rulers commissioned huge carved stone monuments with imperial iconography (Berdan et al. 1996: ch. 4) and they constructed impressive state temples such as the Templo Mayor where elaborate sacrificial ceremonies were held. This propaganda was directed at the nobles of other city-states as part of the Mexica program of political consolidation (see Brumfiel, this volume). After 1519, the Spanish chroniclers recorded much of this propaganda verbatim from Mexica nobles. According to the official imperial world-view, the empire had no need for special arrangements to contain enemy states. This was because the Mexica "were masters of the world, their empire so wide and abundant that they had conquered all the nations and that all were their vassals" (Duran 1993: 336). Surprisingly, many modern scholars have accepted this propaganda at face value, hindering scholarship on the organization of the empire. Another example of Mexica propaganda is the institution known as the "flowery war" (xochi)'ao)'otl). The Mexica told the Spaniards that these battles with Tlaxcalla were done tc)r practice and training, and that the empire had no desire to conquer Tlaxcalla. When Spanish soldiers asked the Tlaxcallans about these wars, however, they were told that the Aztec empire was indeed trying hard to conquer their state. Tlaxcalla was surrounded and its outside trade in salt and luxuries had been cut off, but the empire was simply not strong enough to complete the conquest (see discussion in M. E. Smith 1996: 184ff). The Aztec empire clearly had achieved political and economic advantages over large parts of Me so am erica by 1519, but its degree of domination was lower than that achieved in many ancient empires, and lower than the Mexica nobility would like to admit.

The elite strategy The elite strategy, part ofDoyle's transnational system, describes the connections forged among politically separate e1ites in all parts of the empire. Processes of

The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican world system

elite interaction and class-formation had begun among the MPC Aztec citystates, and were then put to work by the imperial rulers. Specific activities of this strategy included marriage alliances, gift-giving, common participation in key ceremonies and events, and the use of particular styles and forms of art, iconography, and material culture. This strategy cuts across the three strategies listed above, and indeed elite interactions and manipulations were part of all three. Elite dynamics contributed to the growth of trade and markets, they were at the core of the political strategy of consolidation, and they were part of interaction with the strategic provinces. Elite interactions were also important in the tributary provinces (M. E. Smith 1986). Provincial rulers were co-opted by the Mexica, and their participation in the empire was rewarded by support and incentives from the capital (see Brumfiel, this volume). The major reason for singling out the elite strategy is its pervasiveness and its cultural content, which may not be sufficiently emphasized in analyses of economic and political strategies (see also chapters by Kuhrt, Morrison, and Woolf, this volume). The Late Postclassic International style discussed above is an example of an art style that linked elites from distant areas who spoke different languages and were involved in very different local cultural and political contexts. The International style extended f.1.r beyond the confines of the Aztec empire to link all of Mesoamerica together. Within the empire itself, however, there were numerous cultural traits that distinguished e1ites from commoners in local regions, and linked distant dites together to forge a common, extensive elite class within the empire. Two particularly important artistic media that served this role were stone sculpture and manuscript painting (Berdan et al. 1996: chs. 4, 7, 8).

THE AZTEC EMPIRE IN MORELOS How did processes of world system exchange and imperial expansion affect people in provincial areas? This question is difficult to address for two reasons: (1) there is little information, ethnohistoric or archaeological, on provincial societies; and (2) the problem of rough chronologies discussed in the introduction limits the usefulness of existing data fC)J" addressing fine-grained processes of change. Yet this is a crucial issue in the cross-cultural analysis of imperialism (see Deagan, this volume). My research in MOI·dos has generated archaeological data suitable for pursuing issues of world systems and imperialism in central Mexico outside of the Basin of Mexico. In this section I make comparisons among the three periods described in the introduction: Middle Postclassic (MPC), the period of city-state expansion; Late Postclassic-A (LPC-A), the period of central Mexico's entry into the Mesoamerican world system; and Late Postclassic-B (LPC-B), the period of Aztec imperialism (see Table 5.1). I have identified the following patterns at Aztec-period sites in MOI·e1os. First, commercial exchange was pervasive in Morelos during all three periods. Second, the LPC-A period, when this area entered the Mesoamerican world system, was

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The Aztec empire alld the iYiesoalllel'iwn J"odd system

Michael E. Smith a time of economic expansion and prosperity. Third, the LPC- B period, when Mot'dos was part of the Aztec empire, was a time of economic decline and increasing regional and class inequalities. I examine these three issues with respect to three archaeological data sets: excavations of rural houses at Capilco and Cuexcomate; excavations of urban houses at Yautepec; and regional comparisons of ceramic inventories (Fig. 5.4).

147

BASIN OF MEXICO ~

Economic cycles in the countryside: excal'"uions at Capilco and C14eXCO'fnate

/

I

'"

'" '"

I

Cynthia Heath-Smith and [ excavated over f()rty houses and other structures at the rural sites of Cuexcomate and Capilco in 1986 (Fig. 5.5). Chronological research allowed us to apply a refined chronology to these sites (Smith and Doershuk 1991). Capilco was a village that grew {['om a few houses in the MPC period to twenty houses in LPC- B times. Cuexcomate was ()Unded as a town site in LPC-A with about 200 inhabitants. The settlement grew to over 800 inhabitants in LPC- B times, when a large elite compound was abandoned and a much smaller one built in its place. Excavations concentrated on residential structures and associated midden deposits, nearly all of which were phased to one of the three Aztec periods (M. E. Smith 1992). The (<>llowing arguments are discussed at greater length elsewhere (Smith and Heath-Smith 1994). Only two of the houses excavated at Capilco date to the MPC period, but their inhabitants were already wdl connectcd to central Mcxican cxchangc lH:tworks. rmports included ceramics from Cuauhnahuac, the Basin of Mexico, and areas to the west; obsidian fl'om central Mexican sources; and bronze tools from thc Tarascan area of west Mexico (Hoslcr 1994). Thc LPC-A period saw an cxpansion of population in the region, accompanied by the construction of agricultural terraces near the sites. Poor soils and hilly terrain makc this a marginal area ()r rain(;lll agriculture, but cotton can be cultivated in terraced and irrigated plots. Mordos is onc of the kw areas of highland central Mexico warm enough to grow cotton. Not surprisingly, all houscs, elite and commoner, had spinning tools, and these increased greatly in li'equency over the MIlC period (hg. S.6). Cotton textiles, woven by women in domestic settings, werc probably the major export ti'om this area. They wcre the predominant type of' tribute good demanded of commoner households at all levels of the tribute hierarchy, li'om the local noble to the city-state to the empire, and there was an active commerce in textiles. Women's labor produced the goods that linked Morelos households into the Mesoamerican world system, and later, the Aztec empire. In this period, an elite group built an elaborate palace at Cucxcomate in a style similar to Aztec palaces in other areas. Elite middens can be distinguished tl'om commoner middens by the quantities of various imported goods and decorated ceramics. There are no categories of goods that are {(HlIld only in elitc contexts, however. The most valuable items recovered in the excavations bronze tools

I I

., Toluca

Tlaxcalla

\

\ Cholula

•

\

\ \ \

Yautepec

•

\ \ \

HUAXTEPEC PROVINCE

and exotic stone jewelry were {(llllld equally at commoner and elite houses. This pattern points strongly to the operation ofcoml11erce not controlled by the elite as the dominant mechanism of exchange at these sites. The LPC-A period was a time of economic prospcrity, expansion of agriculture, and urbanization in western Morelos. Ceramics Il'om western Mexico declined in fi'equency, while ceramics and obsidian ti'om the Basin of Mexico increased greatly. In the LPC- B period, after the Aztec conquest of Morelos, economic decline set in at Capilco and Cuexcol11ate. Regional population continued to grow and all available land was put into cultivation with terracing. The quantities of exotic goods, including ceramics, obsidian, and bronze, declined significantly {(H' all

5.4 '/JJC lomtion (!f' MOl'do.l' within cmtral Mexico. ArCrts shaded drtrll lTmy illdiwtc m01l1ltai1lS, the dashed linc indicatcs C1ICIII)' te/,/,itm:y.

148

Mic/mc! E. Smith

T7Je Aztec cmpirc alld the jViesot1lllcricall world j)'stClfI

149

5.6 Ccrflm ic tools wcd to .Ijlill cottOll. The whorls ill the /iJl'tlll'Olllld wcrc wci,ghtJ/llr woodell spindlcs, which wcre twirled i1l thesc slIIall bowls.

5.5 Aztu jlcnJnllt houscs at Capi/Co, Mol'c/os; this J'i11l1lTC II'IIS pl1l't (!f'tlJt: Aztec tributary jJl'oJ'incc I!f' CUl1l1lJ11alJIII1 c.

three social sectors (villagers at Capiico, and commOlH:rs and e1ites at Cuexcomatc). Importcd ceramics at this time were almost exclusively !i'om the Basin of Mexico, and the quantities of local decorated ceramics also declined. [ have measured standard of' living with a wealth index calculated as the fi'equency oflocal decorated ceramics (expressed as percent of'total ceramics) plus two times the fi'equency of'imported ceramics (M. E. 'smith 1987). This measure declined f(H' all three social sectors. Wealth index values suggest a reduction in elite-commoner distinctions in the I ,),C- B period, a pat tem also rdlected in elite housing. The large elite compound of' I,PGA was abandoned in I:wor of' a smaller and less elaboratc elite compound in LPC- B times. Regional population in the LPC- B period was probably at or over the capacit y of'the environment to sustain. The poorest households in particular expanded their production of' cotton textiles, probably to make up I(H' f:llling agricultural rdums (the houses with the lowest wealth indices have the highest quantities of spinning tools). The economic decline of'the LP(:- B period at Capilco and (:uexcomate was probably due to the combined cfkcts of'two processes, onc local and onc external ('smith and Heath-'smith 1994). The local process was a regional economic cycle common in preindustrial states with dense peasant populations. The cycle starts with population growth, colonization of' new lands, the expansion of'trade

and manufacturing, and the growth of towns (MPC and LPC-A). As growth continues beyond a threshold, however, the economy is tranSf(JI'Il1ed It'olll a condition of excess land and a shortage of la bot' to one with surplus labm and a shortage of'land. Arable land is f,lIed in, productivity declines, prices rise, the countryside becomes impoverished, and peasant households take up cottage industries 10 supplement f:llling agricultural income (LPC- B). The situation in Morelos resembled historically documented economic cycles of'this sort, including medieval England (Miller and Hatcher 1978) and early modern France (Le Roy Ladurie 1972). The negative effects of' local demographic and agricultural problems were intensif1ed by an external process, Aztec imperialism. Aztec conquest of'this area probably had kw direct dkcts, and imperial tribute would have had only a very modest cfkct on households because of its low level in relation to regional population in Morelos (M. E. Smith 1994). The indirect eflects of' Aztec imperialism were significant, however. One such dkct derived fi'olll the imperial support onoyal provincial rulers. The Cuauhnahuac dynasty had long-standing marriage tics with the Mexica dynasty (the mother of Motecuhzoma I was the daughter of a Cuauhnahuac king), and the Cuauhnahuac state continued to expand by conquering other city-states even after its incorporation into the empire (M. E. Smith 1986). The region around Capilco and Cuexcomate became subject to Cuauhnahuac around the start of'the LPC- B period, and the inhabitants of these sites paid tribute to both a local city-state king and the Cuauhnahuac state in addition to their imperial tribute. There is not suff,cient inf(ll'Illation to calculate the magnitude of'these sub-imperial tribute requirements, but they were probably much

!i

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Michael E. Smith

heavier than the imperial tribute. The decline in wealth and living conditions of the Cuexcomate elite group suggests that the benefits the Cuauhnahuac nobility may have enjoyed from their cooperation with the Aztec empire were not shared by their rural cousins.

Economic change in the city: excavations at Yautepec Yautepec was a political capital with several subject city-states in Aztec times. The site has one of the few surviving Aztec royal palaces, which has been excavated by Hortensia de Vega Nova (1996). In 1993 Heath-Smith and I excavated seven houses and a number of other domestic deposits at Yautepec, which lies under the modern town of the same name. One of the houses is a large elite residence, five are small commoner dwellings, and one is intermediate in size and of uncertain class affiliation (M. E. Smith et at. 1999; M. E. Smith et at. 1994). Timothy Hare and I have established a fine-grained chronology and we can now date deposits to the MPC, LPC-A, and LPC-B periods (Hare and Smith 1996). Studies of the excavated artifacts are still in progress by Jan Marie Olson, Ruth FaumanFichman, and others, and the analysis of sites from our full-coverage survey of the Yautepec valley (by Timothy Hare and Lisa Montiel) has only begun. The following interpretations are subject to change as our analyses proceed. As at the rural sites, the inhabitants ofYautepec in the MPC period had ready access to obsidian from a variety of sources and ceramics from the Basin of Mexico and other parts of Morelos. Although they did have access to obsidian from Tarascan sources, neither Tarascan bronze nor exotic precious stones were present at this time. In the LPC-A period, the city ofYautepec expanded greatly in size. In either this period or the next, much of the alluvial land around Yautepec was put into irrigated cultivation. The amounts and types of imported obsidian and ceramics changed very little from MPC times. Bronze sewing needles, awls, bells, and tweezers from the Tarascan region appear for the first time at Yautepec (Hosier and Macfarlane 1996), as does jewelry of jade, shell, and other exotic material. These exotics are found in both elite and commoner contexts, suggesting that Yautepec households entered the Mesoamerican world system at this time. Spindle whorls and spinning bowls show a dramatic increase in the LPC-A period, and technological analyses suggest a greater focus on the production of fine thread than in MPC times (Fauman-Fichman 1997). Again, cotton textiles provided the major link with the world system, and the increase in spinning was probably related to Yautepec's growing participation in world system exchanges. _ In the LPC- B period imported ceramics and obsidian declined in frequency. The drop in obsidian was particularly dramatic (in comparison with sherd counts). Exotic bronze and jade continued at similar levels, and Tarascan obsidian increased. The quantities of spinning tools continued to grow, and the trend toward finer thread production continued in this phase as well. The aggregate

The Aztec empire and the Mesoamerican lVorld system

wealth levels for the site rose slightly in LPC- B times, owing to an increase in the amount of local polychrome ceramics. AltllOugh this observation is preliminary, it appears tl1at elite/commoner distinctions increased at this time (excluding consideration of the royal palace), in contrast to Cuexcomate where the opposite change occurred. Although Yautepec and tl1e rural sites exhibit cQntrasting patterns of change, there are a number of similarities. In both cases imported goods are abundant in all periods, and ceramics from other parts of MOl·elOS and the Basin of Mexico are common. In both cases, high-value goods, ft·om imported polychrome bowls to bronze to jade jewelry, are found in both elite and commoner contexts. These patterns suggest strongly tl1e operation of markets and commercial exchange, in agreement with ethnohistoric descriptions of marketplaces in all types of communities in Morelos, ft·om cities to villages (M. E. Smitl1 1994). Both areas exhibit patterns of economic growth and expansion in the LPC-A period. The role of Aztec imperialism in tl1e LPC-B period at Yautepec is difficult to evaluate until our analyses at the household level proceed farther. Craft production occurred at a much higher level than at the rural sites (products included, in addition to textiles, obsidian blades and jewelry, ceramic figurines and censers, and bark paper), but we have not examined temporal trends yet. Yautepec's environmental and sociopolitical contexts were very different from the rural sites, however, and models of Postclassic change will probably vary accordingly. Yautepec was a powerful capital city subject only to the empire, and changes cannot be attributed to external intermediate elites as at the rural sites. As an urban center higher up in the political and economic hierarchies of MOl·elOS, Yautepec had advantages over rural communities like Capilco and Cuexcomate, and this probably helps explain the overall rise in wealth levels under the Aztec empire. One feature worth noting is the presence of two Tarascan products bronze and obsidian - during this time when the Aztec and Tarascan empires were at war. This suggests that Aztec imperialism did not diminish the commercial exchanges of the world system, which cut across even the most hostile border in Mesoamerica.

Regional patterns of change The above observations can be augmented by data on ceramic type frequencies at other Postclassic sites in MOl·elOS. This section discusses seven sites whose ceramics are described in my monograph Tlahuica Ceramics (M. E. Smith n.d.). In addition to Capilco, Cuexcomate, and Yautepec, four sites have collections of Postclassic ceramics sufficiently well dated and large enough for socioeconomic inferences. El Puerto was a village on the edge of the abandoned ancient urban center of Xochicalco. Data are from test pits excavated by Kennetl1 Hirth. Coatetelco was a town with a pyramid and ballcourt excavated by Ra(J! At·ana; data discussed here are from test pits. These sites are in western Morelos, not £:1r

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The Aztec emjlire and the MesoameriwlI world system

Michael E. Smith from Capilco and Cuexcomate. Cttauhllah1lac was a powerful city that ruled many city-states in the western half of Morelos. Although a number of excavations have been done in Cuauhnahuac (modern Cuernavaca), the only quantified ceramic collections are from temples at Teopanzolco (MPC) and the palace of the king in the Palacio de Cortcs site (LPC). Finally, Tejlozteco was a hilltop temple precinct above the town ofTepoztlan, north ofYautepec; quantified collections are from residential quarters near the temple where priests may have lived. Imported ceramics were quite abundant at every site, providing additional evidence for the operation of local and regional market systems in all periods (imports are identified primarily on typological grounds; petrographic and chemical analyses are now in progress). Imports comprise between 1 percent and 6 percent of total sherds, with period means all above 2 percent (Fig. 5.7). Since these are total sherd counts rather than vessel estimates, 2 percent is a large quantity (where vessel counts have been estimated, imports comprise closer to 10 percent of household ceramic inventories). In the MPC period, imports from the Basin of Mexico equal imports from other parts of Morelos, but in the two LPC periods the Basin of Mexico was the dominant place of origin f(x imported ceramics at all sites. Every site had imports from the Basin and fl'om other parts of Morelos, and many sites had imports t1'om 1110re distant areas (including Cholula, Toluca, Guerrero, and the Gulf Coast). The single most llumerous imported category at most sites is the salt vessel ("Texcoco fabric-marked") used to transport salt fl'om the Basin of Mexico. Most of the other imports arc decorated bowls functionally equivalent to the locally manufactured polychrome serving ware that is very common at these sites. Most households obtained a variety of styles of decorated serving bowls ft'om a number of distant regions, probably f
153

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PROGRESS REPORT ON AZTEC IMPERIALISM Were the changes documented above limited to MOl'elos, or do they represent wider trends in Postclassic Mesoamerica? At this point it is impossible to say f(JI' sure. The Mexica kings achieved a certain level of success ill creating an empire within the context of the Mesoamerican world system. Unfl:>rtunately, modern scholars are having less success in creating a body of scholarship on Aztec imperialism within the context of ancient empires and world systems. When scholarship on the Aztecs is compared to that on other ancient empires (sec studies in this volume), one is struck by how little wc really know about the Aztec empire. Several years ago Frances Berdan and I attributed the lack of progress on the archaeology of Aztec imperialism to two f:lCtorS: (1) the indirect nature of imperial control "did not lead to major Aztec investments in material remains in the provinces," and (2) "archaeologists have not carried out a sufficient number of problem-oriented projects addressing this isslle to fully evaluate the dkcts of Aztec imperialism" (Smith and Berdan 1992: 353; sce also Rojas 1994). In looking back at the last few years of research, I sce the first factO!' as less of an impediment than it once seemed. We now have better theories and models of ancient empires and world systems and more refined archaeological methods fi)l' their analysis (e.g., Sinopoli 1994a; Peregrine and Fcinman 1996; Schrciber n.d.), and comparative endeavors such as this volume bode well flH' continued advancement in this area. The ethnohistoric analysis of the Aztec empire has advanced greatly in recent years, providing a better framework Illr archaeological analysis (Hassig 1988; Hodge and Smith 1994; Berdan et rtl. 1996; Carrasco

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Michael E. Smith 1996), and art historians are now making significant contributions to studies of the empire (Berdan et al. 1996: chs. 4,7,8). This optimism must be tempered by the simple lack of research. There are still few examples of archaeological fieldwork outside the Basin of Mexico directed at the study of the Aztec empire. Most archaeological studies of the Late Postclassic period in provincial areas do not address issues of Aztec imperialism, and the few projects that do include such a focus are hindered by poor chronologies and limited data (e.g., Hernandez Rivero 1994). The Aztec empire was a short-lived institution, and we need to refine archaeological chronologies in order to study its growth and effects. My work in MOl·elOS illustrates some of the rewards that come from investing effort in chronology building. A further obstacle to progress is methodological: we need better instruments to model key processes of world systems and empires. Tlus is a particularly difficult problem for archaeologists, although similar difficulties plague the documentary analysis of ancient empires. Although it is relatively straightforward to identifY the existence of an empire from archaeological data alone (see above), the identification and analysis of key institutions and processes can be quite difficult. How can one distinguish between the roles of market trade, statesponsored redistribution, and elite gift-giving in providing exotic goods at provincial sites? How can variations in the degree and nature of political control be distinguished, using material and/or documentary evidence? The situation for precapitalist world systems is even more problematic, since their archaeological study is still in its infancy. The biggest obstacles to the analysis of Aztec imperialism involve sampling. The sampling problem is common to most ancient empires and world systems: these were large, diverse entities, and archaeological fieldwork by nature only illuminates small local areas. We need a lot more fieldwork and artifact analyses if scholarship is to steer a course between blithe overgeneralization from one or two studies and despair at the size and complexity of the imperial beast.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation tor Anthropological Research and the four conference organizers for the opportunity to participate in the Imperial Designs conference. My excavations in Morclos have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment tor the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the National Geographic Society, Loyola University, and the University at Albany. This chapter has been much improved, and my own thinking much advanced, as a result of the stimulating discussions, both formal and informal, at the conference, and I want to thank all of the participants. My revisions of this paper were greatly aided by specific comments on an earlier draft by Frances Berdan, Elizabetll Brumfiel, Susan Kepecs, Marilyn Masson, Barbara Stark, and the volume editors.

6 On the edge of empire: form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty Carla M. Sinopoli

INTRODUCTION Historical understandings of the structure and history of tile Mauryan empire of northern India (c. 321-180 BC E) weigh heavily on contemporary constructions of the Indian nation. Portrayed as the first precolonial exemplar of a U1ufied subcontintental polity, a Mauryan sculpted column is tile emblem of modern India, printed on its currency to display essential continuities (or aspirations) between past and present (e.g., Sen 1997: 36). While many questions remain concerning the nature, extent, and impact of the Mauryan polity, here I consider its legacy in a more proximate context - the Satavahana dynasty of the Deccan of central and southern India (c. first century BCE to second century CE). As with the Mauryas (albeit with considerably more debate), scholars have viewed tile Satavahanas as rulers of a geographically extensive and politically centralized imperial polity (e.g., Mirashi 1981: 1; Margabandhu 1985; Shastri 1991: 45), heirs to the political and economic frameworks developed by their Mauryan predecessors. Yet in both cases, historical and material evidence for these polities is limited, suggesting that these empires were both less pervasive and more ephemeral than the claims made about them by both their rulers and the historians and archaeologists who have studied them. In this chapter, I consider that evidence and examine the complex relations between political forms and ideological claims during the South Asian Early Historic period (c. 300 BCE-400 CE). I begin with a brief introduction to the Mauryan empire considering both archaeological and textual evidence for imperial organization and extent and the place of the Mauryas in South Asian historiography. I then turn to the Satavahana successors of the Mauryas and consider Satavahana imperial structure, origins, and royal ideology. In particular, I situate the Satavahanas in their broader pan-regional historical and ideological processes and cultural frameworks, including tile development and spread of ideological systems, economic networks, and categories of material culture whose distribution extended well beyond the range of individual polities and regions. I will argue that, to a considerable extent, Satavahana success derived from their ability to lay claim to some of these broader developments through a

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Carla M. Sinopoli combination of ideological practices, disposition of economic resources, and short-lived military successes.

THE MAURYAN EMPIRE Thus speaks the Beloved of the Gods, the king Piyadassi: When I had been consecrated twelve years I commanded as follows: Everywhere in my empire, the ytthas [subordinate officers] with the rajttka [rural administrators] and the pradiselms [heads of the district] shall go on tour every five years, in order to instruct people in the Dhamma as well as for other purposes. It is good to be obedient to one's mother and f.1ther, friends and relatives, to be generous to brahmans and sramallas [Buddhist or Jain monksJ, it is good not to kill living beings, it is good not only to spend little but to own tile minimum of property. The council will instruct tile officials to record the above, making it both manifest to tile public and explaining why. (Third major rock edict of Asoka; Thapar 1997: 251)

In the late fourth century BC E Candragupta Maurya, king of the Ganges Basin state of Magadha, founded South Asia's first empire. Rulers of one of more than a dozen contemporary city-states, the Mauryan kings of Ma gad ha combined military conquest with agricultural intensification and control of long-distance riverine trade routes to forge a polity that ruled the entire Indo-Gangetic Plain and areas beyond (Thapar 1997). Their empire was relatively short-lived, dating from c. 322 to 187 BCE, and reached its maximal extent under its most renowned ruler, the king Asoka (c. 273-232 B CE). Territories were rapidly lost under Asoka's successors and within thirty-five years of Asoka's death the empire had disappeared. The main focus of this chapter, the Satavahana empire, was one of a series of states and empires that came to the fore in South Asia following the Mauryan collapse. Indeed, Thapar (1997: 320) has suggested that the emergence of states and empires "in Orissa, Andhra and the western Deccan [was] ... virtually impelled by the break-up of the Mauryan state." Scholars know of the Mauryans through the lithic inscriptions of Asoka, in Prakrit (Brahmi script), Aramaic, and Greek. These would presumably have been the primary spoken languages in the regions where the inscriptions were located. Prakrit, an Indo-European language, is believed to have been preferred over the more scholarly Sanskrit because it was "the language spoken by the people at large, and not ... the language of culture" (Thapar 1997: 7). Literacy was no doubt quite restricted during the Early Historic period, and it is likely that the texts inscribed on stone (and probably also on non-durable materials) were intended to be read aloud to a non-literate public. Asokan inscriptions are among the earliest securely dated written sources in South Asia (the much earlier Indus Valley script of the third millennium BCE remains undecoded). The inscriptions, made over some twenty years (from Asoka's eighth through twentyseventh regnal years), span the period of Asoka's conversion to Buddhism in c. 260 BC E. As recorded in the thirteenth major rock edict (Thapar 1997: 255-6),

Form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty his conversion was a consequence of the great remorse Asoka experienced for the massacres that followed upon the Mauryan conquest of the Kalinga state of eastern India. I Referred to as the major and minor rock edicts and pillar edicts, Asokan inscriptions were engraved on stone columns in urban centers in the Ganges basin (Fig. 6.1) and on rock outcrops across the broad territories over which Asoka claimed sovereignty. They thus had a material dimension visible even to non-readers that may have made them important symbols of political authority. Asokan inscriptions were typically located in or near settlements or along trade routes (though not always in highly visible locales). Some three dozen unique Asokan texts have been identified at approximately fifty sites (Fig. 6.2; Allchin 1995: 199). In many contexts, texts co-occur; for example, most or all of the fourteen rock edicts are found together in several locales (Chaudhary 1983: 44-5}.2 As a key source of primary data, Asokan inscriptions have come to play a tremendously important role in interpretations of the Mauryan polity. Although considerable caution needs to be exercised in reading these propagandistic texts, they do provide a great deal of important information. They seem to result from a conscious imperial policy to communicate information and instructions about Asoka's religious values and right behavior (dhamma) as well as his understandings of South Asia's political structlll'e (including mention of border states, administrative offices, and revenue collection, among other things). They are thus by and large prescriptive texts, written in a paternalistic voice to instruct imperial subjects on behavior and values. Other textual SOlll'ces on the Mauryas include the writings of Megasthenes, Scleucid ambassador to the Malll'yan court in c. 310 BCE (Thapar 1997: 296), and Buddhist texts (preserved in Sri Lanka and Tibet) that recount legends of Asoka, either as narratives of his religious deeds or as accounts of sacred lineages 0. S. Strong 1983: 22-31; Thapar 1997: 8-9}. The political treatise of Kautilya, the Arthnsastrn, a text on statecraft, has commonly been interpreted as dating to the Mauryan period. However, Trautmann (1971) has argued that the Al'thnsnstm was a multi-authored text that did not take its present form until c. 250 C E, well after the Mauryan collapse (although portions of the manuscript may well date back to Mauryan times and the author proclaimed himself a minister ofCandragupta Maurya). Mauryan king lists and stories of the accession of Candragupta are also recorded in the Vedic Plll'anas. Archaeologically, the locations of inscriptions provide important evidence of imperial geography (Fussman 1988; Habib and Habib 1990), although the extent to which they docllment areas under direct imperial control is t:1r from clear, especially in the southern part of the peninsula. Other reasonably welldated archaeological materials include coins and sculptures. Evidence ft'om the numerous Early Historic urban settlements and associated material remains (e.g., Northern Black Polished Ware ceramics) is more problematic owing to limitations of current archaeological chronologies (see below). Early scholarship and more recent political claims concerning the Mauryas

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have portrayed the empire as a highly centralized and homogeneous polity that unified a vast region into a single monolithic imperial state. However, some more recent scholarship has emphasized the discontinuous geography of the empire and the internal variability in its administration (Fig. 6.2; e.g., Thapar 1987, 1997; Fussman 1988; though sce Chakrabarti 1997: 203-6 f()r an opposing view). In particular, Mauryan territories in the Deccan and south India appear to have been quite limited, restricted to areas near important mineral resources, especially gold sources along the Tungabhadra River and in the KolaI' region of south India. Asokan inscriptions arc rare in the western and eastern DecGlll areas where the Satavahana polity emerged (sec below, though Satavahana and Mauryan inscriptions co-occur at Sanchi, Amaravati, and Sannathi). Other than Asoican inscriptions and some rare trade wares, these areas contain little direct evidence of the Mauryan presence, and no evidence of the {<:mn that presence may have taken. Thus, while the Mauryan empire was certainly f'ar more extensive and complexly organized than any previous South Asian state, claims f()r its universal status and highly centralized political structure appear to have been overstated. The status of the Mauryans in South Asian history, historical writings, and recent political discourse is an important isslle, although its detailed consideration is well beyond the scope of this study. Given the importance of the past in the legitimation of later states, it is, however, relevant to consider how or if the Satavahanas considered the Mauryas in their claims to imperiallegitil11acy, as well as how historical understandings of the Mauryas have impacted interpretations of'later politics such as the Satavahanas. For how long and in what contexts were the Mal1l'yas relevant to South Asian historical memories and political constructions? Did they, like the Romans f()r the Carolingians (sec Moreland, this volume), become a template and ideal against which later states could model themselves? These arc difficult questions to answer with certainty. Wc know that the existence of the Mauryans and their chronological position in north Indian political history was recorded in Brahmanical Pmanic texts, which took wrinen (()\'In in the fifth centmy C E (sec below) and provide evidence fix a sense of long-term linear dynastic history. According to Thapar, the Puranas attempted "to provide an integrated world view of'the past and present, linking evcnts to the emergence 01' a deity or sect" (1993: 152), and recorded the names of all known lineages and dynasties up to the fifth century C E. However, while earlier ruling lineages were acknowledged in the Puranas, post-Mauryan rulers appear to have emphasized the history or their particular lineage in inscriptions and royal pedigrees, and not the longer Puranic sequences. As will be discussed below, there is only very limited evidence that the Satavahanas made reference to the Mauryas (and, in contrast to Satavahana claims to high Brahmanical status, the Puranas make clear that the Mauryans were of the low-status sudra varna;.1 Thapar 1993: 152). But some Early Historic states may have. In particular, the Gupta empire (320-467 C E4) that emerged

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in Magadha roughly five centuries after Mauryan collapse does appear to have had some sense of being heir to past Mauryan greatness. vVe sce hints of this in dynastic and royal names: the first Gupta ruler (320-335 CE) shared the name Candra Gupta with the first Mauryan emperor (Trautmann, personal communications). A eulogy to his successor, Samudra Gupta I (C E 335-376), was inscribed on an Asokan column now in Allahabad (Thapar 1966: 137) and Pahsien, a Chinese pilgrim of the early fifth century C E, wrote of visiting the remains of Asoka's temple in the Gupta capital of Patiliputra, the f(mller Mauryan capital. Even here, direct references to the Mauryans or Asoka did not appear in royal texts and the Gupta kings, like the earlier Satavahanas, were avid proponents of Vedie sacrifices and military glory. Nonetheless, historian A. L. Basham suggested that the Guptas cOllsciously sought to restore "the splendour of the Mauryas" (1954: 63) and Romila Thapar described the emergence of the Gupta empire as "shades of the Mauryas . . . rc-emerging 011 the scene" (1966: 137). Comparisons between Asoka and Samudra Gupta arc common in contemporary historiography and, like the Mauryan period, the Gupta period is often described as a "golden age" and has been important in nationalist history (Goyal 1997; Chattopadhyaya 1995: 310). Even so, it not clear to what extent these comparisons were explicitly drawn during the Gllpta period. Thus, while legends ofAsoka persisted and were transmitted in Buddhist texts and royal lineages were recorded in the Puranas, detailed knowledge of the historical Asoka and the empire he ruled appears to have been lost relatively rapidly. And by the late ()lIl'th eentlll'y C E, Brahmi script had disappeared from usage O· S. Strong 1983: 6). When the Chinese pilgrim HSlian-tsang visited India in the early seventh centlJl'Y, he recognized the large sculpted columns he saw at several sites as associated with the legendary ruler 0. S. Strong 1983: 4-7). But neither he nor earlier pilgrims such as Fa-hsien (399-414 C E; J. S. Strong 1983: 6) were able to read the Asokan inscriptions on them.' After Buddhism disappeared fi'om India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries C E, even the legends of Asoka were ()rgotten (J. S. Strong 1983: 6-7). Historical knowledge of the Mauryans reemerged in 1837 with the decipherment of Brahmi by James Prinsep of the Royal Asiatic Society (Trautmann 1997: 137). The translation and the recognition of the import of the Asolcan inscriptions oeelll'red roughly simultaneously with early archaeological work on Buddhist monuments of British India carried out under the direction of Sir Alexander Cunningham, (Hll1der or the Archaeological Survey of India. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Mauryan empire had become an important part of South Asian historicalreconstl'uctions and was prominent in political discourse among both British colonials and those resisting them. For British historians, such as Vincent Smith, author of the encyclopedic Ox./ill'd Histo1'Y l!f'bldia (1981 119191), the Mauryan empire was an efficient and admirable despotic autocracy. And Asoka was a king whose name "is still fi'esh in the memory of men after the lapse of more than two millennium 1sic I" (Smith 1981 119191: 137; an interesting perspective in light of that name's recent rediscovery). Smith and his

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Carla M. Sinopoli contemporaries saw the Mauryan period as the apex of ancient Indian political history and the 2000 years between Mauryan collapse and the arrival of the British as a period of decline and decadence. Following the Mauryan collapse, the possibility of a unified India did not again exist until (and because of) the arrival of the British colonial rulers. In a thematic variation, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indian nationalists, such as Pramathanath Banerjea and Narayan Candra Bandyopadhyaya, also saw the Mauryas as both model and precedent (Inden 1990: 193). The empire provided evidence for an indigenous precolonial South Asian state that had united the entire subcontinent under a single legitimate authority, governed by law and reason rather than coercion and despotism. During both the independence movement and his tenure as independent India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru made frequent references to the Mauryans and particularly Asoka, whom he proclaimed in a speech given on 22 July 1947 as "one of the most magnificent names not only in India's history but in world history" (Nehru 1985: 71). Following Indian independence the Mauryans remain a potent symbol of Indian nationalism; Mauryan sculptural images adorn the nation's flag 6 and its currency. During the Satavahana period Brahmi script was still in use, indicating that Asokan inscriptions could have been read and comprehended. Yet, neither Asoka nor other Mauryan rulers appear in Satavahana royal inscriptions/ Instead, as will be explored below, Satavahana referents are to Vedic rituals and Brahmanical pedigrees. While it is always problematic to argue from negative evidence, especially for a period as poorly understood as the Satavahanas, the paucity of references to the Mauryans may indicate either that their impact was far less pervasive in the Deccan than many archaeologists and historians have assumed or that the Satavahanas deliberately excluded them from political discourse.

WHO WERE THE SATAVAHANAS? "Success! From the victorious camp of the triumphant army in Govardhana, the illustrious Gautamaplltra Satakarni, the lord of Benakataka, issues the [following] order to amatya [minister] Vishnupalita in Govardhana: The field of 200 lIiJlartfmas [unit of measure] of Ajakalaka in the village of Western Kakhadi, which was owned by Rishabhadata - that our field of 200 lIiJlflrtflllfls We give to these mendicant monks of the Trirasmi [caves] and We also grant them the following immunities ofthat field - it must not be entered, it must not be interfered with, it must not be meddled with by the district functionaries; it should be provided with all immunities. This order has been given orally. (Nasik cave inscription of Gautamiputra Satakarni, in Mirashi 1981: 23-8)

The nature of the elJidence Like the Mauryas, the Satavahanas are known to scholars from both textual and material evidence. Written sources include (1) sacred texts, (2) inscriptions on walls of rock-cut caves and religious structures, (3) inscribed coins, and (4) for-

Form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty eigners' (Roman and Greek) accounts. The eighteen Vedic Puranas ("Ancient Stories") are the major sacred texts that contain references to the "Andhras" or Satavahanas. These texts may have roots extending back to as early as 500 BC E, though they did not take their final written form until the fifth century C E. Several of the Puranas contain dynastic lists of Satavahana rulers; the number of kings mentioned varies from seventeen to thirty, spanning a duration of between 275 and 460 years (Nilakanta Sastri 1975: 6; Shastri 1987: 4). As with the Mauryans, references to the Satavahanas are also found in some Buddhist and Jain texts. By the Satavahana period, Brahmi inscriptions were widespread throughout the Deccan where they are found on Buddhist sacred structures and commemorative stelae. Fewer than three dozen of the hundreds of recorded inscriptions refer explicitly to Satavahana rulers (Burgess 1964 [1881], 1970 [1883]; Burgess and Indraji 1976 [1881]; Mirashi 1981). The vast majority document donations to Buddhist monastic institutions made by a wide array of individual artisans or merchants, merchant and artisan guilds, lay men and women, and monks and nuns (Dehejia 1992). The Satavahana royal inscriptions too are primarily records of royal donations of land and its revenues for the support of monks or religious institutions. While they sometimes also recorded attributes of rulers or queens (e.g., military success, religious piety) and provide some information on imperial structure, they are much more modest in scope and tone than tlle prescriptive inscriptions of Asoka discussed above. Inscribed coins comprise the most abundant written record of Satavahana rulers. Thousands of coins of lead, copper, and potin (an alloy of copper, zinc, lead, and tin; Goyal 1995: 89) and smaller numbers of gold and silver coins are known from sites and hoards throughout the Deccan and south India. While portrait coins are rare, the names of some sixteen to twenty rulers are found on coins. Several of these rulers appear to be local c1ites and many coins are highly restricted in their geographical distribution (Dutta 1990: 13-15; Sarma 1980: 1), suggesting that multiple minting locales existed, with little emphasis on panregional unitormity in images or systems of measure. Inscriptions on coins are mostly in Prakrit, though in some areas Tamil or Tclugu inscriptions also occur (Ray 1986: 44). In many cases, coins carry matronyms or titles common to several rulers, such as Satakarni, Pulumavi, and Satavahana (Dutta 1990: 18). Rulers' names also vary regionally and it is often not clear whether different names reterred to a single individual or to different individuals who ruled over distinct territories. Other relevant written sources include the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a handbook (in Greek) of the first century CE that reports on maritime trade routes between Roman Egypt, Arabia, and India (Casson 1991), and the writings of Pliny, Claudius Ptolemy, and Strabo, among others. By and large, these texts are most informative on issues of geography and economy, especially on commodities traded between India and the Roman world, but provide little useful information on the Satavahana polity. Some sources do cite formal diplomatic contacts between various Indian polities (though not the Satavahanas) and Rome (Ray 1986: 5-9).

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Form and mbJtallcc in the SMal'ahalla

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Along with coins, the other sources of archaeological evidence fIx the Early Historic period arc both abundant and problematic. The late centuries BeE through early centuries C E were times of rapid sociopolitical change in many areas of the Deccan and south India. This period witnessed the emergence of large fortified centers, and the expansion of multi-tiered settlement hierarchies and social elites, as well as expanding agricultural and craft production, and the development of extensive regional and long-distance trade networks within and beyond South Asia (Seniveratne 1980; Ray 1987; Parasher 1991, 1992; Morrison 1995 b; Parasher-Sen 1996). The roots of these changes can be traced back to the central and south Indian Iron Age or "Megalithic" period of the early first millennium BeE, although the massive megalithic cemeteries of that period arc f:u' better understood than the broader social and economic contexts in which they emerged. Sociopolitical transflxmations were likely accelerated in some areas with the intensification of contacts with Early Historic north I ndian states of the Ganges Basin, particularly the Mauryan empire. As discussed above, direct evidence for the nature and extent of Mauryan contact in the Deccan is scarce, suggesting at most that the Mauryans exerted extremely limited imperial control in that region. The Early Historic period in peninsular India was also marked by the expansion of Buddhism and Buddhist monastic institutions (Ray 1986), the spread of Vedic religion and its crystallization with local religious practices into recognizably Hindu forms, and processes of "Sanskritization" (Srinivas 1989), entailing the expansion of language, beliefs, and behaviors (including the fl)rmalization of varna and, eventually, caste frameworks) across a broad region. While numerous archaeological sites arc known lI'om the Early Historic period (Fig. 6.3), both chronological assignment and clear understandings of regional processes remain vexing challenges. The latter problem is slowly being remedied by an increasing f()cus on regional research (e.g., Krishnasastry 1983; ParasherSen 1996; M. L. Smith 1997), though an emphasis on large sites divorced I"om their regional context remains predominant. Chronological problems result from the discordance between rates of material culture change and rates of political change, as well as I"om limited stratigraphic excavations and a paucity of absolute dates. Thus, although certain artifi1Ct categories (e.g., Northern Black Polished Ware, Red Polished Ware, and mold-made flgurines) arc in a general sense diagnostic of the period, their temporal and geographic distributions remain poorly understood. However, they clearly do not correspond with dynastic chronologies or political entities (despite many attempts to use the presence of particular artif:lct categories to identify "the Mauryans" or "the Satavahanas"). Further, the spatial distribution ofl11any arti(ilct categories (e.g., Black and Red Ware) is much greater than the reputed spatial extent of any individual polity. This lack of correspondence between material «mns and political history is, of course, not unique to the South Asian context (sce Smith, this volume). In the Satavahana 6.3 Major 11101I(lstic context, it points to an essential disjunction between the dynastic history that has sites Illld scttlcllu:1lts (!( been the goal of most scholars of the period, and the kinds of historical evidence the Early Historic that archaeological research can most effectively generate. Decmn.

iI

11."''I.lHH

Sanchi

Sopara Kanheri

Bay of Bengal

Arabian

km

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Dynastic chronology Clu-onological problems also beset text-based reconstructions of Satavahana chronology and dynastic sequences. All such constructions rely heavily on the Puranic Icing lists, with their attendant interpretative complications (i.e., that they are Brahmanical elite texts written in a particular political context long after the events they purport to report [Ray 1986: 34]). Chronological reconstructions fall into two groups. Advocates of the now largely discredited "long chronology" support the maximal span of c. 475 years derived from a literal reading of the Puranas (Nilakanta Sastri 1975: 92-4; Mirashi 1981), and view the Satavahana polity as emerging directiy after the Mauryan collapse. This interpretation is problematic given tile historical context of tile Puranas, the lack of concordance among tile texts, and tile lack of supporting numismatic or inscriptional evidence for many of tile rulers named. Advocates of tile more widely accepted "short chronology" (Ray 1986; Shastri 1987, 1991; Parasher-Sen 1993; Goyal 1995) combine Puranic records with otiler lines of numismatic, archaeological, and textual evidence and date the Satavahana rule from tile beginning of tile first century BCE to the end of the second century CE. Even here, many scholars are reluctant to assign absolute dates to specific kings and tilose who do often select quite disparate dates and name different rulers. Nonetheless, the shorter chronology is the more reasonable given current evidence, and the version developed by Himanshu Ray (1986: 33-50, following Dehejia 1972) will be used in this chapter. This chronology is presented in Table 6.1; tile calendrical dates should be considered approximations. AltilOugh various Puranas list several intervening Satavahana rulers that fill the III year gap between the two periods of rule presented in Table 6.1, no other sources survive to verifY their existence, and the relation between earlier and later rulers is murky. This gap suggests that the Satavahana empire is best characterized as having been marked by two brief periods of imperial florescence with an intervening period of political regionalization or "collapse." Like the Mauryans, the success of individual rulers in forging a large imperial polity was not transformed into an effective administrative structure that could weather periods of internal and external dissension or the reigns of less effective rulers.

Origins and geography While the chronology of the Satavahanas has been subject to debate, so too have the ethnic and geographic origins of the dynasty. The secondary literature includes claims that tile Satavahana homeland was in the western Deccan (modern Maharashtra) and in tile central or eastern Deccan (modern Andhra Pradesh). More interesting for the purposes of this chapter are questions about tile linguistic and cultural relations of the Satavahanas to the Indo-European speakers and societies of northern India, including tile Mauryans. I first briefly review tile former issue and turn to the latter below.

Table 6.1. A short chronology for the Satavahana dynasty (after Ray 1986) Ruler Period I 1 Simuka 2 Kanha 3 Satakarni I 4 Satakarni 11 Imperial collapse (Ksaharata period) INahapana} Period II 5 Gautimaputra Satakarni 6 Pulumavi 7 Vasisthiputra Satakarni 8 Siva Sri Pulumavi 9 Siva Skanda Satakarni 10 Yajna Sri Satakarni 11 Vijaya Satakarni 12 Candra Sri 13 Pulumavi 11 14 Abhira Isvasena 15 Madhariputra Sakasena 16 Haritiputra Satakarni

Regnal dates

<100 BCE 100-70 BCE 70-60 BCE 50-25 BCE

ICE 54-lOO} 86-110 CE

llO-138CE 138-145 CE 145-152 CE 145-152 CE 152-181 CE

Note: Nahapana is a ruler of the Ksaharata polity who is known from several inscriptions; rulers 9 and 10 are either different names for the same individual, or may be two individuals who ruled simultaneousl}' in the eastern and western Deccan; rulers 12-16 are likely regional rulers who may (or may not) be of the main Satavahana lineage.

In an examination of geographic origins, the Puranas again prove a source of confusion. In marked contrast to inscriptions and coins, the name Satavahana does not appear in the Puranas; instead the texts refer to the "Andhras" or the "Andhra Bhrityas." These latter terms, conversely, do not appeal' in coins or inscriptions despite the overlap in l'lIlers' names among these diverse sources. The Puranic use of the term Andhra has led some scholars to trace the Satavahana homeland to modern Andhra Pradesh (Hanumantha R.10 1976: 4; Shastri 1987: 12, 1991: 50; Goyal 1995). Others have argued that Satavahana rule (if not the Satavahanas themselves) originated in the western Deccan (modern Maharashtra) and that the Puranas, which date well after the Satavahana period, were written by authors who mistook ultimate Satavahana presence in the east

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Carla M. Sinopoli as evidence for their origin (Dehejia 1972: 17). In contrast, Margabandhu (1985) has suggested that the Andhras were an eastern clan, employed by the Mauryas, who eventually settled in the western Deccan and it was tl1ere tl1at t11eir empire emerged. Ray (1986: 41-2) has suggested that "Andhra" was an etlmic or tribal term (known from Mauryan inscriptions and the Mahabharata) and did not emerge as a geographic term until well after the Satavahana period. Some of tl1ese conflicting origin debates have occurred in the context of contemporary regional chauvinism linked to modern political and linguistic boundaries (particularly at the state level), and to current trends in archaeological research and writing (leading to texts on the "Archaeology ofKarnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra," etc. - modern political boundaries that did not exist in the ancient world; Parasher-Sen 1996: 22). Yet, while tl1e question of precisely who tl1e Satavahanas were may be largely unanswerable according to these terms, this does not mean tl1at an examination of state expansion in the Deccan during tl1e Early Historic period should exclude consideration of where those states originated and where they expanded to. Unfortunately, present data do not allow a satisfying answer to these questions, tllOugh a founding location somewhere in the western Deccan seems most likely. In the absence of well-developed archaeological chronologies, inscriptions and coins constitute the primary material evidence for examining this issue and tl1ey are both scarce and contradictory. Only four of the thirty published inscriptions with royal referents date to the period ofSatavahana emergence. s The earliest of these are found in the western Deccan at the sites ofNaneghat and Nasik; a slightly later inscription is known from the Great Stupa at Sanchi, to the northeast. The rock-cut9 monastic complexes of Naneghat are located along an important pass through the Western Ghats linking the seacoast with the inland Deccan plateau. At Pandu Leni, Nasik, twenty-four rock-cut Buddhist monastic establishments were carved into the northern face of a large outcropping hill from the first century BC E through the second century C E (Ghosh 1990: 312). Sanchi was an important Buddhist center from the third century BC E through the seventh century C E and contains more than fifty Buddhist monuments, including seven stupas, numerous monasteries and temples, and an inscribed Asokan column (Michell 1989: 179-86). Each site contains numerous inscriptions, though here I consider only those sponsored by, or refel'l'ing to, Satavahana rulers. The earliest such inscription is found at Nasik Cave XIX and records that the cave was excavated by an individual named Mahamatra Saman ofNasika (perhaps a monk?) du ring the reign of King Kanha (B urgess 1964 [ 1881 ]: 98). It can th us be assigned to the second Satavahana ruler and tentatively dated to the early first century BCE (c. 100-70 BCE). At Naneghat, two royal inscriptions refer to Satakal'l1i I (c. 70-60 BCE). The first is an inscription attributed to his widow Nayanika (Naganika). This inscription records Nayanika's family lineage and a list of Vedic sacrifices performed by the royal f.1mily (Burgess 1970 [1883]: 60-4, see discussion below). The second inscription (or group of inscriptions) at Naneghat is associated with a series of bas-relief portraits (now totally eroded)

Form and sttbrtance in the Satapahana dynasty oftl1e Satavahana royal family, with name labels inscribed above them. On palaeographic grounds they are believed to be roughly contemporary witl1 tl1e inscription of Nayanika. Eight royal figures are named in these inscriptions: Simuka Satavahana; Queen Nayanika and King Satakarni; Prince Bhayala (perhaps the eldest son of Satakarni I); [eroded name, probably Satakarni Il]; Maharathi Tranakayira (f.1ther of Nayanika?); Prince Haku-sri and Prince Satavahana (two other sons of Nayanika). The name and portrait of the dynasty's second ruler, Kanha (Krishna), are missing from this sequence. According to the Puranas, Km1ha was the brother of Simuka and thus was not a direct lineal descendant (unlike Satakarni I who was Simuka's son) and may have been excluded for this reason (Mirashi 1981: 18). This suggests a very early attempt to revise dynastic history so as to legitimate Satakarni I and his descendants. The final royal inscription of the early Satavahana period is found on a sculpted gateway element on Stupa 1 at Sanchi and is likely associated with Satakarni Il (c. 50-25 B CE). Like other donative inscriptions, it names the element's donor - Ananda - and notes that he was the son of Siri Satakarni's foreman of artisans (Lueders 1912: no. 346; Dehejia 1992: 36), suggesting some form of state patronage of non-agricultural production. While the earliest inscriptions (and the vast majority of published Early Historic inscriptions overall) are found in the western Deccan, the earliest Satavahana coins reported to date have been recovered in the eastern Deccan at the site of Kotalingala. Kotalingala was a large fortified settlement (some 50 hectares, on a mound 6 to 10 m high) located along the Godavari River in Karimnagar District, Andhra Pradesh. This region is characterized by a dense distribution of Early Historic sites, with a well-developed settlement hierarchy from at least the second century BCE (Krishnasastry 1983; Parasher-Sen 1993, 1996). At Kotalingala, coins were recovered in excavations of residential areas and from two hoards. They include punch-marked coins attributable to the third and second centuries 13 C E and inscribed coins oflocal (pre-Satavahana?) rulers (Reddy and Reddy 1987: 58-60). Also /C:>lll1d were small numbers of inscribed coins ofSimuka, "Satavahana," and Satakarni I. Though the Reddys and others (e.g., Goyal 1995) have enthusiastically used the numismatic evidence to argue that Kotalingala was the Satavahana home base, the samples arc small and nothing is known of where they were minted or how (or when) they al'l'ived at Kotalingala. However, the many kings mentioned on the coins do document a complex and highly dynamic regional political system, with multiple elites making claim to royal status and political ascendancy prior to (and during?) Satavahana hegemony. In addition to the coins, Kotalingala yielded archaeological remains of craft activities and long-distance trade. The site thus provides evidence of a highly specialized and at least partly monetized economy in a region that by and large lacked the early large Buddhist monastic complexes that Ray (1986) has argued played a critical role in the spread of "civilization" and development of political centralization. Although valuable in their own right, these sources unfortunately help us little

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Carla M. Sinopoli in charting the geographical origins of the dynasty, or the path of its expansion. The inscriptions are located in the areas of the greatest intensity of monastic construction of the first century BC E, the western Deccan. But, given both the paucity of evidence and sampling problems, inferences of a probable western Deccan Satavallana homeland are tentative at best. Royal and non-royal inscriptions do provide some evidence on the geographic structure and extent of the polity during particular periods. An inscription at Cave II at Nasik, dating to the period ofVasisthiputra Pulumavi (c. 110-138 CE) and recording the cave's construction by his grandmother, lists the extent of her son Gautamiputra Satakarni's (c. 86-110 CE) kingdom.1° The territory claimed in the inscription is vast, spanning the width of the peninsula and north to south from Gujarat to northern Karnataka. The fit between territorial claims recorded in inscriptions and effective political control are, of course, far from clear, and it is apparent that Gautamiputra's military successes, while impressive, were in any case short-lived. Several inscriptions contain references to geographic districts or aharas that appear to have been the largest adminisu·ative divisions of Gautamiputra's Satavahana polity, under the control of appointed officials (e.g., Govardhanahara, Mamalahara, Satavanihara, Kapurahara). Three distinctive types of settlements are named: nagara (city or palace), nigama (market town), and gama (village). The outlines of an imperial administrative framework are thus evident. Non-royal inscriptions also provide important information on Deccani geography of the Early Historic period. Along with listing donors' names, inscriptions often list donors' occupations (including guild membership), places of residence, and the nature of their donations including, in some cases, grants of land or rights to produce of named agricultural settlements to Buddhist monks or Brahmanical communities. Settlements most frequently mentioned as homes of donors to western Deccan monasteries include the seaports of Sopara, Kalyan, Bharucha, Kuda (?), and Chaul, and the inland settlements of Dhenukakata (location unknown), Junnar, Nasik, Paithain, and Karadh (Dehejia 1972: 142-3). No single city served as the Satavahana capital throughout the duration of the dynasty's history. In the early second century CE, Ptolemy referred to Paithan (Pratisthana; in Aurangabad district) as the capital of King Pulumavi; the Nasik inscription of his predecessor Gautamiputra Satakarni referred to him as lord of Benakataka (in the Nasik region). A pattern of shifting capitals is known from other historical empires in South Asia and beyond, such as the Carolingians (MOI·eland, this volume), the Achaemenids (Kuhrt, this volume), and the Mughals (Sinopoli 1994b). This situation may, at least in part, be associated with struct1lral weaknesses of imperial political and economic organization, thus making the physical presence of the king, court, and military force important to the exercise and immediacy of imperial authority and revenue collection. Along with the monastic centers, ports, and inland settlements already noted, many otl,er important centers of the Satavahana period are known from texts, inscrip-

Form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty tions, or archaeological evidence. These include, among others, the inland settlements of Govardhana, Ter, Nevasa, and Vadgaon-Madhavpur in the western Deccan; and Dhulikatta, Peddabankur, Amaravati, Kotalingala, and Sannathi in the central and eastern Deccan.

The archaeological evidence The first century BC E through tllird cent1lry C E was marked by a dramatic florescence in the construction of Buddhist monastic sites throughout the Deccan. It has been estimated that nearly 800 rock-cut caves were created during this period, as were many freestanding monasteries and stupas (Ray 1986: 35). This construction boom, contemporary with Satavahana/Kshtrapa rule, may partly account for why these periods have attained prominence in Early Historic historiography (though their mention in Puranic lineages is no doubt also of importance to their prominence in historical memory). The relations between state and monastic institutions are, however, far from clear. As noted earlier, although some sizeable royal donations are recorded, the vast majority of donors to monasteries were non-elites (Dehejia 1992: 36) drawn from a broad range of social and economic groups, of which merchants were the most common. On the basis of inscriptional, sculptural, and architectural analysis, Dehejia (1972) has suggested that there were two phases of intensive construction of Buddhist cave structures, the first from c. 100-20 BeE and the second from 50-200 C E. The intervening gap in construction roughly parallels the gap in Satavahana dynastic chronology presented earlier, and Dehejia has suggested that political stability created a favorable context for economic expansion and investment, even in the absence of direct state investment (i.e., a pax SataJlahana, to draw on Roman imperial memories). Building on Dehejia's work, Ray (1986) has argued that the intensity of monastic construction and the location of monastic sites owed much to general increases in agricultural production and, more importantly, to intensification of long-distance trade across the subcontinent and beyond, along maritime trade routes. She further proposed that Buddhism and trade participated in a mutually reinforcing dynamic that may have been facilitated by, but was in large part independent of, particular political institutions. Thus, the flexible belief system that characterized the diverse sects and monastic communities of early Buddhism allowed for fluid constructions of social status and occupation, creating possibilities for considerable social mobility. This situation contrasted, she suggests, with the more rigid Vedic varna system, which was characterized by inherited occupational groups and ritual status. She also noted Buddhists' liberal attitudes concerning wealth acquisition, which contributed to a "spirit of entrepreneurship" (R.'ly 1986: 204). Many monastic sites were located along important transport routes across the Deccan and in major mountain passes between the upland plateau and west coast ports. The monasteries may have served as rest houses and sources of provisions

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for merchants, facilitating trade and, possibly, directly participating in it. Royal sponsorship of Buddhist institutions documented in inscriptions also marks an ideological flexibility of a kind common to many early empires. As will be considered in more detail below, the Satavahanas were Hindus, who performed Vedic sacrifices, proclaimed Brahmanical status, and donated land to Brahman communities. Their donations to Buddhist monasteries may have had economic consequences of reinvesting resources in ways that encouraged continued economic intensification, and ideological consequences as a tool for proclaiming a "universal" status. The monastic sites are tlle best-known and most thoroughly documented archaeological remains of tlle Early Historic period. Many have been tlle focus of more tllan a century of art historical and architectural research (tllough virtually no work has been done on associated settlements or otller remains left by tlle inhabitants/users of tllese sites ).ll Non-monastic sites, in contrast, have been much less tlloroughly studied. Although numerous settlement sites are known from tlle Early Historic, very few have been subject to large-scale horizontal excavations; instead, excavations have typically consisted of a small number of stratigraphic trenches. Accurate maps of site plan and surf.1Ce features are also not available for most reported sites. In some cases these problems are inescapable, as modern occupation overlays many Early Historic sites. However, this excavation strategy has also resulted from the predominance of chronological concerns among many researchers and a consequent lack ofinterest in settlement organization or internal variability. In perhaps the most dramatic example, the only excavations at the approximately 4 square kilometer site of Paithan, the reported capital of Pulumavi, were a few small stratigraphic trenches that were excavated in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s (Ghosh 1990: 325) and are still not fully published. 12 Equally problematic for archaeological understanding is the fact that few systematic surveys have been conducted that can allow scholars to situate the known larger sites in their regional context. As a result we know relatively little about the agricultural economies and communities that provided the economic base for the period's expanding economic and sociocultural networks (Morrison 1995b). It is also difficult to ascertain whether areas of particularly high site density have merely been subject to more intensive examination than other areas, or if the high site density in areas such as Karimnagar District of Andhra Pradesh is an accurate reflection of past population distributions. A further limitation of the archaeological evidence lies in the absence of systematic recovery or analysis of artif.1cts and botanical or zoological remains. Site reports typically contain brief summaries and illustrations of diagnostic finds, with little consideration of artif.1ct distributions or intra- and inter-site variability (see M. L. Smith 1997 for an important exception). Given tlle many problems with the archaeological data, what can we conclude? It is evident tllat the Early Historic period was a time of increasing sociopolitical and economic complexity in many areas of peninsular India. Numerous large

Form and subJtance in the Satavahana dynasty

population centers emerged in areas of arable soils, particularly along major rivers. Areas wiili mineral resources desirable for craft production and commerce (e.g., metals and precious and semi-precious stones) may also have been sites of increased exploitation and associated settlement. The emerging town or urban centers appear to have been foci of regional political, demographic, and economic systems, and were presumably centers of regional settlement systems tllat included numerous smaller habitation and production sites. The amount ofland under agricultural regimes expanded through forest clearance and the construction of irrigation reservoirs and facilities. Craft production also intensified and the distribution of production debris at sites such as Kotalingala provide evidence for discrete areas of specialist production (also supported by the numerous inscriptional references to artisans and guilds). Many of the documented large settlements were enclosed within substantial earthwork and moat fortifications, suggesting competition and conflict between regional centers and a consequent need for defense. The poorly understood settlement distributions appear to suggest a general pattern ofIron Age/Early Historic emergence of numerous small-scale regional polities, probably with fairly fluid boundaries (see also M. L. Smith 1997). These largely autonomous regional systems were incorporated into larger "imperial" political structures during periods of greater political unity that occurred under particularly strong leaders, perhaps including Asoka of the Mamyans or more probably under Gautamiputra Satakarni of the Satavahanas. There are few Mauryan inscriptions in the Deccan, and, as noted above, their territorial claims in the peninsula appear to have focused on limited areas of rich resomces fmther to the south. And despite the grandiose claims of the above-mentioned Nasik inscription concerning Gautamiputra's territorial control, a similar discontinuous or mosaic pattern of territorial integration almost certainly existed during the periods of Satavahana hegemony. However, inscriptions do indicate some attempt to create more formal administrative and revenue collection structmes, such as the ahara units. The distributions of many artifact types and architectural styles suggest that these regional politics emerged in the context of a pan-regional material culture complex that superseded the extent of even the largest imperial politics, and which J suggest is indicative of bmader cultural or "civilizational" trends. Although, as noted above, little systematic analysis has been done on artif.1ct morphology, even a superficial glance at the limited subset of materials illustrated in site reports reveals a remarkable uniformity of some artifact forms over vast areas. This is particularly evident among certain ceramic wares, such as Black and Red Ware and Russet Coated Painted Ware, and in molded terracotta figmine types (moftiles and grinding stone or quem styles are also quite widespread). In the absence of systematic artifact recovery techniques and quantitative studies it is impossible to say what percentage of artifact inventories from particular sites consisted of these widespread types as opposed to more locally specific artifact categories. In addition, no large-scale sourcing studies have been conducted to

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Carla M. Sinopoli examine the production of these wares, though it is likely that the majority of ceramics and other domestic artifacts were produced relatively near to the region where they were consumed. This is supported by M. L. Smith's sntdy of artifact distributions at the site of Kaundinyapur in Nagpur District. Her research demonstrated that most ceramic, chert, and ground stone materials recovered at the site were procured within a regional exchange and/or production network of 75-80 km in radius (M. L. Smith 1997: ch. 10). The widespread similarity of various categories oflocally produced artifacts is complemented by a very wide distribution of small quantities of exotic goods. These include ornaments such as lapis lazuli beads and possibly some scarce ceramic wares such as Northern Black Polished Ware and Rouletted Ware, and some coin types (though many of the latter appear to have intermediate distributions, larger than local regions but not pan-peninsular). Other widely distributed trade goods include Roman coins and very small numbers of Roman bronze artifacts; Mediterranean ceramics, particularly amphorae, are found most frequently at coastal sites. In addition, architectural and sculptural styles also had wide distributions, and Dehejia (1972: 139-40) has suggested the possibility of itinerant artisans or architects. In Early Historic South Asia, as in many other areas, the mere presence of similar material culture, even in goods presumed to be markers of elite status, may be sufficient to support interpretations of some kind of minimally shared systems of meanings. However, it is clearly not sufficient to provide evidence for political boundaries or political unity.13 Such unity did not exist in the region during the Early Historic period, when scales of material culture distribution and political boundaries were quite discordant. I will not attempt an extended discussion of the significance of the appearance of material cultural "horizon styles" at this time in South Asian history. But taken together, both material and written evidence provide a picture of a dynamic period, when significant portions of the subcontinent's population were being incorporated, to a greater or lesser extent;4 into some kind of shared cultural framework. IS Political elites such as the Satavahana rulers do not appear to have been the creators of such f1'ameworks but did manipulate and benefit from them, both ideologically and economically from the increased production and flow of diverse resources from which they could extract wealth.

Cultural identity and legitimation The picture I have painted of the Satavahanas contorms little to images of empires as highly centralized political tormations with major impact on the social, political, and economic lives of the peoples they incorporate (in any case, an invalid image in many contexts). Yet, although imperial infrastructure may have been limited for much of the Satavahana period, textual sources indicate that Satavahana assertions of imperial status were expansive. While many issues concerning Satavahana regional and etl1l1ic origins remain unresolvable, I nml

Form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty in this section to evidence concerning how Satavahana elites defined themselves, how (and where) they presented their claims of identity, and the practices they employed to assert those claims. . I begin with a quotation from a recent historical overview of the Satavahanas. Writing of Gautamiputra Satakarni, Vasudev Mirashi (1981: 13-4) observed, "this Brahmana Satavahana changed his ladle for a sword when tllere was confusion and chaos in tlle country after the death of Asoka, and established peace and order in the Deccan." He continued, "Though the Satavahanas were themselves Aryas and belonged to tlle Brahmana caste, they married Naga and even Saka women without inhibition ... In that age Hinduism had a catholic outlook and freely admitted the Sakas, Yavanas and Pahlavas to its fold." Although tllese quotations are problematic on multiple counts, Mirashi, whose writings celebrate Satavahana imperial grandeur, derived his interpretations from an uncritical reading of Satavahana self-presentation in royal inscriptions. That the Satavahanas claimed Brahmanical status is evidenced in the Nasik 11 inscription of the mother of Gautamiputra Satakarni. The inscription celebrates her son's outstanding character and lists his many accomplishments. Thus, Gautamiputra Satakarni is referred to as "sole archer ... sole hero ... sole Brahmana" (Trautmann 1981: 364), and as he "who humbled the pride and arrogance of the Kshatriyas" (Burgess 1964 [1881]: 109).1 6 As Trautmann (1981: 364) has noted, it is an unwarranted leap to conclude from this inscription that the Satavahanas were of Aryan or northern origin (and, he argues, inscriptional evidence for a Dravidian pattern of cross-cousin royal marriages suggests the contrary, see below). A more appropriate characterization is that the Satavahanas drew creatively from a range of contemporary values and practices in their production of a cultural iconography of kingship. Among these values was the fourfold varnasystem of ranked ritual status (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaisya, and Sudra) and principles of caste (rather than those proclaimed by the Mauryan ruler Asoka). Social hierarchy and systems of inherited status had no doubt marked Deccani social relations from at least the Iron Age and early first millennium BCE (and in some areas, from the mid-second millennium BCE). However, the transformation of inherited status kin groups into hereditary socioritual castes was only beginning to gain a toothold in the Deccan during the Early Historic period and did not yet play a major role in structuring social organization and relationsY Such groups were, however, important in northern India and the Ganges Basin states that predated and were in contact with the Deccan. Satavahana l'lllers also asserted their royal status through the performance of Vedic sacrifices, essential to royal legitimation in the Vedic tradition. These are documented in the Naneghat inscription of Nayanika, in which she recounted the many sacrifices sponsored by her late husband Satakarni I and the associated tees paid to officiating Brahman priests and attendees. The inscription records two horse sacrifices - or nspamedha - the most important of all Vedic royal rituals,18 a rajasuya or royal consecration sacrifice, an agnyadheya or "kindling of the sacred fire" sacrifice, and several other named sacrifices. The fees recorded

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as associated with each of these sacrifices were substantial, for example, 10,001 cows for a Bhagala-Dasaratra sacrifice, or 24,400 coins for another sacrifice (the inscription is damaged, so it is not clear which sacrifice this fee was associated with; Burgess 1970 [1883]: 61-3). The record of these sacrifices was composed in Prakrit and carved on the walls of a Buddhist monastic rock-cut cave located along an important inland trade route. As noted earlier, the Satavahanas, although not Buddhist, were generous in their sponsorship of Buddhist monasteries and communities of monks. The numerous inscriptions further attest that monasteries were an important venue for displaying royal and non-royal generosity, whether to Buddhists or to other communities (especially Brahman communities ). While Satavahana Brahmanical identity and royal sacrifices drew on IndoAryan Vedic sources to legitimate royal status, royal marriages relied on rather different cultural sources and/or pragmatic needs. In an analysis of the admittedly limited kinship data that can be derived from royal inscriptions, Trautmann (1981: 363-75) has argued that there was a consistent pattern of cross-cousin royal marriages (this is a form of marriage explicitly barred in Indo-Aryan kinship systems, while it is the preferred form according to Dravidian kinship rules). Inscriptions record multiple and multigenerational marriage relations between Satavahana nobility and two groups known as the Maharathis and Mahabhojas. Trautmann interpreted the latter as territorial hereditary groups who, with the Satavahanas, comprised the aristocracy of the Deccan. He further suggested that the common use ofmatronyms and other references to mothers' lineages in royal inscriptions 19 could have served both to refer to an important group of allies and to emphasize the purity of royal descent on both the mother's and father's sides (Trautmann 1981: 374). Thus, unlike as prescribed in the sacred Hindu texts, Satavahana women did not sever relations with their natal families upon marriage; instead relations with both parents' kin groups bolstered critical political and social alliances among regional elites. In contrast to the preferred pattern of royal marriages among members of related lineages, a K1.nheri inscription records an example of a royal marriage of a kind that is common to many early states - between non-kin and indeed political adversaries - the Satavahana king Vasisthiputra Satakarni and a Kshtrapa royal woman. She was likely the daughter of the Kshtrapa King Rudradaman I, who in an inscription at the site ofJunagarh was called "he who has obtained glory because he did not destroy Satakarni, lord of the Deccan, on account of his near relationship by marriage, though he had twice conquered him" (Trautmann 1981: 367). In contrast to the multiple claims to Brahmanical and Vedic status noted above, there is little evidence that Satavahana rulers traced their legitimacy to the earlier Mauryan empire. However, one newly discovered sculpture from the site ofSannathi (Karnataka) does provide evidence that Asoka had not been entirely forgotten during the Satavahana period. This is a small unpublished sculptural panel recently uncovered in excavations of a second-century C E Buddhist stupa

Form and substance in the Satavahana dynasty

by the Archaeological Survey of India (Shankar, personal communications 1999). The panel depicts a standing turbaned figure; at his feet is a Brahmi inscription that reads "King Asoka." Excavators have tentatively dated this image to tlle mid-second century CE, nearly 400 years after Asoka's deatll (c. 232 BCE). We do not know who sponsored tlle construction of this stupa (i.e., whetller it was a royal construction). Nonetlleless, tlle presence of this image does indicate tllat, although the Mauryans were not referred to in Satavahana royal inscriptions, they, or at least Asoka, were still remembered in Buddhist sacred contexts.

THE SATAVAHANA POLITY: FORM AND SUBSTANCE I began researching tllis chapter Witll tlle idea tllat tllere was more form tllan substance in the Satavahana empire: tllat is, that tlle presentation of imperial status in inscriptions and monuments far surpassed any political, military, or economic infrastructure of empire that existed during tile period. And to a considerable extent, I still think this is a valid characterization, though the limited or problematic nature of the archaeological and textual evidence does hinder our ability to examine relations between polity, economy, and social/ideological processes. Nonetheless, the empire was characterized by brief periods of greater political centralization and more effective administration that correlated with tlle reigns of particularly capable rulers who were able to both achieve and consolidate military successes. There is evidence for this consolidation in a number of inscriptions that document some kind of formal revenue collection system, territorial administrative framework, and royal officials (such as the foreman of the artisans mentioned above). For example, two inscriptions of Gautamiputra Satakarni from Nasik Cave XI (Nasik inscriptions 13 and 14; Burgess 1964 [1881]: 104-6) record the donation of agricultural fields to a community of ascetics. They further declare that these monks were to be granted immunities fi:om all taxes and from all interference from royal officers, and were otherwise "endowed with immunities of all kinds" (Burgess 1964 [1881]: 106). In addition, the first of these inscriptions concludes that "a charter has been drawn up, which has been approved of by the minister Sivagupta who received verbal orders, and which is preserved by the great lords" (Burgess 1964 [1881]: 105). The second inscription expands on the previous donation. It acknowledges Syamaka, the minister of the Govardhana ahara, and records a donation given by Gautamiputra Satakarni in concert with his mother; a charter of this inscription is recorded as having been drawn up and approved by a woman named Lota, whose status Burgess (1964 [1881]: 106) has translated as "chief lady-in-waiting" to the Queen Mother. These inscriptions suggest the existence of some kind of bureaucratic structure during the early second century C E, although its stability and effectiveness cannot be ascertained.

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Carla M. Sinopoli There is considerable evidence that in the intense competition among the numerous rival states that comprised South Asia during the Early Historic period, the Satavahanas can be counted among the major political and military players and were occasionally transcendent, able to conquer and incorporate rival polities. The Satavahanas were also successful in both benefiting from and participating in the economic expansion that characterized the period, including both agricultural intensification and increased production of non-agricultural commodities (including but not restricted to luxury goods), and their trade both within and beyond the subcontinent. Yet it is perhaps through their ideological form that the Satavahanas were most successful. Their impact during the Early Historic period can perhaps best be seen in the revival of the dynasty in the western Deccan after a century of Kshtrapa hegemony, and in their second- (and third?)-century CE prominence in the eastern and southern Deccan. The last five Satavahana rulers listed in Table 6.1, and dating to after 181 CE (i.e., Candra Sri, Pulumavi 11, Abhira Isvasena, Madharputra Sakasena, Haritiputra Satakarni), all appear to have been regional kings who controlled small territories in the southern and eastern Deccan. While their precise relations with earlier Satavahana rulers are unknown, their claims of connection to them attest to the importance of those earlier rulers and their legacy in later Deccani constructions of kingship and imperial identities. It may be then that the Satavahanas persisted longer in historical memories within the Deccan than did the Mauryas, who have such resonance for contemporary scholars and a broader public.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at the 122nd International Symposium of the Wenner Gren Foundation, "Imperial Designs: Comparative Dynamics of Early Empires." My deepest gratitude to the conference participants, and to Sydel Silverman, Laurie Obbink, and Mark Mahoney, and my fellow conference organizers, Sue Alcock, Terry D'Altroy, and Kathy Morrison. My thanks also to the conference participants and to Rob Brubaker, Lars Fogelin, Joyce Marcus, and Norman Yoffee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

7 Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America: ideology and social integration Kathleen Deagan

Spain's imperial expansion into the sixteenth-century Americas was simultaneously an invasion, a colonization effort, a social experiment, a religious crusade, and a highly structured economic enterprise. Unlike most earlier examples of imperial expansion, it was both sudden and unexpected, involving two hemispheres of the world that had no prior idea of the other's existence. It was furthermore an encounter of a largely literate society with a largely non-literate society (at least in the West Indies), in which the latter was in many places altered or destroyed with stunning rapidity, thereby severely compromising the evidentiary base for later understanding of contact. Nevertheless, the sixteenth-century Spanish empire in the Americas was the largest ever known in the hemisphere (Fig. 7.1), incorporating an extraordinarily diverse array of societies, polities, and geographic landscapes, and enduring as an entity for more than three centuries. Our historical understanding of that phenomenon has traditionally been based on studies of Spain's formal imperial institutions - political, social, economic, and religious. These institutions were documented in great bureaucratic detail, and undergird an enormous historical literature (a few examples of general synthetic works include Merriman 1918-34; Haring 1947; Vicen Vives 1961; J. H. Parry 1964, 1966; Gibson 1966; Zavala 1967; Chaunu 1969; McAllister 1984; Kamen 1991). The general tendency of these efforts, owing largely to the nature of the written accounts, has been to cast the dynamics of empire in terms of "God, gold, and glory" - that is, the goals and perceptions of the imperial centers and the colonial elites. Regardless of the economic, political, and religious motives that inspired Spaniards to colonize and control the Americas, their ability, as that of any empire, to impose their policies was inextricably connected with the imperial center's ability to establish workable relations with two groups of people: the indigenous people who were colonized, and the non-elite Spanish people who lived in the Americas as colonists. The social integration and willing involvement of both groups was essential to the maintenance of empire, and necessarily involved negotiation between the ideological constructs that organized the social imperial effort, and the requirements and demands of people in local settings. These issues clearly overlap the political, economic, ideological, and societal

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spheres. While acknowledging and repeating the observation of other contributors to this volume, that it is impossible and probably inappropriate to isolate those realms analytically, I will nevertheless attempt to address the dynamics of social integration of non-elite people at a community scale against the broader social ideology of empire. I argue that the success of this integration was based in large measure on the ability to sustain the ideological precepts of empire Catholicism and Espallidad - while accommodating local conditions and circumstance in the arena of social practice .

MATERIALITY AND LOCAL EXPERIENCE OF THE NON-ELITE The dynamics of this integration are often best reflected in the materiality of life as lived by the residents ofpost-Columbian America, including the non-elite and often non-literate Indian and Spanish majority. Because of the nature of written texts, it is only through material expression that action and agency are implied for all actors in the past, that is, not only those who produced written or iconographic accounts. Clearly an understanding (however imperfect) of the full range oflocal, "on the ground" agency is essential to the larger understanding of internal imperial dynamics and the evolution of empires. This local experience is not trivial. Popular responses to local conditions at La Isabela, Spain's first American colony, fCl!' example, led within one decade to dle recasting of Spain's approach to America fl'om a mercantile to an imperial venture (Deagan and Cruxent, in press; see also Stevens-Arroyo 1993). Once an empire was initiated, local and non-elite actors continued to provoke responsive changes in the expressed structure of empire in Spanish America through, feJl' example, racial intermarriage, large-scale slavery, and opportunistic ecollomic ventures. These circumstances were at least equally as influential as core imperial institution in the genesis of the multicultural Spanish-American society that is today the legacy of empire. Although, as noted, mllch has been written about the institutions and organization of the Spanish-American empire, relatively little work has explored the circumstances in Amcrica that provoked responsive adjustments in the imperial structure itself'. 'Ne sllspect that this lacuna exists in large measure because dle expression of local experience in America fell' the majority of Spaniards and Indians who participated (albeit not always willingly) in the imperial system is encoded primarily in the materiality of that experience that is, in the archaeological record.

CONTEXTS 01:-' RESEARCH o

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Kathleen Deagan historical archaeology. Historical archaeology attempts to integrate the material evidence of the past provided by archaeology with the textual evidence of the past provided by history, trying (albeit not always successfully) to avoid privileging one line of evidence over the other. Historical archaeology was not formalized as a discipline until 1967, and was uncommon in Spanish America before the 1980s (see Deagan 1998). Because of this, much of the historical archaeology concerned with the dynamics of the Spanish empire has been conducted in the context of the 1992 quincentennial observation of Europe's arrival in the Americas. That event focused popular and scholarly attention on the consequences of Spanish imperial expansion, and provided a point of convergence for postcolonial nationalist ideology in Latin America, postmodernist thought in the social sciences, and the maturation of historical archaeology and social history as disciplines. Quincentenary-related archaeology forced a confrontation of scale between the empire-wide structural phenomena in which many historians have been traditionally interested, and the community or household-based phenomena with which many field archaeologists have been necessarily concerned.' One of the consequences of tlus confrontation of scale has been tl1e documentation by archaeologists of tl1e ways in which the formal imperial policies for social integration of conquered peoples were adjusted at a local community scale, while being sustained, at least ideologically, at an institutional scale. Catholicism, racebased social hierarchy, centralized political administration, the Spanish language, and mercantile economy were all to be found throughout the empire, but the degree to which tl1eir ideal forms were manifested locally was subject to tremendous variation.

CONTEXT OF EMPIRE The sixteenth-century Spanish empire in the Americas can only be understood against the background of more than 2000 years of invasion, colonization, and multiculturalism in the Iberian peninsula itself. Following Greek and Phoenician invasions and settlements between the eighth and sixth centuries BC E, Iberia was colonized by the Carthaginians (fifth to third centuries BCE), who were in turn expelled by the Romans in 206 BC E. Roman imperial rule endured until the fifth century C E. It is credited by many historians (e.g., Vicens Vives 1969: 63-81) not only with establishing many of Spain's agricultural, transportation, and urbanization patterns, but also explicitly with influencing the patterns of sixteenth-century Spanish imperial expansion in the Americas (see, for example, Crouch 1991). The Visigoth occupation of Spain followed the f.1ll of Rome between the fifth and tl1e seventh centuries C E, and was itself ended by the invasion and conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 715 C E by Muslim Arab and Berber forces of the U mayyad and Abbasid dynasties. Under the eight centuries of Muslim rule, Eastern and Greek science, technology, and philosophy were reintroduced to Spain and Europe with lasting

Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America influence on Spanish language, cuisine, agriculture, art, architecture, commerce, technology, and social practice (for a recent summary of such influences, see Vernet 1992). A richly diverse society developed, blending elements of Roman, Iberian, and Arab cultures, and in wluch Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted and intermarried (see Mann et al. 1992).

THE RECONQUISTA Almost immediately after 711 CE, Christian rulers began efforts to recapture Spain from its Muslim rulers, and the reconquista, cast as a holy war, persisted for eight centuries. Much of the military conquest was undertaken by captains who were awarded the title of adelantado, and who carried out their campaigns witl1 little or no financial support from the crown. They were rewarded for success, however, by being assigned hereditary governorships of conquered territories, along with rights to the labor of the Muslim peasants who occupied them. By tl1e fourteentl1 century CE, Al-Andalus, the name given by tl1e Muslims to their holdings in Iberia, was reduced to the principality of Granada, and this, too, finally fell to the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabela, in 1492. The fall of Granada not only united Spain under Christian rule, but also ushered in a new era of religious fervor, intolerance, and intense proselytizing promoted by Queen Isabela. It was in this context that Columbus returned from his first voyage of exploration with news of the New World, and the invasion of America by Spain began.

OVERSEAS EXPANSION AND THE FIRST IMPERIAL EFFORT The initial Spanish imperial effort had a very different shape and texture than the system that ultimately prevailed in the Americas. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam discusses (this volume), the fifteenth century was a period of unprecedented maritime exploration and overseas economic expansion by Iberian powers, fueled by the dual impulses of mercantilism and religious fervor. Portugal led the way in this, and provided the inspiration tor Spain's initial expansion into the Americas. The Columbian project was a crown-private partnership, self-consciously modeled on the Portuguese factoria system discussed by Subrahmanyam. The revelation that uncounted numbers of souls in need of Christian conversion were waiting in the New World intensified the religious motive for this enterprise. From the point of view of the Spanish crown, the goals of evangelization and conversion were equally as compelling as the economic motives of the venture. Once in America, however, neither the religious nor the economic vision remained compelling to either the American Indians or the Spanish colonists. The institutional model simply did not meet local needs and expectations. Resistance, rebellion, and individual enterprise quickly recast the original imperial project from one of a private-monarchical mercantile partnership, to

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the territorially based and centrally controlled pattern of political domination that came to characterize the Spanish empire from the sixteenth century onward (for more detailed discussions of the initial factoria enterprise and its failure see Perez de Tudela Bueso 1954, 1955; Stevens-Arroyo 1993; Deagan and Cruxent in press).

Recasting of empire The shift that occurred after 1500 (and after Christopher Columbus) in Spanish imperial strategy was, in a sense, a return to an earlier medieval pattern, and a rejection of the imperial modernity that persisted in the Portuguese colonies. The second mode of Spanish expansion into the Americas followed a pattern that had been translated from the Iberian reconquista to the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Canary Islands between about 1477 and 1497 (Aznar Vallejo 1983; Tejera Gaspar 1992; Stevens-Arroyo 1993). Crown-appointed adelantados led largely self-supported expeditions of conquest, during which, in the tradition of the reconquista, successful conquistadors were rewarded with allocations of land and the servitude of the native Guanche people who occupied it. Ideally, that land would contain natural resources with a high and profitable yield, preferably of gold or silver, and a sizeable stable population that could be subjected to peonage. Rather than making the Canarian adelantados hereditary, however, as they had been during the reconquista, Isabela retained the right to revoke such privileges at any time (McAllister 1984: 64). This established a new kind of tension between the central imperial authority in Spain and the Spanish colonial authority with vested interests in the colonies. After sustained resistance and dramatic loss of population, the Guanche inhabitants of the Canaries were assigned to the victorious conquistadors who claimed the land on which they lived, and were obligated to contribute labor as a token of their submission to Spain. They were, nevertheless, theoretically given the privileges of Castilian subjects as long as they adopted Christianity and accepted the sovereignty of Spain. The status and privileges of their chiefs were formally recognized, and intermarriage between Spanish men and Guanche women was not uncommon (Aznar Vallejo 1983). However, those Guanches who continued resistance were considered appropriate candidates for enslavement and despoliation (Tejera Gaspar and Aznar Vallejo 1992). This essentially feudal pattern of land and labor capture was ultimately imposed on the Americas. Perhaps more than any other aspect of empire, this pattern established the context in which indigenous American people were incorporated into the Spanish empire. The reconquista-based pattern, however, was profoundly altered by the devastating epidemics of introduced disease that ravaged indigenous American populations in all areas of primary Spanish contact. 2 This has led at least one prominent anthropologist of Mesoamerica to assert that "the driving forces [of empire] were the demands of a dominant foreign ethnic group on an indigenous labor-force that suffered continuous

decline. All other variables were derivatives of these two forces" (Sanders 1992:

189).

The ideological basis for empire Indeed, the effects of demographic disaster provoked by disease and labor demands are overwhelming to most recent Americanist students of the Spanish empire, and have dominated the direction of most recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research. The forces of religious ideology in the shaping of empire, however, were equally compelling and even more pervasive. Observers and historians in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries agree that the conversion of conquered peoples to Catholicism was a paramount goal equal to that of economic exploitation at the highest levels of the imperial organization, that is, the crown and the church. The justification for imperial expansion was explicitly religious, codified in 1493 by the Bulls of Donation issued by Pope Alexander VI (a Spaniard). These assigned Spain "a just title" to American lands, in that they were obligated to evangelize the inhabitants and make them Christians. This was officially the sole authority and justification for the Spanish empire in America, an issue that became the focus of intense preoccupation and extended debate in late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Spain (for synthetic and differing discussions of these see Hanke 1949; Brading 1991: 79-101). The Spanish people, church, and state were inextricably interconnected through the Patronato Real, by which the pope granted the kings of Spain papal authority in the administration of church and ecclesiastical aff.1irs in Iberia. At the request of Isabela and Ferdinand, the PMronato Real was extended to the Spanish Americas in papal decrees between 1493 and 1508. These recast the institution as an agreement between the crown and the pope through which ecclesiastical control of the Americas would remain in the hands of the crown as long as the monarchs fulfilled their obligation to convert the American natives and properly administer church precepts. In 1524, this responsibility was delegated to the Council of the Indies, which also governed secular aHairs in the colonies (I-Iaring 1947: 103, 180). In this way, the religiously motivated and justified purposes of empire were politically institutionalized. Rules of social conduct for both Indians and Spaniards were largely set forth and enforced by the church (backed by the state). Social activities were scheduled and organized by the annual round of religious feasts and observations, and the policies that structured Spanish-Indian relations were largely governed by the church (Hanke 1949; Gonzales 1969; McAllister 1984: 133-83). Catholicism has, in fact, persisted to the present century as the dominant unifYing social and religious institution throughout postcolonial Spanish America. The experience of the recMlquista also shaped a social ideology that was translated to the American empire, that of "Spanish ne ss," or, perhaps less awkwardly, Espanidad, which incorporates notions of class (high) and religion (Catholic). Values evolved over those seven centuries of holy war idealized the hidalgo as a

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Kathleen Deagan man who built a livelihood on service to God and king (as opposed to labor or trade), and acquired property and wealth as rewards for honor, valor, and military success (see Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: 61-3; McAllister 1984; Elliott 1987: 1-10). The hidalgo was furthermore of pure Spanish (i.e., Christian) lineage, without taint of Muslim or Jewish ancestry. The ideals of hidalguia stanls, purity of blood and pride oflineage, were translated directly to the Americas. Only "Old Christians," that is, tl10se Spaniards unsuspected of religious contamination, whether Muslim or Jewish, were permitted by law to emigrate to the Americas (see Morner 1967: 54-5). While the concept of purity of blood was maintained, it was transformed in the American empire from a religious to a racial categorization, disCllssed below.

SOCIAL INTEGRATION IN THE AMERICAN EMPIRE Are these not men? The encounter witl1 American Indians provoked intense discussion, debate, and soul-searching in late-fifteenth-century Spain concerning the nature of these people, and tl1eir potential capacity to live like Christian Spaniards (for a comprehensive treatment of these debates, sec Hanke 1949; Pagden 1982). From the very beginning, the official position of the dominant colonial institutional powers - the crown and the church - was in conflict with the practical position of the Spanish colonists who lived in the Americas. The crown, vigorously encouraged by the Catholic church, asserted that the Indians were their legal subjects and merited both rights and protection, while the colonists asserted that they were sub-human and best suited as a resource of labor. After it was determined in 1500 that Indians were, in fact, human beings by virtue of possessing souls, the Spanish crown was careful to legally ensure that Indians could not be officially enslaved. A series of edicts were issued in 1512 to protect the American Indians (the Laws of Burgos; Hussey 1932). Much social and institutional development after that time was designed to ensure that the "free" Indians would nevertheless be a ready and reliable source of labor. The problem of observing the church's and the crown's mandates to protect and respect the rights of the Indians, while at the same time ensming a reliable sOll\'ce of labor, was initially resolved by the uniquely American institution of encomienda, established in Hispaniola in 1503 (see Lockhart and Schwartz 1983: 64-72; McAllister 1984: 157-66; Elliott 1987; Gibson 1987). Those Indians associated with a particular allocation of land were obliged to exchange their labor for instruction in Christianity and civilization. In order to make this more efficient, the Indians were regularly relocated and consolidated at locations convenient for Spanish labor exploitation and conversion. This process, known as reducci6n, was also consistent with the Spanish emphasis that settled town life was essential for civilization (discussed below). Reducci6n figmed centrally in the

Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America social disintegration and breakdown of traditional cultural patterns among many American Indian groups after contact, as well as in the spread of epidemic disease tl1at decimated those who were among the first to encounter Europeans. The rapid demographic decline in tl1e native populations of the earliest Spanish-American colonies led in turn for a desperate (perceived) need by the Spanish colonists for alternate sources of labor. Their solution spelled doom for the hundreds of thousands of Mrican people brought unwillingly to the Americas as slaves, and introduced anotl1er social and demographic element into tl1e imperial arena after 1520. The enslavement of Mrican people was justified by reference to the same religious-legal arguments that prohibited tl1e enslavement ofIndians: the Bulls of Donation issued by Alexander VI in 1493. Those Donations implied no obligation to evangelize and convert Mricans, since Spain held no territorial presence there. Furthermore, Mrica was tainted by tl1e hint of Islamic influence, which was sufficient justification for slavery. Curiously, once Mrican slaves reached the American colonies they were subjected to the ministrations of the church, including evangelization and conversion. However conversion did not bring liberation (sec H. S. Klein 1989 [1967]: 88-9). In many ways issues of class and religion overrode considerations of race in structuring social interactions with conquered peoples. The labor requirements imposed on American Indians by encomienda and reducci6n, for example, applied principally to non-elite individuals. From the beginning of imperial expansion both in the Canary Islands and in the Americas, official policy stressed respect for and recognition of the political importance of the caciques (paramount leaders). Elite accommodation was a cornerstone ofinitial Spanish policy toward the American Indians, based on the recognition, at least in principle, of a legitimate "Republic ofIndians," and the political authority of its leaders (sce Hanke 1949: 27; McAllister 1984: 180; Gibson 1987: 377; Bushnell 1990). These policies were also formalized in 1512 by the Laws ofBurgos, and came to characterize Spanish-American interaction in those areas of the Americas with strongly differentiated chiefs and stratified societies. In its own way, the accommodation of elites served to help mitigate the tension between crown policies to protect Indians as ft'ee subjects, and colonists' desires to exploit Indian labor. By seCllring the alliance of caciquesit was expected that conversion, labor requirements, and tribute would then be imposed through them to their vassals (Hanke 1949; Gibson 1987: 377). This came to be an especially important mechanism in frontier areas where there were few Spaniards and fewer towns. In the earliest years of contact the accommodation of elite American Indians also included intermarriage between Spanish conquistadors or soldiers and Indian caciquasand noblewomen (Morner 1967: 37; Floyd 1973: 59-61; Lyon 1976: 148; Deagan 1985: 304-5). Such marriages were intended to legitimize Spanish claims to land and labor, although in cases such as Spanish Florida they were entered into mistakenly through a misunderstanding ofmat:rilineal descent l'lIles.

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Integration on the imperial frontier The Catholic church served in principle as a force to mitigate the abuse of Indians as laborers, illustrated by church-inspired protective legislation such as that reflected in the writings ofBartolome de las Casas (Casas 1974). The church also served - particularly in the frontier regions - as a primary agent of reduccion, hispanicization, and labor organization of the native inhabitants. Both the institution of the mission and the concept of peaceful evangelization were features found exclusively in Spain's overseas holdings, evolving in response to local conditions of empire. The idealized goal of empire - the creation of a Catholic state - had been achieved in Spain itself exclusively by force, through warfare, forced conversions, expulsion, and the Inquisition. It was only in the isolated territories of overseas empire that the greatly outnumbered Spaniards developed the principle, and quite often the process, of peaceful proselytizing and conversion. The mission as it developed in Spanish America was not a solely religious venture, but was also a response to the need to secure and control a vast and isolated territory inhabited by large but dispersed Indian populations (see Bolton 1917 for the original statement of this position). Missions evolved along the frontiers of the Spanish empire as centers of Christianity, but also of Spanish political presence, labor organization, economic production, and defense. Even in conversion and the transfer of religious belief, considerable local accommodation can be seen. Catholicism in America of 1500 C E was faced with a situation that recalled the original spread of doctrine more than a thousand years earlier - the accommodation of Catholic doctrine and practice to deeply held but pagan beliefs and practice. The Spanish missionaries were, fClr the most part, flexible in recognizing that the acceptance of Catholicism was a highly variable and selective process for most American Indians, both materially and spiritually. Most historical and archaeological research on the American missions documents the many ways in which elements of Catholic ritual were selected, rejected, and transformed by various groups from the Maya (Clcndinnen 1987), to the peoples of the United States southwest (Weber 1992: 105-21) and southeast (B. G. McEwan 1993). Burials of Christian Indians in the Spanish missions of La Florida, for example, indicate that the Catholic missionaries actively negotiated the adjustment of church ritual at the missions. David Thomas documents the inclusion of native grave goods, including symbolic shell gorgets and bear claws , with Christian Indian burials inside the mission church. "Thus to achieve an important outward symbol of conversion, - and to stamp out offensive pagan burial mounds and charnel houses - Il·iars apparently 'allowed' the Guale to continue their tradition of grave goods, even though the practice directly violated church practice" (D. H. Thomas 1988: 120-1). Accommodation of nonChristian beliefs to Catholic ritual can still be seen today throughout Spanish America: in the correlation of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Patroness of America) with the Aztec maize goddess Tonantzin, the incorporation of native music,

Dynamics of imperial adjustment in Spanish America dance and images into celebrations of the Mass and other rituals, and the synchretic Catholic-Mrican religious expressions of the Caribbean. Archaeological work not only at Spanish missions, but also at many other frontier or rural sites of Spanish imperial presence (such as defensive outposts, plantations, ranches, and tribute-paying Indian towns), shows other kinds of modifications to the Spanish goal of creating communities of "civilized people of reason" living in the Spanish manner. For example, in both mission and nonmission Indian towns under Spanish dominion, archaeologists have been unable to document significant alteration in such pre-Columbian material patterns as spatial organization, diet, and material technology; or in pre-Columbian expressions of social differentiation. 3 In some colonial-era sites without associated written documents in Peru, for example, the archaeological assemblages do not provide sufficient evidence even to determine whether their occupants were Spaniards or Indians (see, for example, G. C. Smith 1991; Van Buren 1991). The imperial goals of establishing civilized Christian life dictated by the church and the crown were apparently adjusted most strikingly (and perhaps even largely ignored) in rural and frontier areas of the empire. There was little social integration of colonized people in these areas into the empire beyond the symbolic acknowledgment of imperial and Catholic dominion. In fact there is some indication that the Spaniards who lived in these communities made [.1r greater adjustments to the American mode of life than vice versa. One historian of the Spanish frontier in New Mexico characterizes "Spanish colonists" as "anyone living in a manner more Spanish than Indian" (Kessell 1997: 50). This was not the case in town centers, where Spanish fCl1"IllS were at least outwardly imposed.

The importance of town The establishment of settled towns and urban centers was central to the Spanish imperial strategy Illr asserting social, political, and economic control in the Americas, and towns were the idealized setting for "civilized" life. As Crouch, Garr, and Mundigo note (1982: xx), "Like the colonial cities of the Roman empire, those of the Spanish empire were conceived and executed as propaganda vehides, symbolizing and incarnating civilization." In 1503 Isabela mandated to the Governor ofHispaniola that "We ordain and order that our Governor of the said Indies undertakes with much diligence to see that poblaciones [towns] be established in which the Indians can live together, as do the persons who live in these our Kingdoms [Spain]" (McAllister 1984: 109). The establishment of Spanish towns in the Americas was a closely regulated undertaking, in both the physical and the administrative organization of these settlements. The regulations governing the physical and organizational aspects of towns were codified in 1573, although they were at least partially implemented as early as the establishment of San to Domingo in 1498, and were fully developed as a code by the early sixteenth century (McAllister 1984: 134-9). The 1573 ordinances are a remarkable statement about Spanish intentions and

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Kathleen Deagan ideals concerning "civilized" town life. They address not only spatial patterning, but also environmental concerns, health, civic authority and organization, relations with Indians, religious matters, status, economy, commerce, and urban aesthetics (these are largely translated and reproduced in Crouch et al. 1982). The ordinances provide an empirical statement of formal Spanish intent, against which to assess and interpret the material actuality at early Spanish towns. They are thus particularly useful in assessing the degree of adherence to Spanish ideal precepts, versus accommodation of new forms in response to changed conditions. In nearly all New World municipalities after 1500, whether urban centers or isolated towns, an overwhelming adherence to the general spatial patterns established in the ordinances can be demonstrated (for well-documented examples see Foster 1960; Chueco Goitia and Torres Balbas 1981; Crouch et al. 1982; Deagan 1982). It was within Spanish colonial towns, where Spaniards, Indians, and Mricans coexisted, that the social integration of Spain and America occurred most visibly.

Intermarriage and the creation of the new ((other)) Intermarriage and consensual relationships among Spaniards (mostly men) and Indians and Mricans (mostly women) formed a crucial dynamic in creating and stabilizing the social milieus of the Spanish-American empire. It redefined the notion of race in ways with which we are still struggling today, and shaped a new social order for the Spanish empire organized by the ancient idea of purity of blood (limpieza de sangre). In the Americas this came to mean purity of white, Spanish blood, as contrasted with the purity of Christian blood that obsessed fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spaniards (see above). While canonical law considered different religions to be an obstacle to marriage, it apparently did not consider race an obstacle as long as both parties were Catholic (Konetzke 1946; Morner 1967: 36). Although relatively little modern scholarly attention has been given to intermarriage as an active force in the Spanish imperial dynamic (important exceptions include Morner 1967; Nash 1980; Esteva-Fabregat 1995), marriage between Spaniards and Indians was sanctioned by both the church and the crown in the early Spanish colonies. Queen Isabela, for example, instructed the governor of Santo Domingo in 1503 to see to it that "some Christians marry some Indian women and some Christian women marry some Indian men, so that both parties can communicate and teach each other, and the Indians become men and women of reason" (Morner 1967: 26). A large number of Spanish men lived in concubinage with Indian and African women. The church tried vigorously to make them marry, but with limited success. This contributed not only to the increase of the mestizo population, but also to the social association of mixed blood with illegitimacy (Morner 1967:

40-2). These unions led to a bewildering array of genetic (and social) admixture

among European, Indian, and African populations, to which Spanish imperial ideology responded in characteristic fashion by recasting the fifteenth-century concept of limpieza de sangre from "old Christian blood" to "white Spanish blood." Although all town dwellers were (at least nominally) Christians, the purity of bloodlines came to be measured by the degree of adherence to Iberian heritage. This ultimately resulted in the formal institutionalization of race mixture into more than twenty-five categories that were explicitly illustrated in colonial Mexico by nearly 1000 paintings (Garcia Salz 1989). AltllOugh tl1ese categories reflected a commitment to social hierarchy and racial prejudice, they nevertl1eless provided a legitimizing means of integrating virtually any combination of racial attributes into a recognized institutional structure. They were furthermore used very flexibly in social practice. In eighteentl1-century Mexico, for example, individuals often identified themselves at different times as belonging to different racial categories depending on the relative advantages of a category in a specific situation (see Boyer 1997). Regardless of imperial legal categories and distinctions, people in the Americas apparently regarded their racial identity "not so much as an indicator of group membership or even as a badge of self definition within a static and rigid system, but rather as a component of [his] personal identity that could be manipulated and often changed" (Chance 1978:

130-1). The fluidity of racial/cultural identity in the Spanish-American empire has been revealed most tangibly in the archaeological records of the early Spanish imperial towns. Excavations of households of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in the Caribbean, Florida, Mexico, and the Rio de la Plata region consistently reveal that domestic, female-associated aspects of those households regardless of their documentary based ethnic or racial identification - are represented predominantly by American elements, or mixed European-AmericanAti·ican elements. These include cooking technology (manos, metates, griddles, pots), ceramic technology, and foodstuffs,4 and household management such as the use of American Indian-style smudge pits in Spanish homes, for example (Deagan 1983: 108). In contrast to this, both traditionally "male" categories and socially visible categories of the material world (e.g., architecture, religious items, clothing) remained Spanish or European in form fi·om the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This is especially evident in the areas of spatial patterning, architecture, and the built environment. These segments of everyday life in the Spanish colonies reveal a high degree of spatial and hierarchical organization in the intellectual templates and material world of the Spanish men who organized them, clearly reflecting both their Roman and Moorish antecedents in Spain (see C. Flores 1973; Crouch 1991). This pattern of carefully maintaining the ideal of Spanish identification Espanidad - in socially visible areas, while adapting to the local circumstances of the colonial setting in private and domestic life, developed very rapidly as a mechanism tor social integration in the towns of the Spanish empire. It suggests

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Kathleen Deagan adherence to a highly structured set of preexisting precepts - embodied in this case by the precepts of Catholicism and the ideal of Spanish identification - but implemented simultaneously with a high degree of flexibility and accommodation to local, indigenous conditions. A central dynamic in creating and sustaining this tension was the cultural exchange brokered by indigenous women within Spanish-established towns. Nearly all historical and anthropological considerations of these inter-gender interactions have been cast in terms of choices and decision-making by European men in the colonial arena. This has ignored, as June Nash has put it, "the creative role of Indian women and their mestizo offspring in producing a mestizo culture that brought together traits from the preconquest society and from Europe" (1980: 145). Non-European women were, in fact, a potent force for social integration in Spanish-American towns. Whether as wives, concubines, or servants, non-European women were the brokers for European, Indian, and African exchanges within Spanish-American households and communities. From an archaeological perspective, it is evident that these gender- and racebased patterns of multi cultural social integration in the Spanish empire not only are both widespread and consistent throughout the Spanish-American world, but also stand in sharp contrast to the patterns of adaptation documented on colonial sites of the Anglo-American empire. Both Robert Schuyler (1976) and James Deetz (1977,1993) pointed out that the cherished notion of the multiethnic and multiracial "melting pot" as the process by which North American society developed is not substantiated in the archaeological record of AngloAmerican colonial sites. These sites overwhelmingly reveal a thorough and systematic exclusion of non-European traits in the colonists' households in both female and male activities (see also South 1977). Even such careful analyses of American Indian influence on Anglo culture as James Axtell's (1981) fail to identify incorporations of non- European elements into mainstream Anglo-American domestic life. Such incorporations are instead restricted to the remote fi·ontier, and relegated to the lowest echelons and outcasts of Anglo colonial society. To anticipate the inevitable essentialist argument that intermating in the Spanish colonies was caused by a shortage of Spanish women I hasten to add that European gender ratios in the respective first half:centuries of American imperial expansion were roughly equal for the Spanish and English colonies. GiI Stein (1994, 1998) has recently demonstrated a similar gender- based pattern of integration in the archaeological record of a very different imperial setting, that ofHa~inebi, a Mesopotamian Uruk colonial enclave (or trade entrepot) in Anatolia (c. 3800-3100 BCE). Items associated with male activities occur in material forms of the colonizing Mesopotamians, while female activity items, as in the Spanish empire, are associated with local Anatolian styles. Stein suggests that cross-cultural marriages could have served to form alliances in the local polities, helping to secure peaceful rclations, access to land, and trading rights. These kinds of non-aggressive colonial relationships were particularly important in the Uruk network, as they may also have been in Spanish expan-

sion, and quite possibly in the experiences of Egyptian colonization in Nubia (see Morkot, this volume), where the intrusive colonial groups were unable to numerically dominate the socially complex colonized communities they encountered. Clearly this is not the forum to explore the implications and explanations for such cultural differences in imperial social integration and intermarriage, but analysis of archaeological data from a gendered perspective undoubtedly offers an important direction of inquiry into the comparative dynamics of empire.

SUMMARY A few summary statements can be made from this admittedly selective and superficial assessment of Spanish imperial ideology and the practice of social integration in the empire. After an early failed attempt to extend a Portuguese-based mercantile factoria model into the Americas, Spanish imperial expansion followed a pattern established during the centuries-long religious war to reconquer Muslim Spain for the Christians. It extended the overarching moral and legal justification of "a just war" and imperial conquest to the Americas by virtue of the conversion of the American Indians to Christianity. Following this, the ideals of Catholicism, Espanidad, and settled life in towns were central to the social integration of conquered peoples into the life of the empire. While these concepts were sustained as ideals until the end of the empire (and in many areas beyond), they were adjusted in practice almost immediately. In the view of the church and the crown, for example, the souls and potential Christianity of the American Indians protected them from enslavement and exploitation. The perceived realities and requirements of life in the Americas on the part of the early colonizers mitigated this ideal, however, and labor capture institutions of encomienda and reduccion developed as alternatives to slavery and accessories to conversion. Conversely, the same ideology led to the sanctioned, large-scale enslavement of Africans, who were not protected by the obligation of the Catholic kings to evangelize their lands, and who were furthermore tainted by an asserted association with Islam. The mitigation of imperial ideology was especially evident on the frontier and in rural areas, where, if archaeological evidence is to be considered, the implementation of Esparlidad and civilized (e.g., Spanish) life was a marked failure. The mission evolved as an institution not only of religious instruction, but also of defense, labor capture, and acculturation. Both ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence have indicated that even in matters of religion, major adjustments and transformations were made in practice. In the Spanish towns of the empire the discontinuity between ideal and practice was marked in different and less dramatic but nevertheless profound ways. The ideal of Espanidad appears to have been carefully maintained in socially visible aspects of life, in activities and areas of material culture associated with men, and in a new hierarchy of limpieza de sangre based on racial admixture

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Kathleen Deagan rather than religion. This was not the case within the households of SpanishAmerican towns, however, where virtually all homes, when observed archaeologically, incorporated American Indian and Mrican elements in basic domestic activities controlled by women. The differences between the imperial center in Spain and the imperial colonies in America in both social practice and underlying ideology are underscored most tangibly in Spanish-American households, and particularly when gender-based analytical categories are applied. It might be suggested that it was within those households, and in women's domestic activities, that the social transformation of identity in the imperial colonies began, leading ultimately to the end of empire.

PART III IMPERIAL INTEGRATION AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS Carla M. Sinopoli

While the peoples and territories claimed by an imperial center typically expand and contract throughout a polity's duration, the initial creation of an empire is often rapid and dramatic - the result of acts of conquest and submission and the acknowledgment of a new political hierarchy in imperial centers and defeated regions. Through such acts, territories are claimed and the physical plan of an empire begins to take form. However, the creation of empires as structures of rule and as more or less integrated polities is a longer and more complex process, often [.1r more difficult to achieve than conquest. Imperial integration entails varying and changing emphases on coercion, rewards, structural transformations, cooption, and accommodation. The three chapters in this section address two separate but intimately connected issues: processes and practices ofimperial integration in New Kingdom Egypt (Morkot) and among the Andean Inka (D'Altroy), and the nature and responses ofimperial subjects in the Vijayanagara empire of South India (Morrison). These issues run through many of the chapters throughout this volume, particularly those in the subsequent section addressing the nature of and audiences for imperial ideologies. Here, we focus primarily on political, economic, and sociological dimensions. As with many other topics addressed in this work, key themes of this section revolve around variability and diversity, strategy and contingency, and general processes versus individual historical trajectories.

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IMPERIAL INTEGRATION If, as Barfield (p. 29) has stressed, empires are organized to administer diversity, then it is important to recognize that processes or strategies for imperial integration need not focus on the creation of uniformity or coherence. In fact, in many cases, difference and competition among and between subject populations may be both tolerated and even deliberately fostered. Thus, from the perspective of the center, political competition and f.1ctionalism, especially among regional and imperial elites, may contribute in the short or long term to the survival and integration of the empire as a whole - by preventing the development of unified resistance to imperial hegemony. Second, it is also essential to acknowledge the spatial as well as temporal dimensions of imperial integration. That is, empires, like other polities, are not created out of whole cloth. Rather, throughout their existence they are continuously transformed, through the intentional acts of manifold individuals and groups and through the intended and unintended consequences of those actions. More or less stable organizational patterns may emerge and endure for long periods; however, change and accommodation to change are always part of the equation. For an empire to endure, conquest and repression must give way to additional practices and organizational structures that can incorporate at least subsets of subject populations into a broader framework. The forms these structures take, and how they are developed and implemented, must be responsive to the social, environmental, and historical context of specific regions and the polity as a whole. There is thus, in many cases, a seemingly contingent nature to decisions affecting imperial consolidation, perhaps particularly in the early decades of an empire's history. Writing of the Carolingians, Janet Nelson has observed that "each royal regime lurched from one challenge to another, improvising responses to a series of crises" (1996: xvii). This is probably not uncommon in many empires, though see Yates' discussion of Qin administration (this volume) tor a very different pattern. Both later imperial historians and contemporary scholars may find grand strategies in such responses, and indeed, over time, such strategies may emerge (see Woolf, Yates, this volume), but it is important to parse out causes and processes from their long-term consequences and representations. The study of imperial integration may focus on a number of distinct dimensions. On the political side, we can examine how administrative hierarchies, decision-making, and record keeping (see Barfield, D'Altroy, Mot·eland, Yates, this volume) are con figured and how centers seck to create or incorporate regional elites and limit resistance. We can also explore how (or if) imperial boundaries are created and defended, and how relations with peoples and polities beyond the empire are structured. The study of economic integration can explore the (re)structuring and regularization of movement and access to resources (human and material). This can entail the creation of physical infrastructures (or use of previously existing ones), demographic shifts, and the reorganization of labor

and tribute demands (see Smith and Schreiber, this volume). Sociologically, we can explore the creation of imperial histories, ideologies, and identities that pull participants (albeit often differentially) into a larger "imperial project," and may also provide tools for its resistance (see Alcock, Brumfiel, Moreland, Morrison, and Woolf, this volume). We can also examine the impact of empire on the communities, bodies, and lives of diverse imperial subjects (see Yates, this volume). In practice, of course, the economic, political, social, and ideological are not easily disentangled, however much different sources of archaeological and written evidence and different intellectual approaches and priorities may lead us to emphasize one over another.

SUBJECTS OF EMPIRE: ELITE AND OTHER

Imperial etites Diverse elites occupy important nodal positions in all states. At the center of empires is the core of elites that provides potential rulers. This group is often heavily factionalized. Fierce succession struggles are widespread and can involve elite ft·om inside and outside of the core group. The group of core elites may be constituted and reproduced in a variety of ways. Attempts to reduce the pool of potential rulers in order to limit succession struggles are evident, for example, in the Aztec shift from exogamous to endogamous royal marriage and Qin attempts at state control of male status positions (see Yates, p. 360). In other cases, core elites may be expanded to increase horizontal connections - through royal intermarriage with regional and external elites (see D'Altroy, Mot·kot, and Smith, this volume). While practices that contribute to augmenting the number of imperial elites can have the long-term negative consequences of multiplying royal claimants and increasing succession tensions, they may respond to immediate political needs and contribute to expanded loyalties to and investments in imperial stability. The incorporation of regional elites, through marriage or other means, is common and essential to imperial integration. As noted above, coercion is inherently limited as a means to integrate large and diverse politics. And even in highly bureaucratized empires, the number of imperial officials is small in relation to subject population, and logistical concerns of distance and communication make direct contact with imperial centers infrequent and problematic. There is thus often a necessary if uneasy alliance forged between imperial centers and local rulers to assure resource flows and administrative, political, and strategic stability. In some cases, new regional elites may be created, either by replacing existing structures of rule or by imposing new ones in previously uncentralized regions. The new elite may be members of the imperial f.1mily, warriors, or other local actors, who shifted their loyalties to a new imperial power in order to alter their own positions in the regional political landscape. And just as we must

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Carla M. Sinopoli acknowledge that imperial centers are politically heterogeneous and conflictridden, it is also important to recognize that the populations of subject areas may be similarly divided. While imperial rulers may seek to exploit these divisions, so too may the various subgroups within incorporated populations - for very different reasons. Attempts made to draw existing or emergent local elites into imperial structures commonly entail a combination of economic and social rewards and implicit or explicit coercion (and sometimes all simultaneously, for example the widespread practice of bringing the offspring of subject rulers to imperial courts for fostering and as hostages). Imperial leaders may also attempt to limit horizontal contacts among various subject elites, by channeling connections hierarchically from regional elite and provinces to the center and restricting inter-provincial contact. This kind of "divide and rule" political strategy can be observed in many imperial states. Writing of Ottoman regional policy, Kafadar (1995: 56) has observed: "within each group of provincial officials, the state managed to divide in such a way as to set landholder against landholder, governor against governor, and governor-general against governor-general. In the general atmosphere of competition, elites were unable to organize concerted action against the state." A similar pattern can be documented in the Inka empire and New Kingdom Egypt, as described by D'A1troy and Mm'kot in this section (see also Kuhrt on the Achaemenid empire and Liverani on Assyria, this volume). Given the importance of conquest and militarism in empires, the creation of a strong and effective military is key to imperial creation and perpetuation. However, these same forces can also be a powerful threat to imperial stability as military leaders can accumulate vast wealth and loyal followings, and independent power bases from which to challenge imperial authority. Land grants and other rewards to military elites and soldiers are therefore common in many empires, as are counterbalancing attempts to limit the ambitions of military leaders. Other powerful elites who can figure prominently in imperial integration include religious and sectarian leaders. Their role(s) can take a variety of forms ranging from underwriting to resisting imperial claims to hegemony. Such variants may be related both to tile content of sacred beliefs (and their relation to state ideologies), and to the structural positions and degree of autonomy of religious institutions and personnel within the broader society (see Brumfiel, Deagan, Moreland, Morrison, and Sinopoli, this volume). While there may be many and varied efforts to create positive relations (from the perspective of the imperial core) between the centers of empire and diverse regional elites and institutions, such elites may simultaneously play important roles in subverting or resisting imperial authority. These may entail limiting or diverting the flow of resources intended for imperial coffers, various strategies to retain or refocus tile loyalties of subject peoples away from tile imperial core (gifting, tax remissions, sponsoring rituals, etc.), or the creation of sites of

Part III Imperial integration and imperial subjects resistance, such as the memory theaters of Roman Greece discussed by A1cock (this volume).

Non-elite subjects If I have focused tllUS far primarily on the elite subjects and shapers of empire, it is not because tile majority non-elite are less interesting or relevant to consider. But neither is it merely because written and monumental archaeological sources tend to privilege elites. If we are interested in exploring tile structure and integration of imperial states, then diverse administrative, military, economic, and sacred institutions and associated elite actors perforce assume a central role in our analyses, as tlley do in many of the chapters in this volume. However, tllis is not to deny tllat non-elites shape imperial institutions, practices, and identities in significant ways (see Deagan, Morrison, and Woolf, this volume). To consider bOtll how the broadest range of imperial subjects impact imperial systems, and the consequences of empire on the lived lives and "materiality" (Deagan, p. 181) oftllOse incorporated within and/or affected by them, we need to broaden our scope considerably. lfimperial elites are diverse, then the non-elites who comprise tile majority of any polity are even more so. Their relations with and responses to local and imperial authorities, and their experiences of empire, necessarily vary widely geographically, temporally, and among individuals and varied social groups (see Morrison, this volume). For some, empires provided possibilities for social and economic enhancement, through military service or other forms of valued labor (e.g., production of valued resources) and achievement. For others, the coming of empire meant death, enslavement, loss of property, or forced resettlement. For most, f.1mily, labor, time, and identities may have been dramatically reconfigured in response to tribute and labor demands and altered rural, urban and sacred landscapes. Yates, for example, discusses the importance of imperial record keeping in fixing identities and regulating behavior in a way that deeply impacted the lives of rural peoples (but did not fully override local rhythms). Brumfiel (1991, 1996) has addressed the role of Aztec tribute demands for cloth in differentially restructuring labor organization, particularly women's labor, in various areas of the empire (and see Deagan, pp. 190-3, on the role of women as "cultural brokers" in Spanish America). Those "subjected" to the power of empire can include both populations within incorporated territories, and more or less directly under imperial "control," and others in more marginal locations beyond or within imperial territories. In many Old World contexts, pastoralists and other landless peoples have proven particularly problematic for rulers of states and empires to dominate effectively. These groups can move within and between imperial spaces and often play critical roles in communication, trade, and military service (see Barfield, this volume, for an extended discussion of the pastoralist empires in Central Asia and

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Carla M. Sinopoli China). These and other communities "outside" of empires can often play significant roles in internal economic, political, and ideological dynamics (see Helms 1993; Smith and Sinopoli, this volume). If not directly subjects of empires, they may still be profoundly affected by them (and vice versa). It is important tllerefore tllat studies of empire look beyond claimed political boundaries to larger spheres of interaction and impact.

8 Politics, resources, and blood in the Inka empIre Terence N. D'Altroy

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The rise of tile Inka empire was one of tile most remarkable achievements in tile history of preindustrial civilizations. In a span of about a century, a small etlmic group fi'om Peru's southern highlands gained sovereignty over tile societies tllat occupied the Andes from soutllern Colombia to central Chile. By 1532, when the Spanish invasion ended tlleir run of power, tile Inkas had drawn as many as 12 million people under tlleir control, WitllOUt benefit of a written language or efficient transportation. 1 The Inkas presented tllemselves to tile Spaniards as if they had a divine mandate to rule and civilize tile world - a viewpoint tile Europeans could recognize from personal experience, even if tile underlying premises were anatllema. The Inkas called tlleir empire Tawantinsuyu, or "The Four Parts Together," and referred to the sacred capital of Cuzco as tile "navel of the universe." Like other vast regions brought under tile sway of early imperial powers, tile domain was culturally and geographically heterogeneous. The Inkas' goal of reigning over the world worthy of their attentions was complicated by the variety of political forms and scores of distinct languages found in the Andes. By building on a base of existing formations and selectively applying standardized policies, the Inkas succeeded in drawing societies that ranged from acephalous villages to competitor states into a unified empire (Fig. 8.1). Even so, the Tawantinsuyu of 1532 still featured a great variety of sociopolitical and economic forms, to which the Inkas had to adapt their policies. This chapter examines how political and economic power were contested at the heart of the empire and, to a lesser extent, in the provinces. It complements MacCormack's chapter, which is more concerned with the content of the ideology that fostered divine kingship and with how the Spaniards' world-view affected their representations of Andean beliefs. I begin with a sketch of the empire's history to set the stage for discussion of the political institutions and the development of economic relations. I am especially interested in examining how the elites interacted in creating the complex economy tllat tile Spaniards encountered and exploited. One of the most intriguing transformations concerns the privatization of resources in the heartland - nominally the passage of custodial care into the hands of each emperor's descendants. That practice diverged significantly from the communal land practices tllat were customary

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Explanations fcn' the rise of the Inka empire remain fl'llstratingly tentative, despite the professional and public interest shown in Tawantinsuyu over the twentieth century. Unlike most other empires discussed in this volume, there was no indigenous written record and the archaeology of the early Inka era has only recently drawn sustained attention. The annals of Inka society that wc rely upon arc epic narratives written down fl'om about 1551 to the mid-seventeenth century, mostly by European authors whose cultural and linguistic filters colored the nature of their accounts. All told, there arc about fifty major reports of Inka history, many of which borrowed II'eely 6'om onc another without attribution (sec Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1983, 1988; Porras Barrenechea 1986; Pease 1995). The chronicles arc supplemented by local accounts, taken down for Spanish inspections that were often historically clll'sory and regionally t(lCused. The I nkas themselves kept their histories as oral narratives that were memorized by specialists called IlhijJ/t /WII'l(1)'lIq, who used knotted colored cords (Ilhiptt) to aid their recall and provide details. In some cases, illustrated panels and marked poles were also used to record inf()J'Jnation, but Andean societies never devised a pictographic system like those employed in Mesoamerica (sce Brumfiel, Smith, this volume). The record keepers passed their knowledge IhH11 t:1ther to son, along with cords that could keep such precise registers that the Spaniards let them be admitted into evidence in legal proceedings. Despite the IlhijJlI's precision, the documentary sollJ'ces cannot be taken as a literal representation of Inka history. Historians have shown how dil'(erent interest groups, often competing royal kindreds, presented radically divergent visions of the Inkas' past (e.g., Porras Barrenechea 1986; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988; Adol'l1o 1989; Pease 1995; Zi6lkowski 1996). Some scholars have even suggested that the I nka history that has been preserved was little more than an elaborate justification of power relations (e.g., Zuidema 1964, 1983; Duviols 1979; Urton 1990). A totally ahistorical position seems to overstate the case, however, and it is more plausible that the Inka accounts contained both historical and structural elements, woven together in narratives that were tailored 8.1 Andeall rc/lioll to suit particular interests (sce Gose 1996). CllCOntPIIJJcd by As they transcribed competing oral histories into written fcm11, each of the '1 iT 11'1111 timll)'II, Spanish and native writers (e.g., Garcilaso de la Vega 1963 r16091; Pachacuti im:llldilll1 the Yamqui 1968 [16131; Guaman Poma de Ayala 1980 [ 1614]) selectively empha- principlIl AlIdmll sized differing visions and thus helped to craft the mythohistories that wc have JIIbl'cgio1/)' INflItiollcd to work with today. The early El\l'opean authors, who sometimes grumbled that ill tbc fc.W.

204

Politics, resources, and blood in the Inka empire

Terence N. D'Altroy

they had to sort through incompatible stories, recognized that the narratives could be reworked to fit the times (e.g., Cieza de Le6n 1967 [1553]: 173; Betanzos 1996 [1557]: 3). For example, one of the best-informed authors, Juan de Betanzos, probably drew from epic poems told among Cuzco's aristocracy (Hamilton 1996: xi). He favored the viewpoint of one royal kin group, for he had married the sister/widow of Atawallpa, the victor in the last dynastic war. In his introductory letter to the Viceroy Mendoza, Betanzos attempted to give this viewpoint weight by observing that he had relied on the accounts told by his oldest and most respected witnesses. He dismissed the stories told by common Indians as credulous and commented that other Spanish authors often misunderstood the language of their informants. One of the results is that his history heavily emphasizes the exploits of the legendary founder of the imperial polity, Pachakuti, who not coincidentally was also the founder of his wife's kindred.

The preimperial era The documentary sources, taken in conjunction with the archaeological evidence described below, suggest that the Inkas were just one of many societies that were jockeying for power in the central Andes in late prehistory. Toward the end of the first millennium C E, the two great urban polities centered at Wari and Tiwanaku collapsed (see Schreiber, this volume). Sometime after 1200, the Inkas emerged as the dominant ethnic group of the south Peruvian Andes, while the Qolla and Lupaqa were competing for supremacy in the Lake Titicaca basin. The pace of early state formation seems to have been modest, especially when compared to the tempo of events that occurred once the expansion began in earnest. In recent decades, scholars have usually followed the imperial-era chronology devised in 1586 by the cleric Miguel de Ca bello Valboa (1951 [1586]: see Rowe 1944). Ca bello reckoned that the Inkas emerged as an expansionist power c. 1438 CE and that most of the empire was brought under Cuzco's rule between 1463 and 1493. Radiocarbon dating suggests, however, that the imperial era may have begun as early as 1400 (Bauer 1992; Adamska and Michczyski 1996; D'Altroy et al. n.d.). Whatever time frame is finally accepted, it is clear that the Inka polity arose quickly and in a few decades had made remarkable achievements in military and diplomatic affairs, ideological hegemony, provincial administration, hydraulic, road, and architectural construction, and social engineering. Explaining what propelled the Inkas from their local political sphere to dominate the Andes therefore still requires a lot of conjecture. The explanations provided by the narratives of the early Inka era portray it as a volatile time, when ancestral heroes personally forged social order from a cultural matrix of chaos. The royal genealogies began with the deified Manqo Qhapaq and usually continued through twelve or thirteen paramounts (Table 8.1). The substitution ofstattles for the mummies of the first four kings has led some authors to surmise that they were apocryphal figures, rather than historical individuals (see Rowe 1967: 68-9). Most accounts attributed the inception

Table 8.1. Conventional list of Inka emperors (modified from ROJl1e 1985a: 64) Ruler

Moiety

Pat/aqa (royal kit/group)

1 Manqo Qhapaq 2 Zinchi Roq'a 3 L1oq'e Yupanki 4 Mayta Yupanki 5 Qhapaq YlIpanki 6 Inka Roq'a 7 Yawar Waqaq 8 Wiraqocha Inka 9 Pachakuti Inka Yllpanki 10 Thupa Inka YlIpanki 11 Wayna Qhapaq 12 Waskhar 13 Atawallpa

Hurin Cuzco Hurin Cuzco Hurin ClIZCO HlIrin Cuzco Hurin CllZCO Hanan CllZCO Hanan Cuzco Hanan Cuzco Hanan CllZCO Hanan Cuzco Hanan ClIZCO Hanan Cuzco Hanan ClIZCO

Chima panaqa ayllu Rawra panaqa ayllu Awayni panaqa ayllll Uska Mayta panaqa ayllll APll Mayta panaqa ayllu Wika K'iraw panaqa aylhl Awqaylli panaqa ayllu ZukzlI panaqa ayllll Hatun ayllll Qhapaq ayllu Tumipampa panaqa aylhl Waskhar aylhl

of the empire to Pachakuti, the ninth monarch on the standard list (see below). The Spaniards met only the last ruler who had been enthroned in Cuzco, Waskllar (the twelfth ruler), and his brother Atawallpa (the thirteenth), who deposed him in a bloody war that closed just as the Europeans arrived in 1532. There is general agreement that we can place little faith in the acts ascribed to the sovereigns on the standard list before Wiraqocha Inka (eighth ruler), and some acts attributed to later monarchs were also clearly embellished. In chapter 17 of this volume, Sabine McConnack explores the ideological dimensions of Inka history; here, I am more concerned with the political features. A cmcial point for both chapters is that Inka history and the structure of royal society were malleable. Early in the Colonial era, each sovereign on the standard list was revered as the founder of a particular royal kin group in Cuzco, called a panaqa. These kindreds had the privileged obligation of maintaining the mummies or statues that were venerated as the remains of their ancestors, supported by the wealth that they had accumulated in their lifetimes. Since each mler ostensibly left a kindred, Inka history was theoretically written into Cuzco's royal hierarchy. At the time of the Spanish conquest, there were ten royal kin groups, five in the upper social division of Cuzco and five in the lower (see below). According to some sixteenth-century accounts, the dual structure was created by Pachakuti early in the imperial era and was later modified once or twice (e.g., Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: ch. 19, p. 224; Toledo 1940: 185; Polo de Ondegardo 1940 [1561]: 138; Betanzos 1996 [1557]: ch. 16, p. 71; Rowe 1985a: 46). The Spanish idea that the kings on the standard list followed each other consecutively is thus complicated by the flexibility built into social system. Moreover, there is evidence that panaqas could be effaced bOtll physically and historically (see below). Overall, however, the consistencies

205

206

Politics) resources) and blood in the Inka empire

Terence N. D)Altroy among histories told in Cuzco and the provinces give many scholars confidence that the latter part of the sequence has considerable validity. Setting aside its fabulous elements, early Inka mythical history contains features that we might expect to find among complex non-state societies. Most important is the centrality of the ayllu as the basic social and economic unit. An ayllu was a corporate kin group that held resources in common and parceled out use rights to its members. Although there was flexibility in how the ayllu could be defined, we can understand it broadly to have been an endogamous and internally ranked kindred. Many ayllu were divided into two parts, often upper (hanan) and lower (hurin), although tripartite divisions were also widespread. The royal narratives often depicted the main change in preimperial Inka society as the closing of Lower Cuzco (Hurin Cuzco) with Qhapaq Yupanki's panaqa (royal ayllu) and the beginning of Upper Cuzco (Hanan Cuzco) with Inka Roq'a's descendants. Even if the relationships among royal allyu divisions were shifted about from time to time, we may surmise that duality and ranking almost surely were present in Inka society, as they were pervasive among the highland societies that the Inkas conquered. The frequency of inter-ethnic marriage described in the legends suggests one way that the Inkas may have advanced their early political interests (e.g., Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: ch. 25, p. 229). Although we may never know if any specific marital alliance described in the narratives had a historical basis, the theme's repetition suggests its prominence in building political relations; the unions would have both reinforced the elites' status and tied them into a broader power base. The marital bonds were honored with gifts or exchanges of fine textiles and valuables that affirmed the celebrants' relative status and the leaders' generosity, while creating relations of debt (Cobo 1979 [1653]: Bk 2, ch. 5, pp. 113-14). It should be no surprise that the Inka myths emphasized their ancestors' generosity, because it helped legitimize their rule. It certainly seems likely that gift-giving served as an advertisement of productive capacity and status, and as a means of publicly forging collateral relations. Later Inka emperors also forged ties by marrying women from other etnias, but in a relationship of marked inequality. In the early tales, many references to Inka leadership also concerned military ventures. Stories told to the Spaniards often recounted that highland leaders incited their warriors through promises of glory and plunder, but allusions to lands as benefits of war are scarce for the era (e.g., Toledo 1940: T. II, pp. 19, 24,28,31,35; Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: ch. 23, p. 227). Schaedel (1978) has drawn attention to a slow shift in the motivation and practice of warf.1re as described for the early Inka era. The simple plundering of the earliest times was later augmented by demands for tribute, and then by outright seizure of productive natural resources. Labor acquisition was also important, though its form shifted from kidnapping to demanding production. If the trends in the tales truly reflect changes in the goals of war, then the moves to annex vast territories in the imperial era grew out of a long-developing trend.

Like the written sources, our archaeological knowledge of the early Inka era is limited, even though recent surveys and excavations have begun to expand the baseline information (see A. Kendall et al. 1992; A. Kendall 1994, 1996). A complete survey of the Cuzco heartland has yet to be published, and study of tlle late preimperial era (Late Intermediate or IGllke period; 1000-1400 CE) has been complicated by tlle extensive renovations of tlle valley'S architecture and landscape tllat were undertaken in tlle imperial era. The available archaeological evidence only hints at tlle power tllat would arise from tlle Cuzco basin. To date, IGllke sites have yielded little that might be expected from a developing state society, but some signs of regional integration were already present by the early fourteenth century. Site positioning and construction suggest that tlle Cuzco area was tranquil, while neighbors 30-50 km away were more concerned Witll conflict (Rowe 1944; Dwyer 1971; Bauer 1992; Heffernan 1996; A. Kendall et al. 1992; A. Kendall 1996). Most of the recorded sites are small - no more than a few hectares - but some sites were large enough to indicate tllat a settlement hierarchy was emerging. In contrast, the kinds of evidence tllat we might expect from a class-based society are scarce - such as IGllke-era monumental const:ructions, economic specialization, or marked residential or mortuary differences. More broadly, the aggregate scale of known IGllke sites is at best suggestive of the formation of a powerful polity.

The rise of the empire The most widely used summary of Inka history is Rowe's account, drafted over a half-century ago. 2 According to his synthesis, the Inkas were embroiled in clashes with several neighboring etnias during the reign of Wiraqocha Inka (eighth ruler). The sovereign enjoyed some military and political success while in his prime, but later in life (c. 1438 CE) he and his heir designate Ink Urqon fled Cuzco in the face of an attack by the Chankas. A younger son named Inka Yupanki led a supernatmally assisted defense of the town and then usmped the throne under the honorific name Pachakuti ("Cataclysm" or "Returner of the Earth"). Under Pachakuti's rule, Inka armies dominated Peru's southern highlands and the Lake Titicaca region, and ventured to the central Peruvian coast. About 1463 CE, Pachakuti ceded military command to his son Thupa Inka Yupanki, so that he could apply his energies to building a capital at Cuzco that was worthy of being the sacred center of the world. Under the young man's leadership, the Inkas took the highlands as far as central Ecuador, captmed the Peruvian coast, and SOl' tied east into the montaria. During the last years of his f.1ther's life and under his own rule (1471-93 CE), Thupa Inka Yupanki secured the remaining Bolivian altiplano, northwest Argentina, and nortllern Chile, and put down a series of rebellions. Wayna Qhapaq's era (1493-1526 CE) entailed suppression of new revolts, expansion ofInka rule in the montaria and north Ecuador, miscarried efforts to secure western Ecuador, and solidification of the southeastern frontier in Bolivia

207

208

Terence N. DJAltroy

and Argentina. Even so, much of his reign seems to have been dedicated to improving the administration of the now grand domain. After his death in Ecuador during a smallpox epidemic that heralded the Spanish invasion, his sons Waskhar and Atawallpa waged a horrific dynastic war that the latter won just as the Spaniards arrived in 1532. While Waskhar was being transported northward ignobly dressed in women's clothes, Francisco Pizarro and a small company of horsemen and foot soldiers captured Atawallpa in Cajamarca in a desperate gambit. With the empire having been split by the civil war, the Spaniards found immediate support among many native societies, who mistakenly viewed them as potential saviors. Although resistance continued for decades, the most significant efforts to drive out the Spaniards collapsed with the failure of the sieges of Cuzco and Lima in 1536. Thus ended a century ofInka rule. Although this summary, or something akin to it, has stood the test of time as a persuasive distillation of Inka imperial history, other scholars have proposed alternative ways of interpreting the narratives. A recent review of the sources by Parssinen (1992), for example, suggests that a number of the expansionist ventures occurred a little earlier in tile imperial era tllan Rowe's account surmised. A structural approach elaborated by Zuidema (e.g., 1964, 1983, 1990), which downplays tile historicity of the accounts, has also gained support over tile years (e.g., Duviols 1979; Urton 1990). Similarly influential are Rostworowski de Diez Canseco's analyses (1960,1983,1988), which combine a close analysis of tile conventions and structures of Andean societies Witll an appreciation for the ductility of history in the hands of the powerful. Regardless of their theoretical bent, tllere is a general appreciation among Inka scholars that the dynamics of politics acted back on history to recast it in terms tllat legitimized the existing power structure. The following section thus sketches out the structure of Inka rule and the factionalized politics that gave the hierarchy its final form.

THE NATURE OF INKA RULE

The political system in outline. The Inka form of government was, in its simplest form, a monarchy in which the throne passed from f.1ther to son. Cuzco's political organization, however, was actually a complex system in which long-dead rulers continued to play a role in the affairs of state through an elaborate system of ancestor worship. Inka rule, whetller state or subject, was organized primarily by kinship and ethnic groupings. At the apex stood the emperor and his immediate f.1mily. Below them were two classes of aristocratic Inka kin and one class of honorary Inka nobility. At the time of tile Spanish conquest, the most powerful set of aristocrats consisted of ten royal kin groups (panaqa). As noted above, each panaqa was created at the death of a ruler in a custom called split inheritance, in which the throne was inherited by tile "most able" son of the deceased ruler. His otller descendants formed a corporate group that inherited his properties, usually under the

Politics, resources, and blood in the Inka empire

leadership of one of the late king's brothers. As noted earlier, a panaqa's principal duties consisted of venerating their ancestor's mummy and caring for his properties in perpetuity tllrough a cult founded around his person. The millions of people drawn into the empire were organized into provinces that consisted largely of existing ethnic groups arranged into units tllat were administratively convenient. Typically, a province consisted of20,OOO or 30,000 households, presided over by a governor appointed by Cuzco. Ethnic Inkas usually filled tile upper levels of provincial government, altllOugh rare non-Inkas could find a place near the top. The Inkas relied heavily on the services of tile provincial lords (lzttrakas) to govern their own people. An evolving hierarchy of state officials drawn from bOtll ethnic Inkas and local lords tied the state and local levels togetller. As Murra (1980 [1956]) has shown, the Inkas attempted to ease acceptance of their rule by espousing an idiom of mutual obligations tllat already existed between the local lords and their groups. Their intent was to portray an exploitative new arrangement as a simple and benevolent extension of traditional and familiar relationships. Over time, the Inkas also enacted new policies or expanded old ones to transform the social landscape of tile Andes. The Inka royalty who sl\l'vived the Spanish conquest explained that their goals in dominating the Andes were to bring order to a chaotic world and to spread the true religion of tile Sun. As magnanimous as those goals may sound, the practice of imperial rule was to organize subject societies in ways that concentrated power and wealth in the hands of a few hundred families at most. That contradiction is hardly a new story for empires. Although there is some truth to the claim that Cuzco's rule brought stability to a volatile political landscape, frequent rebellion shows that Inb benevolence was not universally appreciated (see Murra 1986). Similarly, state policies indicate that the Inkas were well aware that they needed to balance the conflicting goals of using existing relations to coordinate local policies and averting allied resistance. Like many other early empires, the Inkas had state religious and secular institutions, such as the priesthood of the Sun, the priestesses of the Moon, and the military leadership. Even so, the roles of individuals and kin groups carried over from one sphere to another. The emperor was simultaneously god on earth, commander in chief, the ultimate arbiter of law and order, and on occasion even the High Priest of the Sun. At other times, the High Priest was also the army's field marshal. Similarly, the provincial governors had jurisdiction over administrative, judicial, economic, and military affairs. The Inkas relied heavily on symbolic relations to promote acceptance of their rule, despite the coercion used in dominating many societies. The ruler formed ritualized bonds with each of his principal subject lords, which were reinforced annually by an exchange of gifts. When a l'lIler died, his successor had to renew those ties. Coupled with those personalized bonds was the organization of the population into convenient units for extracting productive labor and mobilizing military personnel. In many but not all provinces, state officials ordered the taxpaying households into a decimal hierarchy that was based on a periodic census (see C. J. Julien 1982, 1988). That

209

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Tercllce N. D)Altroy

organization is often termed a bureaucracy in modern analyses, but it was more a reordering of existing kin hierarchies than the creation of a civil service. A neat division of Inka rule into categories of civic or military, religious or secular, and public or private thus misses much of the integrated character of the leadership and decision-making institutions. The Inkas intensified craft, agricultural, and pastoral production in most regions by putting taxpayers to work on resources that were claimed f(Jr the Inkas alone (Murra 1980 l1956 J). To support their programs, they also built a series of provincial centers and supporting installations that were joined by an upgraded royal highway system (Fig. 8.2; Hyslop 1984, 1990; Morris and Thompson 1985). To help ensure security, the military established garrisons and cordons of f()rts that both protected annexed lands and prepared the field f(JI' further expansion. A massive program of internal colonization helped move many of those goals forward. Finally, the Inkas asserted primacy ()r their gods and claimed the cosll1ological history of the Andean peoples as their own. In their religious practices, they paid homage to the animate landscape by building temples and shrines throughout their lands (Reinhard 1985). Many of those practices had been borrowed to some degree from past Andean statecraft. As Schreiber points out in chapter 3, earlier Andean states, such as Wad, Tiwanaku, and Chimor, all boasted a sanctified leadership that was coupled with standardized administrative practices. Each f(H1nded settlements in distant regions and improved transportation and communications systems. 'They also intensified agronomic and artisanal production at particular environmentally favorable locations. In very important ways, then, the Inka polity was more original in organizational scale and intensity than in design.

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The dYftarnics of I ft/la politics Despite the lnka penchant fi)r neat organil',atiol1, ClIzqucflan political conflict contributed mightily to the nature of the imperial ()J'[nation that the Spaniards encountered and to the histories that were told to justify its existence. Some years ago, Mada Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1960, 1983: 159-67, 1988: 145-6; see also Zi6tkowski 1996) drew attention to the infighting that attended virtually every succession in the royal line. Factional competition was integral to the passage of power, so that successful aspirants won the throne through such politicalniceties as intrigue, ft'atricide, coups, and sometillles full-scale war. Although the scale of the last conflict between Atawallpa and Waskhar may have been unusual, its genesis and character were not. Because these conHicts were central to the relationship between economy and politics in the empire, I would like to summarize briefly the succession crises of the imperial era. The discussion picks up the historical thread at the point that many narratives identified as the start of the imperial era the transition ft'OIll Wiraqocha Inka to his son Pachakuti. 3 In that succession, in which Pachakuti usurped the throne ft'om his t~lther,

211

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0 0 ..

212

Terence N. D)Altroy another of Wiraqocha Inka's sons, named Inka Urqon, played a controversial role. In the standard history, Wiraqocha Inka and Inka Urqon had fled Cuzco in the face of an anticipated attack by the neigh boring Chankas, while Cuzco was still just a regional power. The sources concur that Urqon had at the very least been chosen as Wiraqocha Inka's successor, but they vary greatly on his deportment and formal status. Several early writers, including tlle judicious Cieza de Le6n (1967 [1553]), accepted tlle view that Inka Urqon had been a legitimately entllroned ruler who was deposed or killed by his younger brother Inka Yupanki (i.e., Pachakuti; see Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1953). Cieza's witnesses described Inka Urqon in highly unflattering terms, from an Andean perspective. He was a haughty, cowardly, and vice-ridden wife-stealer; he drank until he vomited, turned chicha (beer) into urine, and never erected even a single building. When Inka Urqon's descendants testified for Sarmiento's official history, tlley stated tllat tlle prince had been fully elevated as ruler; presumably, they left out the unflattering bits (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: ch. 25, p. 230; see also Ca bello Valboa 1951 [1586]: ch. 14, pp. 298-9). Most of the rest of Cuzco's aristocracy, however, denied tlleir claim oflegitimacy, perhaps to defend the status of tlleir own kin groups. They asserted that Inka Urqon had been named to succeed Wiraqocha Inka just because tlle old man had been so smitten with Inka Urqon's mother. 4 Betanzos (1996 [1557]: ch. 8, pp. 27-9), defending his wife's kin, wrote that Wiraqocha Inka merely had his beloved son treated as if he were ruler. There are otller versions of the entangled relationship among Wiraqocha, Inka Urqon, and Pachakuti, but these examples should illustrate how witnesses from competing kindreds could present greatly differing views on central issues. While ruler, Pachakuti appears to have ordered two or more of his brothers killed, on charges that were most likely at least partially concocted. At some point in his reign, he recognized his son Thupa Inka Yupanki to succeed him, displacing a previously selected elder son, who seems to have fallen short of expectations. Even though Thupa Inka served a military apprenticeship on the northern campaigns, his ascendancy does not seem to have been well received by all of Cuzco's f.1I11ilies. He reputedly had spent most of his youth sequestered in the main temple, called the "Golden Enclosure" (Qprilzancha), and thus might have been an unknown quantity to most Inka aristocracy. Upon Pachakuti's death, according to Sarmiento de Gamboa (1960 [1572]: ch. 48, p. 253), Thupa Inka immediately set guards to watch over the body, so that news of the deceased sovereign's passage to the next plane could not be leaked. The young man then arrayed 2200 armed soldiers around the temple, inside which he had his succession confirmed. Still leaving nothing to chance, Thupa Inka and his guard then marched to the main plaza, where he ordered all of Cuzco's citizens to pay homage to him upon pain of death. Even though he suppressed a coup attempt by another brother, Thupa Inka's reign may have ended prematurely, when he was murdered by close relations (Cabello Valboa 1951 [1586]: ch., 20, p. 358; Murlla 1986 [1605]: ch. 26).

Politics) resources) and blood in the 11'Ika empire His successor, Wayna Qhapaq, was reported by some chroniclers to have gained tlle tllrone through a coup and managed to stay in power only because an uncle put down a coup attempt on his own royal, but youtllful personage (Murua 1986 [1605]: ch. 29; Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: chs. 55-7, pp. 259-60; Cobo 1979 [1653]: Bk 11, ch. 16, p. 152). Guaman Poma de Ayala (1980 [1613]:/113 [113], p. 93) added that Wayna Qhapaq consolidated his position by murdering a couple of his brothers. When the ruler and his heir apparent both died in the wave of smallpox that heralded tlle Spanish arrival, it set the stage for the final dynastic war between two otller sons, Waskhar and Atawallpa. Keeping in mind the narrative contradictions that have been glossed over here, the succession crises enlighten us about both the practice and recounting of imperial politics. A most important point here is that, despite the fiction tllat was presented to the Spaniards - rule by an unbroken series of deified, omnipotent monarchs - Cuzco's successions were actually sanguinary dramas played out among the royal descent groups (see Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1960, 1983,1988; Rowe 1985a, 1985b; Zi6lkowski 1996, for a detailed examination of this issue). As noted above, the custom of split inheritance transferred the deceased's estate to a kin group that was usually headed by a surviving brother. The group's role was to use the accumulated personal resources of the ruler to venerate his mummy, who still contributed to imperial politics by attending public events and speaking through personal mediums. In 1532, the two most powerful pa1'laqas were Pachakuti's descendant kin, called Hatt,m aylht, and Thupa Inka's kin, called QfJapaq aylht. Without detailing the intricacies of Cuzco's politics any further, I would like to highlight three aspects of the panaqas' roles that go to the heart of politics, power, and wealth. First, during his brief but tumultuous reign, Waskhar gained the enmity of the panaqas by threatening to confiscate all of the resources of royal kindreds and the Temple of the Sun, the most powerful priesthood in the empire. He further alienated himselfth>m Cuzco's elites by murdering a number of respected elders who arrived on an embassy from his suspected rival Atawallpa, and by symbolically divorcing himself from Upper Cuzco. Several possible rationales have been proposed for his conduct (see Zi6lkowski 1996), but the key point here is that his actions would have stripped the elite families of their sources of wealth and their weight in Cuzqueilan politics. Second, at the end of the dynastic war, Atawallpa's victorious forces massacred not only Waskhar's kin and many adherents from Lower Cuzco, but also the kindred ofThupa Inka Yupanki, who was grandfather to the adversaries. Thupa Inka's mummy was dragged from its enclosure and incinerated, though some of his survivors managed the forlorn gesture of scraping his ashes into a jar. Those acts effaced both the most potent symbolic legacy ofThupa Inka's reign and the living people who maintained it. Not until 1569 did his few survivors resort to the Spanish court system to recover their lost estates (Rowe 1985b). Zi6lkowski (1996) plausibly suggests that such devastation was visited upon Thupa Inka's

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kin (Qj1apaq ayllu) because Waskhar's mother was a member of that group, which supported his aspirations, while Atawallpa's mother was a descendant of Hatun ayllu. A final point, which is directly related to the conflict between Qj1apaq ayllu and Hatun ayllu, is tllat Cuzco's aristocracy embraced at least six kin groups called panaqa that did not form part of tlle core hierarchy in 1532 (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1983; Gose 1996). There is some debate concerning tlle reasons for that situation, but it seems likely that royal kin groups could lose status and power and be removed from tlle hierarchy, as may have been envisioned for Waskhar's and Thupa Inka's kin. That is, not only were kin groups periodically rearranged in tlle hierarchy, but some may also have been dislodged. How much faitll we can place in any given story remains a matter of contention today. Nonetheless, tlle overall picture illustrates tlle conflictive dynamics among Cuzco's royal kin groups. Far from being a fixed structure, Inka sociopolitical organization was in periodic flux, and was in an especially unsettled state just as tlle Spaniards arrived. The situation also draws attention to tlle privatized resources tllat formed a crucial source of wealtll over which the royalty were competing. I now turn to tlle Inka economy, to see how state and private resources were developed, and how competition for those resources fits into the trajectory of tlle imperial era.

AN OUTLINE OF THE INKA ECONOMY

The state economy The Inka economy has often been taken to be the essence of order mandated from above. According to many early observers, the Inkas divided the lands and herds of newly annexed peoples among the state, the official church, and the communities (e.g., Garcilaso de la Vega 1963 [1609]; Cobo 1979 [1653]: Bk 11, ch. 28, p. 211; ch. 29, p. 215; Polo de Ondegardo 1916 [1571]: 58-60; Acosta 1962 [1590]: 300; Arriaga 1968 [1621]: 209). In principle, each institution or community was supported by its own rcsources so that none of the products derived fi'om community resources could be appropriated. Some early writers recognized that the divisions were not equal, but even that emendation misses the point that prime lands near Cuzco and in the provinces wc re set asidc as private estates for the royalty and aristocracy. More broadly, scholars such as Rostworowski de Diez Canseco (1962) and Murra (1979) have shown that there were perhaps nine kinds of land tenure under Inka rule in the early sixteenth century. Pastoralism also had institutional and private dimensions, despite blanket statements in the early sources that the Inkas owned all flocks in the empire. Similarly, craft production, exchange, and access to many kinds of raw materials and finished products were only partially subject to state supervision, Inka claims to the contrary notwithstanding. When wc take into account that tlle coastal economies were more specialized and integrated than those of their

Politics, resources, and blood in the Inka empire

mountain neighbors, it becomes apparent that even sketching out the range of economies in Tawantinsuyu is beyond the scope of this chapter (see Murra 1980 [1956]; D'Altroy 1994).5 My purpose here is therefore to focus on the foundations of the Inka state economy and the place of elite - especially royal resources within it. In several influential works, Murra (1975, 1980 [1956]) described how tlle state economy was cast as an extension of the Peruvian highland economies that were present when the Inkas carved out their empire. The Inkas built upon existing structures, using an ideology that legitimized exploitation in the guise oftraditional relations of kin-based mutuality and inequality. Typically, households nested witllin a corporate kin group called an ayllu gained access to farmlands, pastures, and other resources as an outgrowth of their membership in the group. The ayllu often tried to disperse their populations across ecozones in an effort to be as self-sufficient as possible (Murra 1972). Social elites often had rights to farm and pastorallabor, personal service, and some craft products, in return for their ceremonial, political, and military leadership, and for sponsoring festive events. The elites cemented tlleir social tics in part by dispensing certain material goods and edibles to their people, especially cloth, chicha (maize beer), and coca (WachtelI977; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988). The mutual obligations bonded groups, reinforced unequal statuses, and made some goods available to people who otherwise might not have been able to get them. When the Inkas conquered a region, they claimed all resources, which were then reallocated principally among the state, the state religion, and the subject communities. The state seems to have enjoyed far more resources than did the religion, although provinces may have been entirely committed to the church's holdings (sce La Lone and La Lone 1987; C. J. ]ulien 1993). The state apportioned farming and grazing land back to the communities in exchange for rotating corvee, callcd mitJa. Some natural resourccs, especially metal ores, were heavily controlled by the state, but the purported monopoly was not actually achieved (Berthelot 1986). In practicc, communities kept many of their ancestral resources, but did give up prime farmlands, pasturcs, and other resources to the state. Both colonial and modcrn authors often observc that labor provided the main sourcc of wealth for the Inkas, but the state was actually receiving both services and products; state personnel made decisions accordingly (S. F. Moore 1958: 59). Gencrallists ofthc labor rcndered by taxpayers cnumerated over forty kinds of tasks (Falc6n 1946 [1567]); Murlla 1986 [c. 1605]) that correspond fairly well to reports takcn down in Spanish provincial inspections. In Peru's Huanuco region, for example, witnesses reported that they had carried out thirty-onc differcnt duties for the state, ranging fi'om f.1rming and herding, to masonry, military service or guard duty, mining, portagc, and artisanry (He/mer 1955-6 [1549]; Ortiz de ZlIi'iiga 1967 [1562], 1972 [1562 ]). Each assignment was allocated according to the population of the region, as assessed by a periodic census, taking into account the resources that could be exploited. In return for their

215

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Tercnce N. D)Altro),

8.3 Distriliution I!f' the e%/l ist (mitmaqkuna) IIr/i.mll settlclllctltJ dcscribed in 'he te.vt.

eH()rts, the laborers were entitled to be supported with fClod and chicha while carrying out state directives. Some of the most important state institutions were special labor groups, among which the mitmaq/w1ta, )'t71I1l/wlIa, and aqUa/w1Ja stand out (see Rowe 1982). The first group consisted of colonists resettled internally to meet military, political, and economic needs (Fig. 8.3; e.g., Espinoza 1970, 1973, 1975, 1987). In some cases, especially under Wayna Qhapaq, the Inkas established great farms and craft production centers in especially favorable sites (La Lone and La Lone 1987; Spurling 1992). An immense f~ll'll1 lay in the temperate Cochabamba Valley (Bolivia), f()r example, where Wayna Qhapaq ordered the western valley vacated to make way fc)r 14,000 agricultural workers, both colonists and corvee laborers (Wachtel 1982). The maize grown there was reportedly dedicated to the Inb's armies; it was first stored in 2500 storehouses at Cotapachi and then transported to Cuzco or other locales. Other farms were also assigned to military uses, including those at Arica, Arequipa, and Abancay, where coca, cotton, pepper, and various fl'uits were cultivated (Espinoza Soriano 1973; La Lone and La Lone 1987; Spurting 1992). Whether they tended erops or made cloth or pots, the mitml1qlllwa were given use rights of lands they used to support themselves. Empire-wide, the scale of the resettlement was extraordinary, as hundreds if not thousands of communities were moved in their entirety to new locations. It is probable that several million people were ultimately resettled under Inka rule, some locally and SOl11e thousands of kilometers 11'0111 their homelands (sce Rowe 1982). The )'t71W/W1111 were individuals detached f"om their kin group and assigned permanent duties, including !;1l'Illing and household service (clr the elites. The individuals and !;ll11ilies assigned to work royal estates were often detached in such a f:lshion. Especially talented ),111111/W1111 could attain high administrative positions. The Ilqllll/W111l were young women assigned to live in segregated precincts within state installations where they wove cloth and brewed chichll, until awarded in marriage to men honored by the state (sce Morris 1974). There is good reason to believe that, in creating these specialized labor statuses, the Inkas were elaborating existing institutions. The Chi mu of' Peru's north coast, in particular, appear to have boasted specialized artisans attached to society's elite and perhaps to state institutions (Rowe 1948; Moseley and Cordy-Collins 1(90). As they did with many /Catures of the empire, however, the Inkas carried out the reorganization on a previously unheard-of scale. Although the Inkas installed these features in many parts of their domain, the economics of subject societies varied a great deal regionally. On Peru's north coast, f(lr example, local groups specialized in particular products, sllch as ceramics, textiles, marine or 1:\I'In products, and sandals, exchanging their products fCll' those made by others. Some coastal people even made a living as specialized traders (Rosrworowski de Diez Canseco 1970; Netherly 1978). The coast differed also in the scale of irrigated agricultlll'al systems, as the most extensive canal

Politics) resources, and blood in the In/m

o

217

500

1000 km

N Inka site 0 Modern town or city • Town or city over Inka site ()

OSamaipata

BOLIVIA

'-V-Y~vi oTilcara Potrero de Payogasta • Safla

La Paya

• Tucumnn

ARGENTINA

218

Politics, resources, and blood in the Ill/m empire

Terence N. D JAltl'oy networks in the Americas connected five valleys in the Lambayeque-La Leche region. The leaders of the Chimu state, which held sway over the north coast before being conquered by Cuzco, favored investing its public labor in agricultural projects rather than in monumental architecture. The people of the northern Andes had less complex economic formations than did the Chimu, but used monetary goods in regional marketing systems. Even in the Bolivian altiplanl), where the mixed herding-fanning economy was roughly comparable to that of the southern Peruvian highlands, the balance much more heavily favored the pastoral sector. Given such variations and the accommodations that the Inkas had to make to local differences, wc have to take the description of the Inka economy just presented as a general portrayal and not as a universal model.

219

km

25

Royal and aristocratic estates The expanding Inka polity put enormous resources at the disposal of its elites. Some of those assets were converted into private reserves for living and dead emperors, their descendant jJrtllaqas, and the other aristocracy. Every province was supposed to set aside lands ()l' each ruler, but the most elegant royal estates lay in the heartland, concentrated in a stretch of the Vilcanota/Urubamba drainage between Pisac and Machu Picchu often called the Sacred Valley of the Inkas (Fig. 8.4). As was the case with many aspects of Inka reorganization, Pachakuti 'was usually credited with the instigation of royal estates. Every ruler (i'om vViraqocha onward owned estates, however, and even earlier monarchs may have also had private manors. Inka Roq 'a and Yawar \Vaqaq's descendants, f()r example, occupied settlements where t-hey venerated the mummies of their royal ancestors (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [15721: ch. 19, p. 224; Cobo 1979 116531: Bk2,ch.9,p. 125andBk2,ch.l0p. 129; Rowe 1967:n.21,(1.68). Rulers claimed their properties in many ways, including carving out new estates from virgin territory and commandeering expanses that had already been developed. Rowe (1990: 143) suggests that Pachakuti f(lllllded estates at locations such as Pisac and Ollantaytambo to commemorate his military victories. He even spruced up all estate at Juchuy Cossco f()r his deposed f;lther Wiraqocha, where he could live out his years in relative comf()rt (see A. Kendall et ill. 1992). Rulers may have sometimes converted selected state lands into private holdings (Murra 1980 119561: 38), such as when Waskhar claimed a region east of Hu,lnuco as his domain (c. J. Julien 1993: 209-11). Monarchs and aristocrats could also augment their holdings by accepting gifls fi'om subjects, although the voluntary nature of some of those donations is doubtful (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1962: 134, 136; Conrad and Demarest 1984: 139). In an especially interesting twist, some estates seem to have been acquired and lost through games of chance, played even with the Sun himself (Albornoz 1989l1584J: 175,182; Cobo 1979[16531: ch. 15, p. 149; C. J. Julien 1993: 184, 209, 233). Rulers also confiscated some estates once the dust had settled

Principalln\{a Royal Estates .. III A

* •

+ o

Inka Roq'a Wiraqocha Inka Pachakuti Inka Thupa Inl{a Yupanki WaYlla QIlC1paq WaskllC1r other major Inka site

/I'om successional infighting (Cabcllo Valboa 1951 115861: pt 3, ch. 20, p. 360). An important transferral or lands may have also been envisaged at the close or the dynastic war between Atawallpa and Waskhar. As described earlier, the conflict ended with the virtual eradication of the adults of Thupa Inka Yupanki's /JtWllq17 (QfJltjll7lJ Ay/ltl) and the members ofWaskhar's ptYIltllJa ( WftJllhlll' Ayllll). With no adults len to protect their interests, the descendants of Qhapaq Ayllu resorted to a lawsuit in 1569 to regain their ancestors' lost estates (Rowe 1985b; Niles 1987: 20). From a physical viewpoint, some estates wert' created through f(lI'Illidable engineering works. Wayna Qhapaq's holdings in Yucay were largcly reclaimed /i'om swamp, and Waskhar's estate at Pomabamba was developed by diverting a river to create new land (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1962: 134-5; Villanueva Urteaga 1971; Niles 1987: 13). Even though parts of the estates attributed to early monarchs boasted major land improvements, the riverine reclamation projects may have become increasingly important because the good existing field lands had already been spoken fi)r. At onc point, Waskhar groused that land tenure customs meant that the dead "had all that was the best of his kingdom," and that no decent expanses were left for him to claim (Pizarro 1986 [15711: ch. 10, p. 54). His gripe may have arisen from political rancor linked to

8.4 i)is/.ri/llltioll l!f' 'he /ll'illci/la/l'o),1l1 cstatcs ill 'hc CIIZCO I'ClJioll, l'tTII.

220

Terence N. DJAltroy

his conflict with Atawallpa, but he may have also had legitimate grounds for complaint about access to prime lands for rural manors. What is especially significant here is that he seems to have proposed abolishing or confiscating some estates, with an eye to appropriating them himself. Although our picture of the prehispanic system around Cuzco has been clouded by native claimants' ready use of European legal precepts to gain control over lands, it seems clear that a deceased ruler's estates were normally left to his panaqa. In accordance with the principle called split inheritance, the throne passed to a successor who had to develop his own kin group's resources. The lands of the queen (qoya) were held separately; they did not devolve to her husband's panaqa, but were left to her descendants, both male and female. Ownership of the estates may have been especially tangled, because the Inka royalty were linked through blood and marriage in many ways. Personal choice may have also played a role in inheritance, as claimants in early Coloniallitigation testified that some bequests skipped generations at the wish of the benefactor. Over the generations, the number and types of claims that could be placed on particular plots must have created fertile ground for intrigue (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1962, 1963, 1966; Murra 1979; Heffernan 1995). The royal estates were spread across the landscape to provide access to a wide range of resources. Wayna Qhapaq's holdings in Yucay, which are the best described among the manors, contained croplands, pastures, settlements, forests, parks, a pond and marsh, a hunting range, and salt fields (Villanueva Urteaga 1971; Farrington 1995). The ecological heterogeneity of the Andes and the decades-long land improvement projects meant that parcels belonging to rulers, aristocrats, and local communities were intercalated among one another. The Inkas were uncommonly prone to record-keeping and naming natlll'al and artificial features of the landscape, but the close reckoning of named plots and individual terraces covering less than half a hectare suggests how important it was to keep track of the smallest parcels ofland (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1962,1963,1966; Rowe 1990, 1997). Since the estates formed a patchwork, it is hard to estimate how big individual properties were, but some emperors' personal holdings probably covered thousands of hectares. The number of workers dedicated to the royal estates was remarkable; 2400 men and their f.1milies were dedicated to maintaining Wayna Qhapaq's holdings at Yucay (Villanueva Urteaga 1971: 94,98, 136, 139; Rowe 1982: 100; Niles 1987: 13-15). Even more impressively, Thupa Inka Yupanki had 4000-4500 workers at his estates in each of three locations in the empire (Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1966: 32). Their products were used to support the monarchs in a suitable manner in life and in death. They also provided sustenance and wealth for their descendants, and underwrote their political and ceremonial activities. Those needs were weighty, since living and dead rulers and their kin spent a great deal of time visiting each other and performing rituals. Cobo (1990 [1653]: Bk 1, ch. 10, pp. 40-3) commented acerbically that those visits were needed to rationalize the panaqas' ownership of such expansive resources and their fondness for lazy debauchery.

Politics, resources, and blood in the Jnka empire Archaeological remains of estates The archaeological remains along the Sacred Valley provide magnificent witness to the resources and artisanry devoted to royal estates. The Inkas' penchant for melding landforms and structures is one of the most distinctive features of their approach to designing the estates. All exhibit finely crafted terracing, waterworks, and stonework, and they are usually situated on rocky promontories. That combination of features was probably intentional, for stones, springs, and peaks were homes to the powerful spirits called apu; the architecture of the estates gives ample indication that their occupants were often immersed in ceremonies (MacLean 1986; Hyslop 1990: 102-45). There is an especially neat correspondence between known royal estates and the most elegant terracing around Cuzco (Protzen 1993: 271). Hyslop (1990: 140) has observed that the design and orientation of waterworks found at the royal estates are also not part of a generalized pattern. A brief description of some of the estates will help provide a sense of their natlll'e. Ollantaytambo, said to have been founded by Pachakuti, was a planned residential settlement with palaces, religious and defensive structures, storehouses, roads and bridges, terraces, and waterworks (Squier 1877; Gasparini and Margolies 1980: 68-75; Gibaja Oviedo 1984; Hollowell1987; Protzen 1993). Its center is dominated by a trapezoidal street grid on an alluvial fan, with town blocks formed by closed compounds (Ilancha), consisting of up to six one-room buildings facing on to an open patio. To the west, a grand set of terraces cascades down a steep hill, where the complexes now called the Fortaleza and its Temple of the Sun were erected. The treatment of the landscape around Ollantaytambo epitomizes the Inkas' bent for modifying the natural terrain and tailoring their constructions to existing landforms (Fig. 8.5). They channelized both the Urubamba and Patakancha rivers and built eleven expansive terraces that gracefully blended in with the slope of the piedmont; their steep walls helped to repel the Spanish expedition sent against Manqo Inka in 1536 (An6nimo, Sitio del Cuzco 1934 [1536]: 33; Pizarro 1986 [1571]: 146-8; Protzen 1993: 22-6). It is intriguing to note that, although panaqasostensibly had an inviolate right to control their estates, both Pachakuti and Thupa Inka Yupanki reportedly built important edifices at the site. Archaeological work has identified three major imperial-era construction phases, using seven different kinds of stone, each of which was worked in a distinct style. Over time, early structures were dismantled, and many stones were reworked and repositioned (Hollowell 1987: 48). Designs were still being executed when the Spanish appearance abruptly stopped imperial construction. Thus, even at a site claimed to have been the property of a single emperor and his panaqa, there were shifts in planning and execution over 150 years' occupation. Thupa Inka Yupanki's best-known estate was a rural villa created for him at Chinchero, about 30 km northwest of Cuzco (Alcina Franch 1976; Alcina Franch et al. 1976). Like other manors, Chinchero was a planned settlement, containing a large central plaza and a platform mound and enhanced with both

221

222

Termce N. D'Altroy

Politics, resources, and blood in the lnho

Inl
8..5 DiJtril1ll tioll (d' t/Jf tfl'l'II uti 11111 dJ ill

I'll elmlm ti '.I' rOYlI1 eJtlltf lit CIIJidmCII, ill the Umllllllllltl I'ipt:!'

Pllllcy, IIbollt 9011111 lIol'tIJII't:Jt I!f CIIZCO.

agricultural ttrracts and compounds that Iktanzos (1996 115571: ch. 3R. p. 159) said wt:rt built to houst Cuzco's nobility whtn thty camt to visit. Chincht:ro was appartntly tntirdy an impt:rial stttkmtnt in prthistory, as tht fill dtposits {i'om rtmOlkkd topography contain quantitits of Inka polychromt ctramics (Rivt:ra 1976: 2R). As might bt txptcttd at a royal ITtrtat at which rdaxni rtsidtnct and hospitality wtrt tht major activitits, tht pottt:ry contains largt storagt jars, and vtssds usni to prtpart and strw food and drink. Ovt:rall, thtlT is lin'k tvidtnce of ctrel110nial activities, or of craft: production, save a bit of textik making.

Wayna Qhapaq's main estate in Yucay was centered at the residence called Quispiguanca. It was a place of recreation that txisted only because of major feats of Inka ecological engineering, since much of the manor consisted of tracts claimed from swamp through channdization of the main rivtr and several tributaries (Farrington 1983, 1995). Its largdy adobe architecture is modest in comparison to the tstatts of other emperors, perhaps btcause Wayna Qhapaq's most daborate lodgings wt:re in Tumipampa, Ecuador, f~lI' removtd tt'om Cuzco (Niles 1992). The manor (10.4 ha) contains thrte sectors on a series of terracts and an alluvial f~lI1: an agricultural area, a structural or rtsidtntial zone, and a Iakeside house complex. The holdings included f(xty namtd parcds where maize, sweet potatoes, and tht warm weatht:r crops of coca, peppers, cotton, and ptanuts wtre cultivated (Villanueva Urteaga 1971). According to the documentary sources, the manor included deer-filled woods, and an artificial pond that was ustd to raise fish and reeds. The presence of stvtral plants [I'om warmer and more humid climts than Yucay suggests that tht Inkas knew how to USt the terraces' heat- and moisture-retaining capacities to devise a mini-1ttrmtana near Cuzco f()I' the emptror's pkaslII'e (Farrington 1995). Visitors to the tstates arc often struck by tht array of architectural and land improvement techniques sddoll1 setn outside the heartland. The royal estates f(Jl'Il1 a large fi'action of the sites with the ornate ashlar masonry, intricate canal and f()ulltain compkxes, and degant terracing f()I' which the Inkas arc so justly renowned. We often think of land improvements as though they arc designed to intensify production. Though that was true in some cases f()I' the lnkas, the main goals at the royal estates had as much to do with defining symbolic spaCt, status display, and ptrhaps aesthetics as with subsistence intensification. The mlll11l11ks 01' idols of most departed ll10narchs were revered there, whik their wealthy descendants perf(>I'Il1ed a recurrent stquel1ce or rituals that ensured that their positions or status would be maintaintd. The design of'the sett'kl11ents, which modified and adaptnl to natural sources of power, such as rocks, peaks, and springs, signifies that the rulers were both rtvering and staking a claim to the powers of tht cosmos through the immtdiate landscape (Farrington 19R3, 1995: 57; see also Protzen 1993). At the same time, they improvtd production by incrtasing the arabk land arca, reducing erosion, providing irrigation water, and creating bvorable microclimatts. Overall, the rural estates, more than any other aspect of' the empire outside Cuzco (Fig. R.6), exemplif)! how an inbred and txclusionary upper class increasingly controlled power and wealth at the htart of the empire.

CONCLUSION

or

This chapter has txplortd some tht dynamic rdationships betwttn the political and tconomic tkvdopments in tht Inka tmpil't. As with most isslles, the state and dite institutions, and tht economy that sustained them, arc much better umkrstood in their final f(>I'I11 than in their early stages. We still have only

223

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a marginal grip on the nature of lifC at the verge of the imperial era. Even so, it seems plausible to surmise that the early lnb polity went through a progression tl'om alliance and raiding, to domination, and finally to direct annexation. Our current archaeological evidence suggests that those shifts began to occur sometime between about 1200 and 1400 C E, after which an expansionist phase began in earnest. The creation of proto-imperial styles in architecture and prestigious material culture seems to have antedated the major expansions, so that by the time the lnbs undertook to conquer the known world, some of the material correlates that wc associate with imperial status were already in place. Still, the lnkas appear to have elaborated much of their socioeconomic apparatus only as a response to managing a vast new population. By 1532, the Inkas had made remarkable strides toward placing their stamp on the societies throughout the Andes. The moves toward creation of an independent state economy, based on discrete resources and using dedicated personnel, had transfill'll1ed the nature of life lilr millions of people. As much as incorporation into the I nka state trans!()f'Jlled many aspects of subject societies, however, the stability of local economics provided the filllndations of the state economy. Accordingly, much of what had organized communities previously still characterized liIC at the local level under Cuzco's reign. The importance of/ocal kin groups in providing access to resources and to organizing labor, the kinship basis of the social hierarchy, and the rights to sumptuary goods as a consequence of social status were still central, even if the rights were now conferred Il'om above. Despite local stability, some of the shifts that were underway had the potential to tranSl(lI'Ill lile in permanent, substantive ways. Onc major change was the development of private resources. The most prominent holdings were the royal estates near Cuzco, but manors were also set aside lilr kings and other aristocrats outside the heartland. The justification I(lr such enrichment of individuals or kin was often fi'amed in exalted terl11S, as the descendants of venerated ancestors had to care fill' their ever-living fi:lrebears. The net result, however it was phrased, was to transICr prime resources permanently into private hands and thus to inflame competition at the highest level. The jJfl1laqa thus became affluent while assuming the obligation of keeping the deified ancestors in state. Despite the principle that royal estates were to be worked in perpetuity by and fill' the jJ(11Wqfl of each emperor, there arc some hints that the policy was not absolute. Ollantaytambo, till' example, deviated tl'OI11 the prescription, and one of Thupa Inka Yupanki's estates was reportedly abandoned shortly beti:lI'e the empire's collapse (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [ 1572 [: ch. 32, p. 237; Cobo 1979 [ 1653[: Bk 2, ch. 15, p. 149). It is especially interesting that the ll10st powerful clites (i.e., kings) may have had the ability to convert institutional resomces into private estates. In the provinces, the neat lines between state and subject, or public and private, were also sOll1etimes blmred, as the perks granted subject clites were often consull1ed in public activities. Regional elites were simultaneously leaders

8.6 Distriblltion I!I' Id'thc princijllll stlltcjiTril/s, /JI'o)Jillcilll csllltcs, IInd slol'tT.!JC jildlitics tln·oll.!Jhollt SOIllC

7i~H'mltiI/JIIYIl.

226

Terence N. D)Altroy of the local society, self-interested landed gentry, and state managers. Because of their multiple roles, there was ample room for conflicting interests to operate among provincial elites, a situation attested to in early documents. In closing, I would like to emphasize that tllis chapter has focused on just a few of tile complexities of life among tile powerful in tile Inka empire. Comparison Witll tile otller chapters in this volume, however, should illustrate tllat the processes described here evince bOtll general patterns seen in a variety of cases and twists of a peculiarly Andean nature. It is my hope tllat by meshing the two, we will come to a better understanding of empires in general and Tawantinsuyu in particular.

9 Egypt and Nubia Robert MOl·kot

THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE IN NUBIA IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE (c. 1550-1070 BeE) Introduction: self-definition and the imperial concept in Egypt There can be little doubt tllat tile Egyptian pharaohs and the elite of the New Kingdom viewed themselves as rulers of an empire. This universal rule is clearly expressed in royal imagery and terminology (Grimal 1986). The pharaoh is styled as the "Ruler of all that sun encircles" and from the mid-18th Dynasty the titles "King of kings" and "Ruler of the rulers," with the variants "Lion" or "Sun of the Rulers," emphasize pharaoh's preeminence among other monarchs. The imagery of kingship is of the all-conquering heroic ruler subjecting all foreign lands. The Icing in human form smites his enemies. Or, as the celestial conqueror in the form of the sphinx, he tramples them under foot. In the reigns of Amenhotep III and Akhenaten this imagery was extended to the king's wife who became the conqueror of the female enemies of Egypt, appearing like her husband in both human and sphinx forms (MOl·kot 1986). The appropriate terminology also appeared; Queen Tiye became "Mistress of all women" and "Great of terror in the foreign lands." Empire, for the Egyptians, equals force "all lands arc under his feet." This metaphor is graphically expressed in the royal footstools and painted paths decorated with images of bound foreign rulers, crushed by pharaoh as he walked or sat. This imagery and terminology indicates that the Egyptian attitude to their empire was universally applied irrespective of the peoples or countries. Their response to their subjects was not distinguished in racial terms; all were foreign. Practically, however, there is evidence that the Egyptians did have different responses to the control, integration, and administration of Aft·ican and Asian regions. The Egyptian response to Nubia differed from the response to Asia for a number of reasons, both historic and geographic. In tllis chapter, however, I will limit my discussion to the relations between Egypt and Nubia.

227

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Robert Morkot

Changing interpretations of the Egyptian empire in Nubia In 1964, Adams summarized the then generally accepted view of Egypt's relationship with Nubia during the Late Bronze Age (New Kingdom, c. 1550-1070 BC E), and offered his own interpretation based upon preliminary results of the UNESCO campaign in Nubia. The UNESCO campaign, associated with construction of the Aswan dam, produced a vast amount of new archaeological and epigraphic material, not all of which has yet been published or synthesized. While rejecting many of the older interpretations that were based on prejudicial and problematic premises, Adams' (1964, 1977) characterization of the Egyptian empire still perpetuated a number of views established at the beginning of the twentieth century. A significant change in Egyptological attitudes to the Egyptian empire in Nubia is found in the conference papers and syntheses of the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g., Kemp 1978; Frandsen 1979; Leclant 1980; O'Connor in Trigger et al. 1983; Israelit-GroIl1983). These works embraced not only new material, but also new approaches within archaeology. All were rooted in the evidence, and not in theory building. They were, nevertheless, informed by contemporary theoretical approaches to imperialism. Prominent features of these studies include the emphasis on the role of ideology in imperial expansion, and a questioning of the role of trade and the assumption that empires were necessarily economic exploiters. Kemp, Frandsen, and O'Connor particularly emphasize the integration oflocal elites into Egyptian imperial administration and argue against the direct exploitation model. More recently, S. T. Smith (1991) has been among the few Egyptologists to discuss theoretical models of imperialism. Finding the arguments in Eisenstadt (1979) to be somewhat overgeneralized, he detects more relevance for Egyptian activities in Nubia in the model proposed by Horvath (1972) and Bartel (1980, 1985) and the specific applications of D'Altroy and Earle (1985) and Alcock (1989). Building on this theoretical discussion, Smith (1995) went on to publish the material from the UNESCO excavations at Askut, and offered a model for the economics and ideology of imperialism in Nubia. A further result of the UNESCO Nubian campaign of the 1960s was the publication of the tombs of indigenous Nubian princes of the 18th Dynasty at Debeira (Save-Soderbergh 1967-8; Save-Soderbergh and Troy 1991) and Toshka (Simpson 1963). Kemp, O'Connor, and Frandsen had already emphasized the role of these individuals, but Save-Soderbergh and Troy (1991) provided an important reappraisal in the light of tlle new material. With the exception of these studies, the period of the Egyptian New Kingdom occupation of Nubia has been rather neglected in recent years. This is due in large part to an understandable change in attitudes within Nubian studies itselt~ laying much greater emphasis on indigenous phases rather than on Egyptian "colonial" monuments.

Egypt and Nubia My approach (Morkot 1994, outlined in Morkot 1987) examines the Egyptian domination of Nubia in the New Kingdom through various themes: military, political geography (MOl'kot 1991 b), administration, economics (MOl'kot 1995a), and ideology. In considering all of these separate issues, I have emphasized the chronological framework. That is, New Kingdom Egyptian rule in Nubia lasted for close to 500 years. Clearly there must have been considerable changes over that period. One specific area that I wished to address was tlle "collapse" or end of imperial rule and its aftermatll. The older interpretation of Egyptian imperialism in Nubia saw Egypt as an active-progressive center tllat subordinated and transformed a passive and backward periphery. Witll the end of Egyptian involvement, Nubia then "reverted." This view has been challenged and modified by a number of recent writers, but the idea of reversion to some form of nomadic or "tribal" society has persisted. In contrast, I view the Kushite Kingdom that (eventually) came to dominate Egypt as the "25th Dynasty" (c. 740-656 BCE) as a "successor state," tlle development of which is inextricable from the imperial system of the Egyptian New Kingdom (see below). Indeed, to view this successor as immediately filling the power vacuum left by Egyptian withdrawal, if not actually being responsible for that withdrawal, itself necessitates a radical revision of our interpretation of tlle limits of Egyptian control. Earlier archaeologists proposed that the period of Egyptian rule was marked by a decline in population in the late New Kingdom, and argued that the end of the period was marked by hydraulic crisis that contributed to imperial collapse. Although this interpretation is now generally rejected, many of the conclusions that derive from it are still accepted. The idea that the Egyptians simply left Nubia in c. 1070 BCE and that nothing happened until the Kushite Kingdom appeared some 300 years later is inherently unlikely. This is not an interpretation suggested by even the most cursory glance at other postimperial and postcolonial societies. Working from the premises that: (1) there was no reason to accept that there was a major depopulation of Nubia during the Late New Kingdom, and (2) there was no hiatus in either archaeology 01' history, led me to consider, among other alternatives, that there was indeed a flaw in our chronological interpretation (J ames et al. 1991). I still feel that this highly controversial alternative is worth considering. Other scholars have also challenged conventional interpretations. Bruce Williams (1980) offered a reinterpretation of the post-New Kingdom archaeology of Lower Nubia. And David O'Connor (1987,1991) questioned the location of some Nubian territories. This has led to a rethinking of how f.1r the Egyptians expanded and campaigned in Nubia, and Nubian responses to Egyptian imperial expansion. S. T. Smith (1991: 94 n.12) also rejects tlle depopulation theory. The most significant questions that arise from this questioning of traditional interpretations are:

229

230

1 Was the administration of Nubia entirely controlled by "colonial" Egyptians? 2 Were there large numbers of Egyptian settlers in Nubia? 3 Was tl1e Egyptian economic exploitation ofNubia one-sided plunder? 4 Was tl1e Egyptian response to Nubia fundamentally different from her response to Asia? 5 Did a hydraulic crisis cause the population of Nubia to decline rapidly from the later-18tl1 Dynasty onwards resulting in an almost depopulated country by tl1e end of tl1e viceregal period?

Table 9.1. ComparatiJJe chronology: Egypt and Nubia Central Sudan

Upper Nubia

?

?

The Egyptian New Kingdom presence in Nubia cannot be considered in JlaCUO, but has to be seen as tl1e third phase of a complex relationship that stretched back for some 2000-plus years. Pending the publication of the material from the Old Kingdom Town site at Buhen (being undertaken by David O'Connor), which will certainly require some reevaluation of our current understandings, the relationship between Egypt and Nubia in the Egyptian Early-Dynastic/Old Kingdom may be summarized as follows. In tl1e late Predynastic phase, equivalent to the Nubian A-Group (c. 5000-3000 B CE; Trigger's Early Nubian, Adams' A-Horizon) there were strong trading contacts between the two regions. These have recently been summarized by H. S. Smith (1991). The radical hypothesis ofBruce Williams (1980) - that the pharaonic monarchy first appeared in Nubia during this period - has been rejected by the majority of both Egyptologists and Nubian archaeologists. There is now more material from Abydos that predates the Nubian material Williams worked with. Indeed, the archaeological material from Abydos, Hierakonpolis, and other sites further north is forcing a complete reevaluation of the emergence of the pharaonic state. Nevertheless, Williams was certainly justified in revising the earlier model that saw A-Group society as non-hierarchical. It is clear that during the period of state formation in Egypt, Nubia was undergoing a similar process. This was probably due in large part to increased economic contacts between the two regions. By the time of the unification of Egypt there were three principal powers in Lower Nubia - and they may have been united into one state based at Qustul. However, we have no documentary evidence to illuminate this, and the evidence at present is derived from the cemetery sites of Seyala (H. S. Smith 1994) and Qustul (B. B. Williams 1986, 1992). Egyptian military expansion into Nubia in the 1st Dynasty seems to have been an attempt to suppress a powerful southern neighbor (H. S. Smith 1991). However, there is no evidence of what motivated Egyptian actions. Was Nubia somehow involved militarily in Egypt? There is a consensus among archaeologists working in Nubia that the indigenous population was driven out by the Egyptian campaigns and that for the major part of the Egyptian Old Kingdom the Nubians adopted a nomadic lifestyle in the surrounding semi-desert regions.

Lower Nubia

Egypt

Near East

Pre- Dynastic

EB I EARLY

?

?

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Early Dynastic

EB II BRONZE

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Egyptian policy in Nubia in the Old and Middle Kingdom

231

Egypt and Nubia

Robert Morkot

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Kingdom of Nobatia

The strong cultural similarities with people who appear in Nubia in the late Old Kingdom suggest that they may have regained control of the Lower Nubian Nile valley in the 5th Dynasty - perhaps forced back into the valley by increasing desiccation of surrounding regions. It is also possible that while adopting a seminomadic lifestyle they had continued to come into the Nile valley seasonally to raise crops.

232

Egypt and Nubia

Robert Morkot

The Egyptian presence in Nubia during the Old Kingdom seems to have been sporadic rather than constant. S. T. Smith (1991: 83) characterizes this phase as an example ofHorvath and Bartel's "Eradication Imperialism." Although there is evidence of direct exploitation of resources, notably the diOl'ite from the quarries at Toshka to the west of Buhen, the full economic importance of Nubia to Egypt is still unclear. It might be assumed that some gold and semi-precious stones were acquired from the deserts and presumably from trade with Upper Nubia, and, through Upper Nubia, with the central Sudan. The excavations at Kerma are now producing material from the so-called pre- Kerma phases, and it is likely that the center was already emerging as a point of contact between the Egyptians and Nubians. The activities of the Middle Kingdom pharaohs began with military forays in the 11 th Dynasty. Again Nubia seems to have been divided into multiple states with powerful rulers, some of whom may have already adopted pharaonic style (MOl'kot 1999a). Middle Kingdom military activities were prolonged, continuing into the reigns of 12th Dynasty rulers Amenemhat I and Senusret I. One official's rock inscription records that he had been campaigning in Nubia for twenty years on behalf of pharaoh. As in the Old Kingdom, there seems to have been an attempt to completely subjugate the population, although this time not to force them out of the country. References to crop destruction, felling of trees, and razing of villages indicate the intensity of the campaigns. The Egyptians built a series of massive fortresses - but these were for control of the Nile traffic. Most are situated around the 2nd Cataract, with Buhen the major depot at the northern end (see Fig. 9.1). Two other major forts controlled the Nile valley in Lower Nubia. The extent to which the Egyptians integrated the Nubian population in this phase is still questionable. There is archaeological evidence for a flourishing local culture, and conventional interpretations assume that the Egyptians were not interested in the indigenous population. Instead, the focus of attention was the trade with the south. This phase can be seen as an example of Horvath and Bartel's "Equilibrium Imperialism" (S. T. Smith 1991: 83). It ended with Egypt's withdrawal. Having initially supported the Kerma "state" as a trading partner, perhaps militarily, Kerma's power grew to such an extent that it was able to take over Lower Nubia (a cause or result of Egyptian withdrawal).

Military expansion into Nubia in the New Kingdom (c. 1555-1070 BeE) The process of New Kingdom Egyptian military expansion into Nubia has been reasonably clear for a long time from the evidence of hieroglyphic inscriptions and graffiti. Relatively little new material has come to light in recent years, and that which has has tended to add detail rather than radically alter our reconstruction of events. Nevertheless, the scholarly literature still tends to underemphasize the time and effort required for the Egyptians to gain control of Nubia as

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far as the 4th Nile Cataract. Egyptian rule in Nubia during the Late Bronze Age (New Kingdom) lasted altogether for about 500 years, of which the phase of expansion amounted to a thll hundred years. (Note: in the following discussion, I follow conventional chronological terminology; dates written as + "150," tor example, are those of Egyptian domination calculated f)'om year 1 of the reign ofKamose, c. 1555 BCE). It was with the three military campaigns during the co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (+ 63-84) that Egyptian domination as f.1r as the 3rd Cataract was assured and some significant control was gained over the region as far as the 4th Cataract. Thutmose III did not return to Nubia for twenty-five years (+ 109), when he sailed through the Dongola Reach as far as Gebel Barkal. He claims to have been the first pharaoh to do this - and there is no evidence to the contrary. This year therefore marks the establishment of the Egyptian frontier at the 4th Cataract. Military actions following his reign are relatively few and appear to have been directed principally against desert gold-mining regions. A period

9.1

LOIIICI'

Nubia.

234

Robert Morkot of apparent peace followed (+ 116-212), in which diplomacy rather than war dominated Egyptian foreign policy and Nubian "luxuries" were the mainstay of international gift-exchange. From the reign of Horemheb (+215-246) on, a different situation seems to have prevailed in military activities in the south. Although much of the Nile valley appears to have remained peaceful, the regions on the southern frontier were increasingly dominated by the "rebellions" of Irem (O'Connor 1987). The end of Egyptian rule in Nubia is still rather obscure. The evidence suggests that the viceregal government continued to operate normally until after the reign of Ramesses VI (+ 397-403). At some point in the late 20th Dynasty, possibly as late as the reign of R.'1messes XI ( + 438-468), the southern province of Kush (located between the 2nd and 3rd Cataracts) was abandoned. The frontier was redrawn at the 2nd Cataract. Evidence from the administrative capital of Kush - Amara West - suggests that it was systematically closed down. This in itself implies that either events in Egypt or the emergence of an indigenous power in southern Nubia were causing problems. The middle years of Ramesses XI saw the viceroy active in Egypt itself. The last decade of his reign witnessed civil war and campaigns againstthe viceroy who was still in control of Lower Nubia and the provincial capital, Aniba. The New IGngdom phase of imperial expansion in Nubia, closely paralleled in western Asia, differed from previous expansions in several ways. First, there was a clear policy of integrating the people and using them within the administration rather then removing them or (apparently) ignoring tllem. Second, the time factor is important. Including the period of expansion, New IGngdom Egyptian presence in Nubia lasted for nearly 500 years, as opposed to the intermittent presence during the Old IGngdom (400 years) and the confined occupation of the Middle IGngdom (260 years). Third, Egyptian ideology also reflects a different attitude. From the mid-18th Dynasty on, a distinctly imperial terminology developed. This certainly grew out of the traditional titles and images of pharaohs, but included new elements that acknowledged the superiority of the pharaoh among other rulers: that is, "IGng oflGngs" and "Ruler of the Rulers" (Grimal 1986; also see Lorton 1974 who gives different renderings of these titles).

Political geography and administratiJ)e structures The major distinction between the model I have proposed (Morkot 1987, 1991b, 1994) and the conventional Egyptological model of imperialism concerns the limits of Egyptian control in Nubia, both geographical and integrative. Most studies have assumed that the regions ofNubia directly integrated into the viceregal administration extended from the 1st Cataract (immediately south of Aswan) to the 4tll Cataract. This region was divided into two provinces, Wawat and Kush. Wawat, in Lower Nubia, extended from the 1st to the 2nd Cataract, and Kush, from the 2nd to the 4th Cataract. In contrast, I have pre-

Egypt and Nubia sented (Morkot 1991b) a very different model for the region south of the 2nd Cataract. I argue that tlle viceregal domain of Kush extended only from the 2nd to the 3rd Cataract. The region soutll, between the 3rd and 4th Cataracts, was a frontier zone tllat came under the control of the "Overseers of Southern Foreign Lands." It was also called Kush. The major Egyptian foundations in Kush lie to the nortll of tlle 3rd Cataract. They are tlle fortress of Sai and tlle temple-towns ofSoleb, Sedeinga, Sesebi, and Amara West (see Fig. 9.2). South of the 3rd Cataract, New IGngdom temples have been identified only at Kawa and at Gebel Barka!. Recent excavations have also identified New IGngdom material at Kerma. Arguments against my model (e.g., Kemp 1991) have emphasized that there has been relatively little survey and excavation in the 3rd-4tll Cataract region. Therefore, the t:'1ct that tllere have been few New IGngdom sites identified does not mean that tlley were not there; tlley simply await discovery. However, this ignores my key argument concerning tlle nature of tlle sites north of the 3rd Cataract (see below). Kemp (I972a, I972b, 1978) seems to agree with a generally held view of New IGngdom population growth. He views settlement in this region as essentially expansionist; the number of towns increased over time. In consequence, he concludes that the distribution of the towns was not commensurate with the agricultural potential of the region. In marked contrast, I have emphasized the distinctive nature and short duration of tlle sites in tllls region. The building of new temple-towns in the Abri-Delgo Reach of Upper Nubia began about ISO years after Egyptian reoccupation ofNubia. This part of Upper Nubia had been first occupied in the war against Kerma and was continuously occupied, with a major fortress at Sai. The region was fertile, although not so productive as areas south of the 3rd Cataract, and was within a gold-producing region (although its extent remains unclear). Whether the new temple-towns were built to accommodate an expanding population from Egypt remains questionable, although with the expansion of the Lower Nubian system, land may have been needed to settle ifnot Egyptian "colonists," then Nubians or EgyptoNubians. Baving made a decision to absorb this area, the administration created settlements that would establish an integrated local economy, something a fortress did not do. Expansion in the Abri-Delgo Reach follows closely upon what seems to have been a conscious reorganization of the administration ofNubia sometime during the reign of Amenhotep 11 (+ 116-139) or Thutmose IV (+ 139-148). The initial development of the imperial administration seems to have rapidly followed military expansion, creating offices, etc., as circumstances dictated. The subsequent period of consolidation and, apparently, relative peace saw a reorganization directly paralleling that of the Egyptian administration. There were two provinces headed by the viceroy, each with its own deputy (idnu). The religious institutions and the military had their own heads. The continued building works within the Abri-Delgo region suggest that

235

236

Egypt and Nubia

Robert Morkot

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political and ideological factors, rather than purely agricultural concerns, were important in its development. A parallel may be noted to the situation in the peripheries of the Late Assyrian Empire, discussed by Liverani (1979, 1990: 135-43), with the duty of the virtuous king to extend cosmic order, irrigate arid land, and build towns. The cui tic emphases and associations with rebirth evident in the Nubian temples might go some way to support the interpretation of the building campaigns as political and religious acts. In sum, I see the temple-towns of the Abri -Delgo Reach not as a continuing urban expansion into this region ofNubia, but as a series offoundations of much more limited duration. These towns served briefly as the principal administrative centers of specific reigns and were later replaced. As such, they parallel the "Houses of millions of years" in Egypt itself, their estates being reallocated to newer foundations. Of course, with estates in the vicinity of the settlements tlley would not have been completely abandoned - but the official class would have moved. The sequence of the building and duration of the sites further suggest that there was not continuous expansion. The fortress of Sai belongs to the early-mid New Kingdom phase, followed by Soleb and Sedeinga (Amenhotep Ill, reused by Tutankhamun), Sesebi (Akhenaten, reused by Sety I) and Amara West (Sety I to the late 20th Dynasty). The nature of these "urban" centers themselves must also be considered (Trigger 1985: 348; Hassan 1993; O'Connor 1993). In Nubia, as in Egypt, they were limited in number and functioned as elite residential, administrative, and cult centers rather than as residential centers for agricultural workers. Some were also production centers and had artisan populations. However, much of the artisan production would have been for the state and the elite and not for "sale" to the people cultivating the land. Other centers would have served as depots for the supply of military installations. The system of temple-town economies proposed by Trigger (1965: 109), Kemp (1972a; 1972b: 661,667; 1978), and Frandsen (1979) provides a model for the integration of the Nubian towns and hinterland, and also f()r the acculturation of the indigenous population. It should be emphasized that the "urban" centers in Nubia, which were limited to perhaps half-a-dozen in Wawat and the same in Kush, and which were not all occupied at the same time, were elite centers. The majority of the population was dispersed across the agricultural land, probably in the scattered ribbon-settlements that prevailed in the region until recently. In sum, evidence ti'om the towns of the Abri- Delgo Reach suggests that they functioned as the main administrative centers of the province of Kush during the viceregal period. What then was the nature of Egyptian control in the 3rd-4th Cataract "frontier zone" region? There has been considerably less survey and excavation in this area. An Egyptian fortress is known to have existed somewhere in the region of Gebel Barkal and the 4th Cataract. We know that this fortress was later called Napata, but its exact location is uncertain. Several scholars have argued that Napata served as the major viceregal center. However, it seems extremely

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unlikely that the principal administrative center would have been placed on the southernmost frontier, and evidence from further north contradicts this interpretation. fu discussed above, I have proposed that the 3rd-4th Cataract region was left in the direct control of indigenous rulers who received military support for their regimes along with economic and other benefits. In return, they may have been directly responsible for tlle acquisition and transmission of "luxury" commodities, such as ivory and ebony, tlll"ough trade Witll the central Sudanese savanna. The title "Overseer of tlle Southern Foreign Lands" held by tlle viceroys has been considered a "poetic variant" of tlle usual viceregal designation. However, other officials, who seem to constitute a homogeneous group, also used tlle title. They include tlle viceroys, tlle Chief of Bowmen ofKush (the head of the militia in Nubia), and otllers who are almost certainly Kushite princes. Significantly, tlle local rulers of Lower Nubia did not hold tllis title. It thus seems reasonable to conclude tllat it designated, quite specifically, control of the part of Kush that was not integrated as a province, but nonetheless owed allegiance to tlle imperial administration. The role of tlle indigenous rulers in this region is considered furtller below. This model presents tlle 3rd-4th Cataract as an imperial margin, with symbolic frontiers at Gebel Barkal and tlle 4tll Cataract (riverine routes) and at Kurgus/Abu Hamed (desert routes). Arguing that the region between the 3rd and 4th Cataracts was not n111y integrated into the viceregal administration has a number of important implications. First, it suggests that the Egyptian system of temple-town economies was not introduced in this area and that locally prevailing economies persisted. Second, there would not have been as widespread acculturation of the non-elite population as appears to be found in the integrated parts ofNubia. This in itself has significant implications for the succeeding postimperial phase, discussed below. Some archaeological support for this interpretation now seems to be emerging. During ten years of excavation in the Debba Bend of the Dongola Reach, K. Grzymski and his team have identified no Egyptian material and conclude that during the New Kingdom this area was inhabited by a non- Egyptianized indigenous population (Grzymski 1997).

The local elites There has been no major synthetic prosopography of the New Kingdom administration of Nubia in recent years. The doctoral dissertations of Michel Dewachter (1978) and Ingeborg MUlier (1979) remain unpublished and any attempt to assess the administration of Nubia is thrown back on the original study of Reisner (1920) and a mass of articles and excavation reports. Most recently, Torgny Save-Soderbergh and Lana Troy (1991) have reassessed the evidence for the indigenous princes of Lower Nubia in the New Kingdom. The importance of these rulers to the viceregal administration had already been emphasized by Kemp (1978), Frandsen (1979), O'Connor (in Trigger ct al. 1983), and others. While the role and importance of the princes is beyond

Egypt and Nubia doubt, there has been little study of the remainder of the administration and the role of otller local e1ites. Integration oftlle Nubian elite began early in tlle phase of imperial expansion. The children of rulers of Upper Nubia were sent to Egypt to be raised in the palace from the reign of Thutmose 11 (+ 60-63) onwards. By tlle co-reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III (+ 63-84) members of tlle ruling families of Lower Nubia had adopted Egyptian names in addition to tlleir Kushite ones, and were employed within tlle provincial administration. This suggests tllat tlley too had been educated at tlle Egyptian court from an even earlier date (perhaps under Thutmose I, + 49-60). The titles of local rulers persisted into the later 18tll and 19t1l Dynasties, but their names are purely Egyptian; indigenous names have been dropped. The elites buried in the main centers of Lower Nubia from the same period all had Egyptian names and styles of burial. Lacking skeletal material, it is hard to prOlJc that they were Nubians rather tllan Egyptian settlers. The princes of Lower Nubia do not appear to have opposed the Egyptian authorities, altllOugh our evidence is, of course, one-sided. Upper Nubia, however, had proven more difficult to absorb. Initially the power of tlle Kerma kingdom had to be broken, and there was constant "rebellion" in tlle first century of Egyptian activity. Such factors may have led the Egyptians to use education at the Egyptian court, gift, and military support, and to "allow" a degree of autonomy, in order to maintain their authority in the 3rd-4th Cataract region. The binding of the administration to the central government was certainly achieved through the distribution of "gift." A few texts record the installation of the viceroy and his first tour of duty accompanied by the royal envoys, on which occasion he "rewarded" the local officials. Doubtless gift/reward was given on other important royal occasions, such as accession and jubilee. Instances ofindividual reward are also known. The binding oflocal elites through marriage to the Egyptian crown is a more obscure issue. Despite the very clear instances of marriage between pharaohs and Asiatic princesses detailed in the Amarna archive, Egyptologists have generally persisted in arguing that pharaohs did not marry Kushite women (e.g., Frandsen 1979). This stands in contrast to the claims of some earlier Egyptologists who suggested, on the basis of superficial evidence, that some Great Royal Wives were ofNubian origin (e.g., Tiye and Nctertari). This ambivalent attitude is probably best regarded as a residue from older prejudices. While direct positive evidence is lacking, there is a strong likelihood that pharaohs did marry Kushite women. It should also be noted that although Egyptian pharaohs married the daughters of many Asiatic rulers, policy decreed that daughters of pharaohs were not sent to be wives offoreign rulers (Schulman 1979). Requests for daughters of pharaoh by the kings ofMitanni and Assyria/Babylon were apparently refhsed. This contrasts with the Hittite policy by which daughters were given as wives to foreign rulers or their heirs, with a contract to ensure that the Hittite princess would be chief wife and chief queen, and that her son would be eventual king (Schulman 1979). The effect was an expansion of the Hittite empire through blood.

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Another major tool in the binding of Egypt and the Nubian provinces was religion. The presence of Egypt in Nubia in the New Kingdom is seen most obviously in the temple building of the late 18th and early 19th Dynasties. Yet the very size and number of these edifices has in the past posed a problem for historians of Nubia, especially when allied with presumptions about the region's history. Earlier literature rarely regarded the temples as centers of religious belief. Instead they were seen as massive structures oflimited function, built to overawe the indigenous population, or even to preside over a deserted no-man's land. While peculiarly local features are apparent in the iconography and associations of the kings in the Nubian temples (as is common in many other imperial contexts; see Alcock and Brumfiel, this volume), the function of the temples reflects current trends within Egypt itself. The development of Egyptian religion and particularly of the royal cult in Nubia is important because, most obviously, it informs on the ideology that the Egyptians wished to impose on their dependencies. It is also significant when the later phases of Kushite history are examined. The "Egyptianization" of the Napatan and Meroitic periods (see below) has been seen as a residue of the years of occupation, gradually dissipated through the reassertion ofindigenous phenomena. The importance of the Anum cult in the Meroitic period is an obvious example of continuing Egyptian influence. Habachi (1969), followed by Trigger (1976), Kemp (1978), and others, urged that the Nubian temples should be looked at within the broader context of New Kingdom Egypt and not in isolation. Habachi's (1969) fundamental study of the deification of l{amesses Il in Nubia showed it to be essentially the same process as found throughout Egypt. Even so, the royal cult generally has been interpreted as a manifestation of political power lacking religious content (Habachi 1969). Price (1984) critiqued similar attitudes in his discussion of the relationship between religion and politics in interpretations of the Roman imperial cult. He (1984: 9-10) did not deny the obvious political aspects of the imperial cult, but emphasized that initiatives could come from below, and need not all be imposed by central authority. This can be paralleled in New Kjngdom Nubia where private inscriptions invoke living and dead rulers. The endowment of royal cult images by members of the elite doubtless guaranteed prestige and may have had economic benefits, but discussions of these have tended to emphasize the economic rather than religious aspects. As in Egypt, Roman imperial cults did not endure long after the emperor's death. Deceased emperors and pharaohs joined the ranks of the gods, but the most potent form of cult was that of the living ruler. The organization and exploitation of the Roman imperial cult by local elites as detailed by Price has parallels with the pharaonic cult in Nubia. Many members of the Nubian elite also held religious offices, whether of the royal or of other cults. Female members of the elite, particularly, were involved in religion as chantresses, singers, and Chief of the Harem of local deities. As in Egypt itself, there was no church-state divide. Members of the same elite families held offices in civil, religious, and military institutions (Morkot 1994: ch. 6). The ritual of Egyptian religion involved festivals focusing on a processional "appearance" by the god. When that god was also a manifestation of, or merged

with, the living ruler, there must have been a further binding of the subject people with the dominant state and its ruler. Participation in these festivals, and the gifts of food and other commodities that are associated with them , must have served an important role in cementing the relationships between rulers and subjects. The acculturation of Nubia's non-elite is more difficult to assess. Adams (1964: 107-8; 1977) and others, following Cecil Firth, proposed that after the expansion of Egyptian power in Nubia in the early 18th Dynasty ( + 5-100) there was a rapid recession, and because of hydraulic crisis a decline in the population, throughout the later 18th (+185-246) and 19th (+246-356) Dynasties. Adams (1964: 244-5) suggests that "by the end of the 18th Dynasty almost all productive activity in the region had probably ceased." However, the apparent disappearance of a large proportion of the indigenous population in the 18th Dynasty (presumed to have been retreating into Upper Nubia) may in fact have been due to a rapid acculturation and a reorganization of the agrarian economy around the Egyptian towns. Adams (1964: 106; 1977: 235-40) argues against acculturation as a satisf.1ctory explanation, but the evidence presented by SaveSoderbergh and Troy (1991) suggests the contrary. The Scandinavian Joint Expedition found graves of relatively late New Kingdom date that continued typical Nubian burial traditions but contained entirely Egyptian objects (SaveSoderbergh 1967-8; Save-Soderbergh and Troy 1991). With the imposition of a redistributive economy the products that were handed out, and therefore the objects recovered, would have been typically Egyptian in style. It remains difficult to assess to what extent the basic features of indigenous cultures may have survived masked by Egyptian material culture. Ifwe accept that the majority ofNubian officials were indigenes then we raise a number of questions about what would have happened at the end of the New Kingdom. Most significantly, would they have attempted to carve out a separate state for themselves? I turn to this issue below.

Economy The older view of Egyptian economic activity in Nubia was one of exploitation. Egypt simply plundered Nubia of its resources - mineral (principally gold, but also various stones), animal (ivory, hides, ostrich feathers), vegetable (ebony), and human (as slaves). Kemp (1978), particularly, has argued that economic exploitation was a prime motive in Egyptian imperial expansion. He quite rightly stresses the investment by the Egyptians in temple building, defense, and administration, and suggests that the reorganization of local economies around tile temples would have resulted in much of the local agricultural production being consumed locally. As S. T. Smith (1991: 81-2) points out, other scholars from various backgrounds have also regarded economic exploitation as significant to imperialism. He suggests that the Egyptian presence in Nubia during tile New Kingdom may therefore be seen as a manifestation of "Acculturation Colonialism" (1991: 92-3).

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The most recent discussions of the economy of Nubia during the New Kingdom (Morkot 1995a; S. T. Smith 1995) do not reject Kemp's arguments, but recognize that there was both investment and significant economic exploitation. In Lower Nubia agriculturally productive land was always much more limited than in the broad flood plain of Egypt. This would have dictated a rather dispersed settlement pattern. And even if the land was intensively cultivated, its agricultural potential was limited. Throughout history, Lower Nubia has never supported much more tllan a subsistence agricultural economy, Witll the exception of date-production. Its importance to Egypt was as a source of vast mineral wealtll, notably tlle gold of tlle Eastern Desert. Upper Nubia was more productive agriculturally. The results of a recent survey have shown tllat the Nile flowed tlll'ough three river channels in the Dongola basin during tlle Kerma period (c. 2000-1500 BCE). It is unknown whetller tllese still functioned in New Kingdom times. If tlley did, we will have to reconsider the potential of tlle region as an arable producer. It is certain that tllis was a major cattle-pasturing region during tlle New Kingdom. However, much of its importance must have been as tlle access route to the luxury commodities of tlle central Sudanese savanna. The model of an internal redistributive economy based to a considerable extent upon the temple-towns argues against tlle simple plundering of Nubia's resources. Land was held by the religious foundations and administrative offices of the viceregal dominion; its produce was predominantly destined for the use of people and institutions within Nubia. While the evidence for an expanding population in Egypt and consequent settlement of Egyptians in Nubia is inconclusive, there are indications of statecontrolled manipulation of the Nubian population. Forcible removal of people from Nubia and settlement of foreigners in the country is indicated by some texts. However, it is impossible to assess the fi'equency of such events and the numbers involved, and consequently the total impact of such actions. These transplantations, as paralleled in other ancient societies (notably the Late Assyrian empire; see also D'Altroy, p. 216, Kuhrt, p. 118, this volume) are usually associated with military action. Although the evidence is at present problematic, it at least suggests that the Egyptians were not averse to the forcible movement of population under certain circumstances. I have argued (Morkot 1995a: 178-80) that although there was a limited agricultural potential in Nubia, a surprisingly large range of its products was nonetheless imported into Egypt. Among the most notable non-mineral products were those of the date and dom palms. The sources limit our ability to quantitY the economic production accurately, but the few figures at our disposal suggest that cattle sent fi'om Kush to Egypt (perhaps just to the temple of Karnak) numbered about 300 per annum. This is three times the number sent from Wawat. Wawat, however, produced about sixteen times more gold than Kush. There is no evidence for the methods of cross-frontier trade in ivory, ebony, and the other "luxuries" of the central Sudan. It seems likely that the acquisition

Egypt and Nubia of these commodities was one of the chief responsibilities of the elite of Kush. There are no records of trading expeditions such as are known for the Old Kingdom. However, the commodities appear as part of the regular annual "tribute" system. If the administration remained largely in the control of tlle indigenous elite, so too the internal economy ofNubia must have. Kemp (1978) has argued tllat, given the extensive investment of the Egyptians in temple building, military defense, and so on, Egyptian "imperialism" was not wholly exploitative. The model of the redistributive economy also provides an explanation for tlle "disappearance" of the C-Group population of Lower Nubia during tlle 18tll Dynasty - as the range oflocally produced artifacts was replaced by centrally supplied goods. The old idea of a decline in population and productivity throughout tlle New Kingdom can be rejected as an incorrect interpretation oftlle evidence. It does, however, seem clear tllat there was a substantial decline in gold production in Lower Nubia by tlle 20th Dynasty and that the gold was almost worked out by available methods (renewed gold production in the Ptolemaic period used different technology). Nevertheless, the Egyptians did not abandon Nubia as a drain on their resources. It is clear tllat they regarded Nubia as an extension of Egypt and that other factors forced the withdrawal from the southern region, perhaps in the reign of Ramesses IX or Ramesses Xl.

Summary The literature on Egyptian Nubia underemphasizes the impact of time. Nubia in the period of the Egyptian imperial expansion is not likely to have been the same as Nubia after 300 years of Egyptian domination. I have proposed that the Egyptian attitude to Nubia was fundamentally the same as that toward Asia, and that consequently Egyptian-Nubian interaction was different than often assumed. With greater emphasis on the role of the indigenous elites, and a more complex society and economy in Nubia, the rise of an indigenous successor state is more easily explicable. Lower and perhaps parts of Upper Nubia had at the end of the New Kingdom a developed state system with an organized and trained bureaucracy, social and political hierarchies, military forces (formidable, apparently), control oflocal resources, and agricultural subsistence. In addition, there were, certainly in Upper Nubia and probably still in Lower Nubia, local organized political entities - "chiefdoms" or "kingdoms" - that controlled the luxury trade of the central Sudan and had their own military forces. The model argued here would see a large part of Upper Nubia remaining under the direct control of indigenous rulers throughout the New Kingdom and therefore not Egyptianized to the same degree as the rest of Nubia. Its rulers, many raised at the Egyptian court, would have been Egyptianized and may have introduced elements of Egyptian culture and religion into their states. But the majority of the population, even ifit acquired some Egyptian objects, would have

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remained largely unaffected by Egyptian culture, language, and ideology. In this model the "problem" of Egyptianization is reduced. Following the end of the viceregal period, Upper Nubia would not have "reverted" but simply continued long-standing Kushite traditions.

THE KUSHITE DOMINATION OF EGYPT (THE EGYPTIAN 25TH DYNASTY), c. 750-650 BeE The traditional interpretation As discussed above, the conventional view is that following the period of Egyptian rule in the New Kingdom, Lower Nubia was abandoned for a considerable period and the people of Upper Nubia reverted to a tribal or seminomadic lifestyle. Tlus state of affairs is argued to have continued until the emergence of an indigenous chiefdom, later to become a "kingdom" in the midninth century BC E. This kingdom then rapidly expanded to control the central Sudanese savanna between the Atbara and Nile (the earlier archaeology of this region is still barely known) and is divided into two historical phases: Napatan (from the eighth century BCE to c. 200 BCE) and Meroitic. The Meroitic phase is largely coincident with the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt, continuing until about the mid-fourth century CE, when the state fragmented. Its three successors became the three Christian kingdoms of medieval Nubia. The king-list (largely compiled from tomb material) and the few "historical f.'lcts" of the Napatan-Meroitic kingdom probably mask a series of dynasties and fragmentations of the state. Throughout the Napatan-Meroitic periods the rulers (male and female) continued to use Egyptian pharaonic styles of title and regalia, combined with some indigenous forms. Egyptian gods continued to be worshipped and the Egyptian hieroglyphic script was used for official texts. However, this later Napatan phase is dismissed in much early literature: "much of tile Egyptian veneer disappeared ... and the last pyramids and hieroglyphic texts are almost a mockery of Egyptian culture" (Adams 1964: 115). The subsequent Meroitic period was similarly characterized as a further debasement: "it was the Egyptianized kingdom of Napata running downhill to a miserable and inglorious end ... the last two or three centuries were ones ofunrclieved degeneration and gloom when compared with the glories of the past" (A. J. Arkell quoted in Adams 1964: ll5). While this view of the Meroitic period has been largely rejected in more recent literature, there is still a view that the Egyptian elements of the culnJre are something of a "veneer."

A reinterpretation The phase ofKushite domination of Egypt, in Egyptian terms the 25th Dynasty, lasted from about 750/740 BC E until 656 BC E, and thus forms the earlier part of the "Napatan" kingdom. As the earliest phases of Kushite expansion into

Egypt and Nubia Egypt are still very obscure the initial date is somewhat arbitrary. The domination can be divided into the following phases: 1 Kushite expansion into Upper Egypt, under kings Kashta and Piye, witll control only of Upper Egypt (c. 750/40-710 BCE). 2 Domination of tile whole of Egypt witll major residence at Memplus, and increasing involvement in western Asia: reigns of Shabaqo and Shebitqo (c. 710-690 BCE) and Taharqo (690-664 BCE). 3 Assyrian invasions of Egypt, in tile reigns ofTaharqo and Tanwetamani. Eventual ascendancy ofPsamtik I of Sais; Kushites still acknowledged in Upper Egypt until 656 B CE. A principal issue, which the literature has until recently largely ignored, is tile process of state formation in Nubia (Kush; for recent discussions see Torok 1992,1995; Morkot 1994, 1995b, 1999,2000; T. KendaIl1999). The Kushite expansion stands at tile end of what is generally tllOught to have been a very rapid process of state formation (e.g., T. Kendall 1982). Much of the scholarly literature (e.g., Adams 1964, 1977; Kitchen 1973: 358; O'Connor in Trigger et al. 1983: 242-3) begins with the Kushite invasion of Egypt and continues from there without any analysis of how the Kushite state came into being. As discussed above, the conventional view is that Kush developed from an apparently modest chiefdom (mid-ninth century BCE) to a state with the military and economic resources, and presumably the political homogeneity and hierarchies, to gain control of a considerable part of Egypt. Further, it was able to do this from a homeland that is separated from Egypt proper by the sparsely (or un- )populated divide of Lower Nubia. This characterization has developed largely on the basis of the archaeological material. GeOl'ge Reisner excavated a cemetery at el-Kurru that contained burials of some of the "25th Dynasty" pharaohs and others that he interpreted as several generations of ancestors. This cemetery formed the focus for all discussions of the emergence of the Kushite state and largely continues to do so (see heated controversy ofT. Kendall1999 and Torok 1992, 1995). While there has been very little archaeological work in other parts of Upper Nubia that has recovered material that can be attributed to this phase, the possibility that such might exist has generally not even been considered. Consequently, the literature emphasizes the archaeological and historical hiatus and the sudden emergence of Kush "from a perplexing historical void" (T. Kendall 1982: 9). Adams (1977) is onc of the few archaeologists to have characterized the "Napatan" period as a "successor state." Adams follows the historical theories of Arnold Toynbee. He views the emergence of the Kurru kingdom as one of Toynbee's "heroic ages" in which Nubia, Egypt's "external proletariat," becomes "a classic example of a successor state: a barbarian people assuming the mantle and the burdens of empire from the hands of their former overlords" (Adams 1977: 244-5). Kush undoubtedly should be seen as a successor state, but the difference between this and other successor states is the 200 years it took

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between the collapse of the colonial system and the supremacy of the "barbarians." Unable to explain tius archaeologically, Adams (1977: 247-8) was forced to comment ti1at "it took some time for ti1e lesson ofti1e pharaohs to sink in." T. Kendall (1999) concentrated on the chronology of the Kurru cemetery and did not consider the broader issues at all. T6r6k (1992, 1995) also discussed elKurru, advocating a different reconstruction, but also focusing on ideological factors. Yet any attempt to discuss ti1e process of state formation must consider all of the bases: political (interaction of the social hierarchy, geopolitical regions, etc.), military, economic, and ideological. In my writings (Morkot 1995b, 1999), I have emphasized ti1e importance of a continuous tradition of kingship/rulers hip in Kush that can be traced back to ti1e A-Group phase (pre-3000 B CE). I argue ti1at such a continuous tradition (which was exploited by Egyptians during the New Kingdom) would have resulted in ti1e emergence of independent states and power holders soon after ti1e Egyptian witi1drawal. In this context, the idea of regression to a tribal level is not convincing. I suggest ti1at conventional discussions ofti1e "emergence" of ti1e Kushite state have been prejudiced by a number of factors. First, is the emphasis on ti1e archaeological material from the cemetery of el- Kurru. This has led to ti1e assumption ti1at the rise and expansion of the state was under the direction of a single ruling dynasty - that buried at el-Kurru. There has been no consideration ofti1e possibility that ti1e Kurru rulers may have taken over (by force, marriage, or other methods) a state that was already rapidly developing. Second, ti1e confused chronology of the Kurru material has been ordered within an accepted Egyptian chronology, resulting, in the most favored model (T. KendaIl1999), in a "gap." T6r6k (1995) and others have proposed lengthening the chronology of the Kurru cemetery, and so almost closing the gap, although there still remain many archaeological problems. There has been no consideration of the emergence of the indigenous Kushite state by analogy with other postimperial contexts. This again has been influenced by interpretations of the archaeology ofNubia. Yet, in the later phases of Egyptian rule in Nubia, we have indications of a powerful state somewhere in the southern part of the domain (or across its frontier) which posed a threat - Irem. We also have evidence for powerful elite families within the Nubian administration. It is, at the very least, possible that the Egyptian empire in Nubia did not vanish in a puff of smoke, but withdrew in the face of rising indigenous powers.

Kushite imperial expansion and control Our reconstructions of Kushite expansion into Egypt are based largely on fragmentary data and assumptions. A stela fragment of King Kashta, excavated at Elephantine, Egypt's southernmost town, indicates that he had adopted pharaonic style, and had advanced, presumably militarily, to the Egyptian frontier, and into Upper Egypt. In Thebes, the Kushite princess Amenirdis I was

Egypt and Nubia

installed as heiress to the reigning God's Wife of Al11un, Shepenwepet, at Thebes. Earlier Egyptologists thought ti1at it was Kashta who had done tlUs, ti1ereby gaining acknowledgment as ruler in the Thebaid. More recentiy, following ti1e theory ti1at the Kushite succession passed fi'om brother to brother, it was proposed ti1at Al11enirdis was installed by her brother, Piye (Kitchen 1973: 151). However, all other God's Wives were installed by ti1eir fathers, and ti1ere is no evidence to suggest ti1at Al11enirdis was an exception. Neither is the theory of broti1er-succession substantiated (Mm'kot 1999). The likelihood is ti1at Kashta used ti1e inviolable office - as it already had been - as a way of having Kushite authority in Thebes recognized (Mm'kot 1991b; 1994: 330-64; 1999). Beyond tius, nothing can be confidentiy said about ti1e Kushite occupation of Upper Egypt. The "Victory Stela" of Piye (Lichtheim 1980: 66-84; Eide et al. 1994: 62-112, no. 9) indicates that at ti1e time of his campaign against Tefnakht of Sais, Piye was acknowledged as ruler of Upper Egypt and had a military force present ti1ere. One of ti1e most illuminating of Kushite historical texts is ti1e socalled "Sandstone Stela" of Pi ye (Eide et al. 1994: 55-9, no. 8), which predates ti1e much better known "Victory Stela." The sandstone stela certainly belongs to a point early in the king's reign, perhaps year 4. It attributes the king's accession to Amun. Although it is not specifically stated, it is a reasonable surmise ti1at, following his accession, Pi ye had travelled to Egypt to ensure the continued acknowledgement of Kushite rule in Upper Egypt and particularly Thebes. The king tells us: He to whom I say "You arc a IPcr-chief," he shall be a IPcr-chief. He to whom I say "YOll arc not a IlIcr-chief," he shall not be a IlIcl"-chief. He to whom I say "Make a khau-appearance (as king)," he shall make a khauappearance. He to whom I say "Do not make Ilhall-ilppearance (as king)," he shall not make I,hau-appearance.

The inference fi"om this must be that Piye either reappointed rulers or appointed new rulers. It is necessary to distinguish between the IIIcr-rulers and those who make Izhau-appearance (i.e., ncsut-kings - "pharaohs"). This passage clearly reflects the situation in Egypt at the time of the Kushite invasions, in which there were four ncsut-kings who had adopted filII pharaonic style witi1 fivefold titulary and the appropriate regalia. These are referred to in the later inscription as the "uracus-wearing" kings. There were other powerfill local rulers, mostly of Libyan origin and closely related to the kings who carried the Libyan titles "chief" (wcr) or "great chief" of the Ma. The broken stela does not name any of these rulers, but the "Victory Stela" of Pi ye's 21st year records his defeat of the Saite ruler Tefnakht and his allies, including many of the rulers of the Delta. Piye's overlordship was again recognized by both nesut-kings and wcrchiefs. All except Tefnakht came in person and swore their oaths. Tefnakht swore

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his in the temple of his own city in the presence of a general and the Chief Lector Priest sent by Piye. The text of the oath is preserved on the stela although it is probably very abbreviated. If not as lengthy as the Assyrian Vassal Treaties it contains similar promises, notably that Tefnakht will abide by Piye's commands and will not make war on his own account. Following Piye's death, his successor, Shabaqo, was again faced with the expansion of the Saite kingdom under its ruler Bakenranef. The act of "rebellion" at the change of ruler was common (almost usual, see D'Altroy, p. 209; cf. Kuhrt, p. 94) and presumably reflects the termination of treaties on the death of one of the signatories. This pattern is already evident in the Amarna Letters of the 18th Dynasty, where Egypt's relations with Mitanni are renewed on the death of rulers in either country and sealed by diplomatic marriage. Following his defeat of the Saites, Shabaqo's rule extended over the whole of Egypt, and he appears to have ruled from Memphis. Shabaqo followed the policy of earlier Libyan pharaohs and appointed a son as High Priest of Amun at Thebes. Unlike his predecessors he did not install a daughter as there were already tvvo heiresses to the God's Wife of Amun, one his sister (Amenirdis I) and the other Piye's daughter. There is evidence for the reallocation of some offices at Thebes, although the precise dating is unclear; it may have occurred in the reign of Shabaqo or of Shebitqo. The Kushite Kelbasken was installed as Mayor of Thebes and 4th Prophet of Amun. The Nakhtefinut f.·lInily had held the latter office for six generations. Later, both offices were granted to the family of Monthuemhat, which had previously occupied the Vizierate. The Vizierate, in turn, passed into the family of Nesipeqashuty. While it is difficult to impose any form of "policy" on these changes in administrative office holders, it can be said that families that had controlled offices for a considerable period had those offices removed. Even so, Kelbasken is the only Kushite known to have been installed in a major non-religious office (as Mayor) and although there were many Kushites in Thebes, they do not generally seem to have replaced the Theban elite. In the case of the Monthuemhat f.1mily, the loss of the Vizierate appears to be a demotion, but we know from both Egyptian and Assyrian sources that Monthuemhat remained the most powernll individual in Upper Egypt. Monthuemhat also established a marriage alliance with the Kushite royal house; his third wife, Wedjarenes, was a granddaughter of Piye. There is a strong likelihood that Shabaqo established marriage alliances with Egyptian elite families. Although marriage between members of the Kushite royal family and the Egyptian elite are known, most Egyptologists have argued that there were no such marriages with the Libyan dynasts. There is considerably less evidence for the methods of Kushite control of the elite in north Egypt. One stela does record the marriage of a Kushite princess (probably a daughter of Shabaqo) and the northern Vizier, suggesting a policy similar to that in Thebes. Following the defeat of Bakenranef, Shabaqo may have appointed a Kushite governor in Sais, but the only direct evidence for this is the

epitome of Manetho's history. Elsewhere, he probably reconfirmed or replaced rulers. Donation stelae from his reign record some of the same Chiefs and Great Chiefs who had earlier paid homage to Piye. Taharqo followed similar policies as his predecessors. His daughter was installed as eventual successor to Shepenwepet 11; a son was appointed as Second Prophet of An1t1I1 at Thebes; Shabaqo's grandson succeeded as High Priest. His policy toward the Libyan dynasts also appears to have been the same - despite the considerable upheavals and changes of alliance during the Assyrian invasions. Taharqo's successor, Tanwetamani, also confi'onting Assyrian invasions, adopted the same pragmatic approach to the Libyan rulers, accepting their allegiance when they came to pay fealty. The Assyrians, too, confirmed and reappointed dynasts who had previously been loyal to the Kushites. They may also have installed a new vassal, Nekau, in Sais. Later, when the dynasts reverted to Kushite allegiance, some were deported to Nineveh, and apparently executed. One Assyrian vassal, Psamtik, son of tile ruler of Sais, was installed in his own fiefdom and adopted an Assyrian name, Nabu-shezzi-banni.

Economy of the Kushite empire The imperial expansion ofKush must have had enormous economic impact, but the documentation is extremely scanty. The narrative of the Victory Stela of Pi ye records that tile wealth of conquered rulers and cities was accorded either to the temple of Amun in Thebes, to Amun Lord of Thrones of the Two Lands (which might be the god's Kushite temple), or to the royal treasury. Piye received the contents of the treasuries of several towns along with gifts ofjewelry, gold, semiprecious stones, linen, and horses from the Libyan dynasts. The conclusion of the text states that Piye returned with ships laden with silver, gold, copper, clothing, and the produce of Syria and aromatic woods. Some of this diverted wealth was doubtless used for the support of the Kushite army and officials in Egypt, and some for the king's extensive building works in the temple of An1l1I1 at Gebel Bat·kal. Trading activities with western Asia were certainly important during Kushite rule in Egypt and may have been a significant factor in Kushite expansion. Once they had established themselves in Memphis, the Kushites presumably gained some control of the old royal monopolies, including in papyrus and byssos(linen) which were valuable exports at this time. The principal trading partners were tile Levantine cities of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Ashdod. Timber from the hinterland of tile more northerly cities is recorded in the building inscriptions of Taharqo, as is Asiatic copper. Exports fi'om the Kushite heartland included ivory, ebony, and elephant-hides. These items can be found in the "tribute" of tile Sea Coast paid to Assyrian kings as early as the reigns of Assurnasirpal 11 and Tiglathpileser Ill. Horses are another possible export (MOI'kot 1991b, 1995b; Heidorn 1994).

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The Kushite empire: summary From the reign ofShabaqo (c. 710-696 BCE), the Kushites were ruling from Memphis. How they controlled their vast empire is not yet well understood. The empire fell into four major regions. These were: (1) Egypt, which was reasonably homogeneous; (2) Lower Nubia which, if not without population, probably had only a rather limited population; (3) the 3rd-4th Cataract, which was fertile and fairly homogeneous; and (4) the central Sudan as far as present-day Khartoum, separated from the regions further north by the Bayuda Desert. If we assume the 3rd-4th Cataract region to have been the original Kushite powerbase, then their imperial expansion was both northward (toward Egypt) and south into the central Sudan. There is still very little information concerning how tlle Kushite rulers administered tlleir home territories. We have only one reference to a Kushite prince installed as "mayor" of a town. Administrative terms that do occur in texts are of Egyptian origin (such as sepat, Le., "nome"); however, it would be rash at tllis point to assume tllat an Egyptian-style administrative system was imposed. We are forced to conclude from tllis admittedly scanty material tllat the Kusllites adopted tlle Egyptian system witllin Egypt. This entailed reconfirming most officials and tlleir families in office, placing Kushites only in positions tllat had formerly been occupied by members of the Libyan ruling houses. It is likely tllat witllin Kush a different system operated that had its origins within Kushite tradition. In Egypt, the Kushites appear to have followed the same policy as earlier Libyan pharaohs in their relations with the elite. Under the Libyans, the High Priest of Amun had been a son, in the later phase the eldest son, of the reigning pharaoh. The God's Wife of Amun was a daughter of the pharaoh, but her office was inviolable and not all pharaohs installed a daughter as God's Wife or as her heiress. The position of High Priest of Ptah at Memphis had also been held by a royal scion, but there is no direct evidence for a Kushite occupant. The evidence from Thebes suggests that local elite f.1milies continued to exercise power, although there was some limited redistribution of offices. The Libyans had established numerous marriage alliances with the elite Theban f~lInilies. There is less evidence from other parts of Egypt, although the same situation may be assumed. Some Kushite-Theban alliances are known and a royal daughter married tlle Vizier of Lower Egypt. Marriages with the Libyan dynasts are, in my opinion, also very likely. One wife of Shabaqo carried religious titles that arc not characteristic of a Kushite queen but suggest that she was daughter of a Libyan (MOl·kot 1994: Appendix 6). Following the Assyrian invasions and Kushite reconquests, Psamtik I of Sais gained control of Lower Egypt. The Kushites were still acknowledged as rulers of Upper Egypt until Psamtik's 9th regnal year (also year 9 of the Kushite king Tanwetamani). The transfer ofThebes and Upper Egypt ft·om Kushite to Saite

Egypt and Nubia rule appears to have been effected diplomatically. Psamtik sent his young daughter Neitiqert to be tlle eventual successor to the Kushite God's Wife of Amun, Shepenwepet 11. The situation is thus similar to the initial Kushite appearance in Thebes. Both Shepenwepet 11 and tlle reigning Kushite High Priest of Amun were still active some years later. The Egyptian pharaohs oftlle New Kingdom had attempted to integrate local e1ites in bOtll Nubia and Asia. The Assyrians later followed a similar policy. In bOtll instances if a ruler was deposed, a member of tlle same family often replaced him. Indeed, one of the problems of tlle Late Assyrian empire derives directly from this policy (see Liverani, tllis volume). Leaving local rulers in control involved considerably less expenditure, but was subject to tlle potential of rebellion. Eventually a number of vassal kingdoms were converted into provinces because of rebellion. In Egypt, the Libyan dynasts changed tlleir allegiance according to which power was tlle more imminent tlll"eat, Kushite or Assyrian. The Egyptian empire in the New Kingdom appears to have faced less rebellion tllan tlle Assyrian empire and certainly lasted considerably longer. Important factors may be tllat the Egyptian empire was far smaller than the Assyrian and military troops could be more rapidly moved to rebellious areas. It is also possible that the Egyptians interfered less with tlleir vassal states. In sum, the evidence for some aspects of the themes under discussion is scanty. However, it seems reasonable to state tllat tlle Kushites exploited already existing economic and power structures. They did not reorganize the hierarchies, and only occasionally appointed their own nominees. Those nominees usually occupied powerful religious posts that had previously been the preserve of the Libyan pharaohs. In the economic realm, it is evident that during the phase of conquest considerable wealth (principally food) was reallocated to the temple of AnulI1 at Thebes. This temple was directly under Kushite control. In addition, there is evidence that large amounts of precious materials were sent to Kush. Skilled workers were also sent to Kush and the later years of the dynasty saw extensive building works there. With Kushite involvement in western Asia, a proportion of the commodity trade no doubt also went directly to the Kushite homeland. One question that inevitably emerges from this is to what extent was trade or the economy a significant f.1ctor in Kushite imperial expansion. Obviously, numerous f.1ctors affected the emergence of the Kushite state. Until we have a much greater knowledge of the history of the southern parts of the Kushite kingdom, we are unable to assess the role of the social, economic, and political structures of that region and the ways they affected state formation. Nevertheless, it is difficult to see why a Kushite state would expand in the way that it did and with the speed that it apparently did, if the economic circumstances of the eastern Mediterranean lands had not been influential.

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Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

10 Coercion, resistance, and hierarchy: local processes and imperial strategies in the Vijayanagara empire Kathleen D. Morrison

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The Vijayanagara empire (c. AD 1300-1700) was among the most areally extensive imperial polities in South Asia, laying claim to a vast territory on the Indian peninsula that stretched from coast to coast and covered much of southern India (Fig. 10.1). However, the nature of this polity and its internal organization - in particular, in the nature, scope, and degree of power exercised by its rulers - is much in dispute. Scholarly interpretations range from images of a rather benign, ritually incorporated segmentary (B. Stein 1980, 1995) or theater state (Fritz 1986, after Geertz 1980), to images of a militaristic empire (Nilakanta Sastri 1975) or efficient extractor of produce (Palat 1987). More recently, Sinopoli and I have pointed out the great variability in the form and extent of economic power exercised by elites, including those at the eponymous capital city (Morrison 1995a; Morrison and Sinopoli 1992; Sinopoli and Morrison 1995; Sinopoli 1986; and see Morrison and Lycett 1994). In part, this disagreement reflects the evolving state of scholarship on the Vijayanagara empire. However, much academic debate also stems from the significance of the Vijayanagara period itself for Indian history. Not only was this a time of transition from more regional polities to larger-scale imperial incorporation, it was also the period in which the influence of European trading companies and countries began to make itself felt, a period in which the structural conditions later encountered by European colonial powers were solidified. More than this, however, the later Vijayanagara period was a time of transition: of the movement of population on a large scale, the modification of natural environments, and the creation of various marginal and marginalized groups (or more properly, of the sets of economic and social strategies adopted by these groups), some of whom have come to be understood as remnants of an enduring, timeless Indian past. Such marginalized groups include various hunting and gathering peoples as well as peasant agriculturalists. Far from being holdovers ft'om the deep past, however, such strategies were products of the complex political economy and political ecology of the Vijayanagara empire, products of the age. In most previous analyses of the Vijayanagara empire, analytical effort has been directed primarily toward those who presumably constituted the most dynamic

actors on the imperial stage, e1ites of various sorts including kings and their families, officers, local leaders, priests, and temple managers. Tllis chapter partially inverts this focus, moving away from viewing imperial strategies solely as intentional or unintentional acts of powerful elites and toward incorporating those at the margins of Vijayanagara imperialism into perspectives on the empire itself. From this perspective, imperial expansion and incorporation are not fully explicable in terms oftlle intentions and actions ofleaders and rulers, or even oftllOse intentions coupled with material and cultural possibilities and restraints. Instead, they appear as recursive and "negotiated," both imposed from witllOut and actively constructed, resisted, and manipulated by those who are brought into imperial systems (e.g., Irschick 1994). This "negotiation" is both ideological and physical, and in both spheres can be violent, bloody, and devastating. The phenomenon of imperial incorporation is thus more graphic, disjunctive, and immediate in the experience of subalterns than the rather dry language of scholarsllip written from the perspective of an imperial elite or reified imperial polity generally makes it out to be. As such, fuller understanding of key moments of political, economic, and environmental change associated with the Vijayanagara period requires analysis of both elite and non-elite action and experience. Studying the construction, experience, and perhaps rejection and reworking of domination in the past is a difficult enterprise. I am aided in this by a tradition of theoretical scholarship in the social sciences and history, and I rely on the work of many historians of South Asia. However, I also bring to this work evidence from the archaeological record of Vi jay ana gal'a, perhaps the only "voice" that remains for many who have been largely or completely written out of textbased history (Morrison and Lycett 1997). The material record may not often make clear what Scott (1976: 4) refers to as the creation of social dynamite - the nature of exploitation in peasant society and the moral economy of peasants that interacts with that exploitation to create potentially explosive situations. And it probably even misses a great deal of the detonation of that dynamite (Scott 1976: 4), moments of rebellion or revolution (Wolf 1969). However, archaeological remains make clear, more so than texts, the material conditions of life under which participants in the Vijayanagara i1'l'lpcritmt labored, conditions that, as I suggest here, powerthlly shaped both the possibilities and the course of Vijayanagara imperial expansion. In this paper I consider some processes of imperial expansion and incorporation, their effects on those so incorporated, and, to the extent possible, the dynamic responses, strategies, and conditions of life of three different groups of subject peoples. The first group of people I consider are small-scale agriculturalists making a living on the semi-arid Karnatak plateau and living within a day's journey of the city of Vi jayana gal'a, one of the most populous places on the subcontinent in the sixteenth century. These f.1rmers are known on the basis of both historical and archaeological data, and their impact on the landscape is also documented through studies of pollen and charcoal (Morrison 1994, 1995a). The second group, known only from the documentary record, is a more diverse

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Local pJ'ocesses and illl pel'ial stmtegies in Vijayrt1wgam

KrtthlCe1l D. MOJ'J'iSOll

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assortment of agriculturalists and craftspeople fi'om what is now northern Tamil Nadu, a region several hundred kilometers distant from the capital city. Finally, I discuss what may be the most marginalized and least "Vijayanagara" of all the cases considered here, the gatherer-hunter-traders of the western coastal mountains. These are people who by and large were never under direct or even indirect Vijayanagara rule, but fc)r whom the changes in land use and economy of the Vijayanagara period proved far-reaching. These three examples - briefly and preliminarily sketched out in this chapter - are meant to suggest a range of experiences with and responses to Vijayanagara imperialism from the local to the provincial to the remote.

DOMINATION AND EMPIRE FORMATION: BASES OF POWER

Bay of Bengal

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200 km

I mperial expansion and incorporation - empire-building - is at the core a process ofdominatiol1, of the exercise of power. However, such power is always deployed (or attempted to be deployed) within specific historic, cultural, and material contexts. These contexts, and their potential implications for processes of empire t()l'Ination, operation, and dissolution, are my specific concern here. Nevertheless, I do wish to make clear that by using terms such as domination and resistance, terms that can lead one into a kind of social science quicksand, I do not intend to imply that the existence of structured inequalities or the exercise of power can be understood solely as a product or process of elites, as a kind of "top-down" flow of action, ideas, and vitality. Instead, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, I would agree with other scholars that- subalterns also play an active role in the making of history, that creating meaning as well as the material structures of/ile are processes in which all members ofa society take part in some way. Subaltern actions and consciousness are not simply reactive, as use of dle term resistance might imply. Instead, processes of power might be understood more (idly in light of recent discussions that stress interplay and the mutual constitution(s) of' power relations (e.g., Scott 1976, 1985; Irschick 1994; Agrawal 1999). Without sinking too deeply into this quicksand, I might simply point out that there is more than one type of "actor" on the imperial stage (central elites) or even two (elites and non-elites), but instead a plethora of players, individuals, and groups of differing status, interests, and abilities who mayor may not share common goals (see Brumfiel and Deagan, this volume). Nevcrtheless, while recognizing that nOl1-elites also shape the f(mHS of stratified society a recognitiol1 that has been rather belated among archaeologists, perhaps as a result of the traditional t()CUS of fieldwork on the monumental - it also seems necessary to add that this shaping is often done under severe constraint. In the empires discussed in this volume, there is inevitably a materiality to the exercise of power. People within an imperial society (and many without) operate within systems of structllt'ed inequality - what Wolf ( 1990) refers to as

10.1 The Vijt7)'II1JlllTtU'1l emjJire. 'l7Jf solid tinc i1Jd imtt:s the mllximulII Ilrm IInder dirt:Ct imperitlt cOlltrol; th/; dtHhed lillc indhMes disjJllted m'CIls or Ilrms tl1Ider indirect con trot.

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structural power - so that their knowledge and understanding may pale before, and indeed be only minimally effective in, confronting institutional and cultural structures that oppress and limit them. The Vijayanagara empire grew from a small regional polity based in the interior of the rather remote Karnatak plateau (Venkata Ramanayya 1933). Like several other South Asian empires before it (Inden 1990), the Vijayanagara empire burst forth from a resource-poor, semi-arid homeland to conquer large tracts of fertile agricultural land and its inhabitants, including the rich alluvial deltas ofIndia's eastern coast. The limits of the empire shifted through time with conquest, incorporation, and rebellion (Sewell 1982 [1900]; B. Stein 1980, 1989). But even in the early years of the fourteenth century, there is little doubt tllat tlle polity incorporated a hugely diverse set of inhabitants, differentiated on tlle basis of economy, religion, language, and social organization. By tlle sixteentll century, when tlle empire reached its maximum spatial extent, tllere existed not only diverse groups of peoples within tlle empire, but also a wide range of degrees of imperial control over and interference in local patterns of governance and revenue extraction. While tlle Vijayanagara empire was certainly a conquest state, critically dependent on force and the tlU"eat of force to incorporate and hold togetller its domains, tlle polity was also integrated in otller ways, notably through complex sets of ritual relationships (see B. Stein 1980; Inden 1990: 207-10) tllat were built upon relations of hierarchyl rather than simply coercion. These relationships had the potential bOtll to ramify (e.g., Appadurai 1978) and conflict, creating a shifting field of power relations that admitted a certain cultural and political fluidity (e.g., Mines 1984; Ramaswamy 1985c; Karashima 1992). In the following abbreviated case studies, I suggest that the diversity of responses to and experiences of Vijayanagara empire-building is predicated on four conditions or dynamics, as well as to more contingent and less predictable exigencies of historical circumstance. The first two conditions relate to tlle "center" (a falsely concrete construction when seen from some analytical distances; a reasonable abstraction from others) - to its material and organizational bases and to the intentions and goals of its leaders. The second two relate, on the other hand, to the "objects" of domination and incorporation (if they may be objects with agency), their ecological situation, their social, cultural, and political organization. That local conditions powerfully structure the course of imperial expansion and consolidation comes as no surprise; our challenge is to balance the analytical pull of our usually sketchy, biased, and always imperfect data to accommodate this complexity. The first set of conditions structuring the course and consequence of imperial expansion relates to the organizational and material base of the imperial polity itself. What are the technologies, both organizational and physical, of domination? In tlle Vijayanagara empire, the answers to these questions change through time, witll, for example, the possibilities for communication, transportation, and monitoring of activity over the long distances of the empire shifting with the

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

relocation of the capital city in the late sixteenth and again in tlle seventeenth centuries. The empire was extremely large and most military movement took place over land, so that imperial armies, though always on the move, could never patrol tlle entire realm. The troops attached to subsidiary rulers were always important, both as participants in imperial wars and raids and as threats to centralized control. When firearms became a routine part of warfare during the sixteenth century, the technology of war necessitated changes in defensive architecture and worked to change the contours of the conquest state. No less important were the ultimate material bases of power: food and labor. How were workers in the imperial cause mobilized and how were elites, soldiers, and otllers provisioned? The Vijayanagara empire relied to a large extent on agricultural produce and the income from agricultural production (Mahalingam 1951; B. Stein 1980), and tlle productive capacity of both dry and irrigated land lies behind any consideration of imperial expansion, warf.1re, or politics. The location of the capital city in a small "oasis" of irrigation potential (Morrison 1994, 1995a) is certainly relevant to its survival; the location of the core provinces of tlle empire in a region of agricultural uncertainty is certainly relevant to its expansion. The success of the court depended on being able to avoid the uncertainties of rainf.111 and crop failure that most dry f.1rmers in the vicinity of the capital f.1ced. This was accomplished only partly through involvement in irrigation (Morrison and Lycett 1994; Morrison 1997b) - incorporation of more productive regions and a peripatetic court also served this purpose. In general, Sinopoli (1988) and I (Morrison and Sinopoli 1992; Sinopoli and Morrison 1995) have noted, with others, that the degree of central involvement in production and distribution varied with the product and its relevance to elite concerns. War horses from the Arabian peninsula and trade goods such as textiles occasioned great efforts on the part of rulers and royal officials (Digby 1982), while more quotidian crafts such as earthenware ceramics engendered almost no notice at all. The second set of conditions structuring response to imperial domination has to do with the goals and intentions of central elites and the extent to which these are shared by (or at least not actively opposed by) those who actually execute those goals and by other elites. This concern for intentionality - what "the empire" was trying to accomplish, what the emperors did and meant to do makes up the bulk of traditional Vijayanagara history (e.g., Sewell1982 [1900]). There is no doubt that kingly intentions varied through time, including even their degree of ambition and scope. For example, the first few Vijayanagara kings did not claim the same kind of titles suggesting universal dominion that later rulers did. That pretensions to universal sovereignty had real implications is not at issue. However, it may be necessary to break down analysis of intentional acts more careflllly. For example, consideration of the goals and intentions of imperial rulers invites questions about the identity and recruitment of such elites, the bases of their power, and the means by and extent to which they were able carry

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out their desires. In the Vijayanagara empire, political leaders had the military option as one direct course of action (although they held no monopoly on the use of force as local leaders also maintained armies), and religious patronage as another, indirect strategy. Patronage of Hindu temples, Brahmins, and other religious institutions linked rulers (and others; patronage was by no means limited to political leaders; Morrison and Lycett 1994) to these economically, ideologically, and socially powerful institutions. Vijayanagara emperors asserted their legitimacy, in part, as protectors of Hindu dharma (cf., Sale tore 1982), a claim buoyed by their religious activity. Indeed, claims of sovereignty are often followed closely by accounts of religious patronage. The Sivatatvacintamani (fifteenth century) for example, boasts: The king (Devaraya II), just as [the god] Shiva vanquished the mythological demons (tripllriislIriis) and achieved victory, too accomplished victory over the three sovereigns . . . and manifested himself as the supreme emperor at Vijayanagara and on that account he was known as Devarajendra (king of all gods). The king manifested himselflike his patron god Virupaksha [an aspect of Shiva], in the bejewelled throne as the supreme emperor (rtijadhi-rtija-parami fllaram) Sri-Vira-devarajendra. That king subscribed to the construction oHour beautiful entrance gateways to that temple of god Pampa-Virupaksha, at the four cardinal points. They were all beautified with precious stones and glittering pinnacles on the top. (Kotraiah 1994: 36-7)

I' I

Religious institutions were also brought doctrinally into the business of imperial consolidation, as local deities, particularly goddesses, were incorporated into orthodox Hindu pantheons (B. Stein 1980). These first two f.'1ctors structuring the course and nature of attempts at imperial domination and control refer to aspects of the center and to political elites, and as such conform to conventional historiographic and archaeological understandings of the nature and operation of empires. As I hope to have made clear, this notion of a (thinking, goal-directed) center is perhaps f.'1lsely concrete, failing to take into account, for example, inter-elite competition (see Brumfiel and Fox 1994; also D'A1troy, this volume) and the contingent and sometimes shifting nature of "elite ne ss" itself. Analysis based on center-out, top-down perspectives, while important, leaves out vital elements of the imperial story. Understanding the diverse responses to Vijayanagara expansion requires the addition of at least two further structuring f.'1ctors, both relating to the human and other conditions at the receiving end of imperial ambitions. Like any discussion of imperial "centers," imperial "peripheries" quickly fall apart as coherent objects of study on close examination. Incorporated peoples rarely constitute single interest groups. Nevertheless, any understanding of the dynamics ofimperial expansion will require attention to local conditions and at least some attempt to untangle the diverse threads of local interest and action. The first of these conditions is the underlying (in the sense of preexisting, not in the sense of natural or given) ecological dynamic of the area and peoples

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

to be incorporated. This ecology is a human ecology that includes not only environmental conditions, flora, and fauna, but also human demography and the organization of production, distribution, and consumption. In the case studies below, factors such as the technology of agriculture - irrigation, storage, transportation - play an important role in the range of economic and hence political options open to subjects of the Vijayanagara empire. Irrigation networks cannot exist and the production of irrigated crops such as rice cannot take place without suitable sources of water, appropriate slopes and soils, and particular climatic conditions. Hunting and gathering as an exclusive subsistence strategy cannot be sustained under conditions of high human population density; what such a density may be is in part a product oflocal biotic conditions. To say that the ecological structure of a subject region and people makes a difference to the outcome of empire-building is, however, to say very little. To this must be added tile fourtll factor in our list of conditioning factors, the cultural and social dynamic of the conquered. To build tile example of irrigated rice production, we might tllen add to tile soils, slopes, and rainfall regimes mentioned above tile technical knowledge of canal and reservoir construction, as well as tile ability to mobilize labor in f.'1cility construction and maintenance, agricultural operations, and crop processing. Vijayanagara rulers and local leaders consistently followed a policy of encouraging agricultural expansion into new areas as well as promoting the intensification of existing cropping regimes through the construction of irrigation f.'1cilities. Such policies require particular constellations of land, labor, and environment and, one might suggest, local cooperation in order to be successful. Elite goals and intentions, then, are not sufficient to understand the ways in which programs of agricultural expansion and intensification played out; local conditions are also critically important. In organizational terms, there exist different possibilities for the domination and control of people integrated into powerful corporate organizations than for those who are not. Several scholars have described the merchant and producer guilds of southern India (K. R. Hall 1980; Abraham 1988) who, during the earlier Chola empire, not only regulated and ran workshops and markets, but in some cases even maintained armies, managed temple finances, and collected taxes. These powerfi.ll bodies disappeared during the early Vijayanagara period or survived in very altered form (Abraham 1988). Other locality-based forms of self-government also have a long tradition in southern India, and there is little doubt that localities within the Vijayanagara empire maintained considerable control over local affairs. The social (religious, caste, ethnic) composition of such local bodies was, however, limited to the upper, dominant groups, often landed agriculturalists (B. Stein 1980; Karashima 1992), leaving tile landless and tile low with little collective power. Smaller-scale communities standing outside of lowland caste society - "tribal" agricululralists, gatherers, and hunters, for example - not only lacked the corporate organization of upper-caste landowners

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Kathleen D. Morrison or high-status craft specialists (Ramaswamy 1985b, 1985c), but also had fewer personal ties of patronage, dependence, and loyalty to the powerful than even landless laborers in the lowlands might have been able to muster. The efforts of Vi jayan agar a rulers to create, consolidate, and extend their rule across southern India met with variable success. This variability was partly responsive to tile factors outlined above. Dry farmers in the immediate vicinity of the capital city operated under very precarious economic and ecological conditions - this much is quite clear archaeologically (Morrison 1995a, 1997b). They also appear to have been rather peripheralized participants in networks of food grain exchange and prestation tllat were closely tied to bOtll politics and ritual. In this, tlleir domination cannot be understood without reference bOtll to tile ecological imperatives of dry farming (and to tile economic conditions that kept them dry farming) and to their social condition. Unfortunately, in tllis case we still know little about their resistance to such exploitation and their strategies for circumventing it. That is, a number of texts refer to tenants "running away" from oppressive landholders, but we are unable to link any of these historical references to dry farmers in tile immediate Vijayanagara hinterland. This situation contrasts witll the case of several groups offarmers and craft specialists in a southern province of tile empire who actively resisted imperial revenue demands and were able to obtain concessions from those in power. This success is mirrored by that of certain groups of weavers, for whom the Vijayanagara economy provided opportunities for social and ritual group mobility (Ramaswamy 1985a; and see Mines 1984). Finally, we move to the physical as well as conceptual margins of the Vijayanagara empire. There, upland gather-hunter-traders, in part of an ongoing process of displacement and oppression, were literally created as dispossessed and subject groups as a consequence of the operation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century economies, rather than as the result of some imperial policy.

DRY FARMERS IN THE URBAN HINTERLAND: FOODGRAINSANDPO~R

In precolonial India, literary descriptions of prosperous realms typically represent them in highly conventional terms as being lush, green, and (perennially) watered. The Vijayall1t1'1'l1iri Charite, written by Srutakarti, a Jain poet from the Mysore region in about 1567 C E, evokes an earlier South Indian empire, the Hoysala, describing the landscape of its capital city, Darasamudra. This evocation of the long-faded Hoysala empire, an empire that expanded out of the Mysore region on the heels of the cataclysmic military defeat of the Vijayanagara armies in 1565, is certainly not coincidental. Like many texts, this one begins with a description of the Hoysala realm: The country had a number of reservoirs, streams, ponds, stepped wells, and wells full of good water which supplied water to the gardens, irrigated lands, other lands, etc., all resulting in (increased agricultural production and) offering a pleasant sight to the eyes and mind. There were also fields with standing

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara crops of coconuts, sugarcane, superior variety of paddy [rice] (gandha-ftili). There were groves of fruit-bearing trees yielding pomegranates, jack fruits, oranges, bananas, areca nuts, lime fruits and others. (Kotraiah 1994: 5)

Indeed, from such accounts, one might imagine all food grains to be rice and all fields to be irrigated. This was not the case. In sixteenth-century southern India, food grains not only expressed and reflected status relations, but were also differently valued as ritual foods and as the means to pay taxes and otller obligations. Because of the sharply defined conditions under which differently valued food grains would grow in the semi-arid interior, marked disparities existed in the diets, agricultural strategies, and economic articulation of different groups of grain producers. I consider here a few aspects of the production and disposition offood grains in the Vijayanagara hinterland, and the logically independent but articulated networks of circulation through which food grains traveled. I suggest that the dominant relations of power that structured Vijayanagara prestation - in the context of the temple economy and in the disposition of "traditional" produce shares, including those due to political leaders - were maintained by the demand for items of value (rice and cash). These demands forced producers without access to wet lands to participate in a market economy and to sustain a system of investment, ritual, and consumption to which they themselves did not have access. These dry farmers are only partly visible in the historical record; much of what is known about their forms and strategies of production derives from the archaeological record. In the area around the city of Vijayanagara, archaeological survey data provide evidence for the tempo of settlement and agricultural expansion and intensification between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries (Morrison 1995a). The initial settlement expansion in this area dates to the midfourteenth century and is visible in the construction of the urban core walls of the city as well as the establishment of a number oflarge temple complexes. Early settlements, most of which continued to be occupied throughout the Vijayanagara period (and several into the present), tend to cluster nearer the river and the city and although they are found across a large area, parts of the region were not permanently settled during the fourteenth century. In a roughly 120 square kilometer surve}' area, we have identified more than thirty reservoirs that were partly or wholly constructed at this time; most settlements are associated with reservoirs. Other agricultural facilities associated with the Early period include at least five canals that drew water from the Tungabhadra River by means of anictttsor long diversion weirs. Rainf.1ll f.1rming of millets was, however, probably the mainstay of most agriculturalists. The pace of growth was rapid, and much early expansion was apparently fueled by immigration to the capital city. The archaeological record of Early Vijayanagara settlement growth and agricultural expansion is complemented by historical and palaeobotanical data that reflect similar trends. Pollen and microscopic charcoal data from reservoir cores indicate a relatively open, treeless landscape and intensive regional burning during the Early period, consistent with the archaeological interpretation of

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Kathleen D. Morrison intensive agriculture and field clearance. Inscriptional data also show a strong overall temporal distribution, with an Early, fourteenth-century peak in the number of inscriptions followed by a trough in the fifteenth century and a dramatic expansion in the sixteenth century or Late Vijayanagara period (Morrison 1995a). Thus, the archaeological record of growth and stagnation in settlement and agricultural production is matched closely by tlle historical data. The fifteenth cenulry is ratller uneventful archaeologically; only one settlement and one reservoir can be definitely assigned to tllis period. The growth of the Early period seems to have stalled, and indeed this was a period of some dynastic uncertainty (Sewe1l1990 [1982]; B. Stein 1989). This political uncertainty may be relevant for understanding both tlle lack of monumental construction and tlle decline in elite investment that characterized tlle fifteentll century. The sixteentll century, in contrast, was a period of phenomenal groWtll in and near the capital city as well as a period of territorial expansion and consolidation. Inscriptional, archaeological, and palaeoecological data all reflect this expansion. The sixteentll century was also, as far as we are able to tell, a period of political reorganization (e.g., Karashima 1992: 2) when new forms of governance were introduced into some oftlle provinces oftlle empire. By the end of the sixteentll century, the city of Vijayanagara was abandoned and bOtll tlle boundary and tlle capital of tlle empire shifted further soutll. In the immediate hinterland of the city of Vi jayan agar a, tlle security and abundance of agriculture relied almost exclusively on the control and storage of water. The capital city is situated in the dry interior, in an area that receives approximately 500 mm of rainfall annually. This scanty rainfall is subject to an estimated 25 to 30 percent variability, so that in any given season the summer monsoon rains may fail to come at all. Under these climatic conditions, only very hardy crops such as sorghum (So"lfhum sp., known as jOlJlar or cholum) and other millets can survive without supplemental watering and, as such, were and are the food grains of the poor. Rice (Oryza satiJla) was a highly valued food, tlle grain of choice for those wealthy or powerful enough to afford it. Rice figures prominently in many rituals and its social "value" has been discussed by many scholars (Hanchett 1988; Raheja 1989; Reynolds 1991; and see Howe 1991). Rice is also discussed in texts describing tlle activities of Vi jayan agar a elites. One such text (the Sanatlmmara Charite), said to date to 1485 C E, described the consumption of at least twelve different rice dishes at a royal wedding, as well as the presentation by the host to the guests of "auspicious rice" (akshate; Kotraiah 1993: 3-7). In elite (vegetarian) cuisine, a cuisine also relished by the gods, rice dishes constituted one of the four major categories of cooked food. In t:1ct, while rice is never missing from menus of feasts and food offerings, millets are never explicitly present. 2 In tlle region around the city of Vi jayan agar a, rice was grown in paddies, specialized and constructed microenvironments with level ground, secure sources of flowing water, and complex networks of ditches, borders, and drainage channels. Long-term existence of rice paddies in an area actually modifies soil strucUlre,

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara creating a hard pan underneatll the plow zone. Thus, rice transformed physical environments as well as social and economic ones. In the Vijayanagara hinterland, wet crops such as rice were supported by a network of canals and canal-fed irrigation features (Fig. 10.2). Canal construction occurred in two major episodes, tlle first during tlle initial period of urban occupation and the second several hundred years later in the early sixteenth century. Altllough it is difficult to be certain what crop mixes were grown in specific areas, existing botanical evidence suggests that rice was a major focus of production in tllese canal-irrigated zones. The desire for rice and elite demands for rice may, in part, lie behind some of the early focus on intensive irrigated agriculture in the Vijayanagara region. However, in addition to its powerful status associations, paddy rice is also a highly productive crop tllat can significantly outproduce other grains. Further, rice is extremely storable. Particularly in its less processed forms, rice may store WitllOUt deterioration for several years. Old rice has been said to taste the best, and rice reportedly may be maintained in storage for generations (Breckenridge 1985: 49). In fact, rice that is not cured but is cooked immediately after harvest tends to become pasty, lose solids in solutions, t:1il to swell, and disintegrate (Grist 1975: 385). Rice land was not well distributed tllroughout the Vijayanagara hinterland. Land in canal zones was limited and the extension of canal irrigation may well have displaced individuals or groups with limited potential to assert their use rights over the land. Outside the canal zones, it would have been possible to raise only very small plots of rice under the more reliable reservoirs and/or by using water laboriously lifted from wells. The labor demands associated with paddy rice cultivation are considerable and even small holdings under paddy cannot generally be maintained without recourse to extra-household labor. Mencher (1978) has noted a striking association between cropping patterns and the proportion oflow-caste landless laborers in South India. Where wet rice dominates, the proportions of landlessness are highest and distinctions of class and caste most marked (and see B. Stein 1980). Thus, rice production requires significant access to resources such as low-lying, level land, water rights, and labor. In turn, rice and other valued foodstuffs were involved in the assertion and replication of power relations in the form of both temple ritual and investment and the market. Dry grains such as sorghum and other millets such as ragi (Eleusine corocana) and bajra (Permisetum typhoideum) probably always constituted the staple food for the majority of the population. Millets can be grown under a raint:1ll regime, although such production is very risky and a variety of strategies were devised to facilitate crop growth. In the Vijayanagara region, these strategies included tlle construction of a range of soil and water control featl1l'es such as check-dams, terraces, and gravel-mulched fields. Reservoirs, ranging in size from simple dams a few meters long to massive constructions several kilometers long, also addressed the problems of crop production in the context oftlle highly seasonal and low rainfall (Morrison 1993). Land under reservoirs was referred to by a term meaning "dry crops on wet lands" (Ludden 1985), suggesting that millets

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in'ilfatcd ZOIlC (!t'lbc Vija)'1lIlIl/JIlI'll imperilll capilli I (1I111e

mllll/ ill Ufi/ifl'r(qIJl).

were the primary staple grains grown under reservoirs. Agrieultural (~1Cilities supporting the produetion of millets varied not ollly in size, but also in their degree of connectivity. Thus, there were major organizational difkrences between the production of dry crops ill fields with a kw small check-dams, features whose placcment only modestly affected the overall runoff and erosional characteristics of the larger landscape, and those grown under reservoirs or larger terrace systems that significantly altered af'fCcted rcgional watersheds and slopes (Morrison 1997b). The physical linkages of the latter imply concomitant social linkages that arc absent in smaller-scale dry (~\I·ming. Dry grains do not figure prominently in the historical record even though it is clear on the basis of archaeological data that they constituted the major staple crops. Rapi could be stored in pits f(lr several years, but there seems to be general agreement that millets do not store as well or as long as paddy (Breckenridge 1985: 49). The disposition of different f(IOlI grains served to reinf(lrce existing relations of power by f(lrcing producers of less valued dry grains to participate, albeit indirectly, in a network of prestation, ritual, and investment fi'om which they were excluded. The remarkable structure of temple investment in the Vijayanagara period, a structure with significant political, social, and ecological as well as religious ramifications (Appadurai 1978; B. Stein 1980; Hcitzman 1(87), has been referred to by Breckenridge (1985) as a system of "social storage," as 1 discuss shortly. It is important to note, however, that this social

Loml processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara storage was not for everyone, even f()r everyone drawn into the system. For the majority of small f:1l'll1erS and agricultural laborers, storage was of the more material kind and social storage on a regional scale was perhaps more personal and less institutional than that envisioned by Breckenridge. Precolonial Hindu temples were symbolically and economically powerful loci f(JI' the consumption and distribution as well as, less directly, the production of f(lOd grains. Temples ranged in size ft'om small shrines without resident religious specialists, to large complexes that attained the size of small citics. Many tcmples had storcrooms and large kitchens. In the capital city, major temple complexes were designated as towns in their own right (Filliozat and Filliozat 1988) and supportcd large populatiolls of various kinds of specialists (Ismail 1984). In thc historical rccord, temples appear as the rccipients of gifts. Gifts givcn to temples included land, rights to produce from specified villages, valuables, and, less often, cash or livestock. Local political leaders are the most ubiquitous donor class in this period, but a wide varicty ofprivilegcd groups and individuals made gifts to temples that are recorded in stone and copper-platc inscriptions. These groups included royalty, mcrchant groups, groups of landowning villagers, and religious functionaries. Thc vast majority of these gifts went to tcmples, with other religious endowmcnts such as feeding houses f(lr Brahmins occasionally receiving indcpendcnt gifts. Temples used gifts ofland and producc rights partly to support themselves and to providc large-scale semi-public feasts on festival days (of which therc wcre many). Tcmples also acted as "developmcnt agencies" (after Breckenridge 1985) (II' agricultural production, using donations to invest in the construction of agricultural f:1Cilities, often pooling smaller donations. The tcmple was then entitled to a produce share fi'om d1e lands watered by thc new hcility, land that could produce a more secure and reliable crop, if not a more valued crop. Thus, temples did not simply amass resources, but actively invcsted thcm in agricultural production. A great deal more remains to be learncd about the construction and investment activities of temples, and it would be important to know, /(11' example, how labOl' was mobilized (II' construction projects. Gins to temples accrued religious merit f(lr the donor and (II' those specified by the donor. Such gins were also recognized by being recorded in stone or, less publicly, on copper plates. However, sllch prestations were not simply alienations but also investments through which donors received a material benefit (ct: B. Stein 1980, 1989). This benefit accrued in the context of ritual consumption and distribution. In her analysis of the great temple and pilgrimage center at Tirupati, in the southern part of the empire, Breckenridge (1985: 56) notes that, in the fifteenth century, the preferences of the gods at Tirupati shifted li'om gifts ofvaluablcs such as pearls, tCstive lighting, and cows, to f()()d. Aner the fifteenth century, then, the Tirupati gods' enjoyment of tCasting required gifts of fcmd. This shift brings to mind the complex sets of injunctions in normative Hinduism about receiving f(){)(i of different kinds fi'om people of different kinds and, inversely, about prestations that may be given as well as accepted. The gift of/(x)d to goddesses and gods entailed the services of priests acceptable as f(lod-givers,

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Kathleen D. Morrison and patterns of caste and community affiliation no doubt differed with the situation of the god. More than the identity of the giver, however, we might be concerned with the identity of the gift. Gods had refined palates, and enjoyed the full range of dishes also relished by elites. Thus, rice would have been appropriate in the context of temple worship,3 while other grains - at least in the larger temples - may have been less enthusiastically received. Food offered to the gods was returned as prasada, or sacred leftovers. At Tirupati, three quarters of the prasad was allotted to the temple and one quarter to the original donor (Breckenridge 1985: 57). Prasad had sacral, caloric, and market value since it could also be sold to pilgrims. Thus, prasad embodied and produced "value" in a number of different contexts. Both temples and donors could and did enjoy the continuing return on their original investment both in their diet and by converting prasad to other desired commodities in the market. In this sense, we can see that rice was commoditized by temples and elites in a specific sacral context, although a separate market for rice outside this system of circulation also existed (Filliozat 1978: 58). Producers of less valued food grains were forced to support this structure, even though they themselves did not participate in it, either as donors or as donees. There has been considerable debate about the nature of taxation during the Vijayanagara period, a debate complicated by both regional and temporal variability (see discussions by Mahalingam 1951; B. Stein 1980, 1989; Karashima 1992). Our understandings of Vi jayan agar a economic arrangements are complicated by the growing monetization of the pcriod. Although coined money had existed for several centuries, cash was becoming increasingly important throughout the sixteenth century (cf. Pal at 1987). South Asian ethnographic and historical literature is replete with descriptions of the apportionment of the "grain heap" at harvest time, and the various in-kind shares due to occupational specialists such as barbers, washermen, potters, and other service people (e.g., Berreman 1972: 57-61; Beals 1974: 70-1; but sce J. P. Parry 1994). That this normative arrangement also obtained during the Vijayanagara period is generally assumed (e.g., Mahalingam 1951). The disposition of shares depended in part on the tenancy arrangement of the land, with the "royal" or "landlord's share" (melparam; Breckenridge 1985: 50) in some cases due to temples and in others to political leaders. An almost bewildering number of arrangements obtained, but the relevant point here is that at least for the superior share - that due to governments or temples - obligations of ricc wcrc to bc paid in kind, but obligations in othcr food grains or in gardcn producc wcrc to bc paid in cash. This rcquircment would havc forccd many subsistcnce agriculturalists, produccrs of millcts, to participate in the market economy in order to obtain cash. Thc requircment for cash may be partly accountcd for by the superior storability of rice, in that only less perishable foodstuffs would have becn desired by the authorities. However, I suggest that the social value of rice and its appropriateness for prestation were also relevant to this demand. Simply put, like the gods, temples and kings desired food and only certain products constituted

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara appropriate foods in the context of prestation. Where rice was not produced, cash had to be obtained. Thus, agriculturalists without access to the significant rcsources rcquired to produced valued foodstuffs - water, land under a canal, labor - wcre forced to provide other culturally appropriate goods and, in a way, to perpetuate the differential valuation of grains. The changing prefercnces of the gods from valuables to food, thc markct in prasad, the investment of temples in agriculture (particularly if construction workers were paid in cash), and the dcmand for cash paymcnts of what werc formerly produce shares contributed to a context in which food and cash circulated in a numbcr of conceptually distinct but, in practice, interlocking systems of circulation - "traditional" produce shares givcn at the harvcst, cash paymcnt of taxcs, market exchange, and temple ritual and feasting. Finally, I want to rcturn to thc issue of social storagc. In her analysis of investmcnt at Tirupati, Brcckenridgc noted that donors oftcn made gifts that spanncd long distanccs so that tcmples and donors had rights in produce that crosscut ecological zoncs. This pattern of entitlemcnts was particularly important in dry zones, such as that surrounding thc city of Vi jayan agara, linking donors witll tile wetter and morc fertile deltas of thc cast coast. Breckenridgc (1985) has perceptively refcrrcd to these nctworks of cntitlcmcnt as a form of social storagc. This storagc, howcver, opcratcd at a rathcr high level so that the majority of the population in thc Vijayanagara hintcrland, for cxample, ccrtainly had no call on cast coast produce. For thcsc produccrs, thc balance of rcsourccs crcated by tcmple gifting must havc bccn somcwhat rcmote, belonging to a sphere in which thcy barely participatcd. Unlike thc donors to Buddhist monastic institutions in the first fcw ccnturics eE, in the Vijayanagara period no "houscwifc and householdcr, fishcrman and gardener" (Dchejia 1992: 35) appcars as donor. Instead, donors came from morc privilegcd groups. In a challengc to the dominant intellcctual themc of hierarchy that has pervaded studies of South Asian Hinduism (c.g., Dumont 1970; Marriott 1990), Raheja (1989) has recently suggestcd that ccntricity and not simply hierarchy may bc the organizing principle of prestation. That is, gifting itself marks thc ccntrality of donors (rather than their hierarchical ritual status), so that donors with significant access to resources arc at the midpoint of widening circles ofprestation. Sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, with its nexus of in-kind paymcnt of sharcs in ricc and cash paymcnt of shares in millcts, could also be conccivcd in terms of Rahcja's contcmporary obscrvations. Only those with significant acccss to rcsourccs such as land under a canal, watcr, and labor could produce socially and ritually valucd foodstuffs such as ricc and only thcsc produccrs could makc paymcnts of sharcs in kind. That at least some of thesc produccrs wcrc includcd in thc village assemblics fcaturcd as tcmple donors is clcar. Othcr producers, without acccss to canal-irrigatcd land, wcrc excludcd from gifting foodstuffs to (some) templcs or to thc govcrnment through tile paymcnt of obligatory sharcs (taxcs). Thc agricultural improvements initiated by tcmples, howcvcr, cnsurcd that f.1rmcrs would bccome increasingly obliged to

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them. Nevertheless, millet growers were not outside temple ritual, but supported it through their forced participation in the growing market economy. Tills burgeoning market in food, in turn, allowed the traffic in prasad and thus further enriched donor and temple alike. Giving gifts may have made donors more "central," but it seems that the changing conditions of production, distribution, and consumption of food in the Vijayanagara period made dry farmers more peripheral participants in a structure of privilege to which they had little access. In some conventional sense, Vijayanagara rulers had little control over (or interest in) dry farming, even in the area around tlle capital city (Morrison and Sinopoli 1992). However, dry farmers found themselves caught up in structures of inequality that implicated bOtll rulers and temples (cf. Wolfl990). We know little about tlle specific participation of small-scale dry f.1rmers in corporate groups such as village assemblies. Certainly the large range of facility elaboration, scale, and degree of regional connectivity suggests some variability in the wealth and connections of such farmers and thus perhaps in their ability to resist the economic changes of the sixteentll century. For a closer look at forms of res istance documented historically, however, we must move on to the second case.

THE NORTHERN TAMIL PROVINCES: REBELLION AND DISSENT Vijayanagara conquest and consolidation moved primarily from north to south, with portions of what is now the state of Tamil Nadu incorporated into the empire early in its history. Much scholarly attention has been paid to the Tamil country under Vijayanagara rule, and I attempt no review or synthesis of this literature here. Ecologically, this broad region includes both semi-arid inlands and more mesic coastal areas, as well as the fertile delta of the Kaveri river, where irrigated rice fields supported a dense population (Ludden 1985). Although this area is well studied historically, archaeological data arc virtually absent. Karashima (1992) has suggested that the nature of Vi jayan agar a rule over the Tamil country changed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries with the imposition of naya/la rule, naya/las being military leaders, many of them Telugu speakers from the northern part of the empire, assigned specific territories by the king (see also Nilakanta Sastri 1975; B. Stein 1980, 1982, 1989; Talbot 1994). This contrasts with the earlier, looser, system of ministers, governors, and generals (Karashima 1992: 2), many of whom were local. Naya/lashave been compared, controversially (see the excellent review by Kulke 1995), to feudal lords, but this comparison should not be taken very far. What is clear, however, is that naya/la power was significantly predicated on their military role, that many sixteenth-century naya/ms were outsiders, and that naya/la rule increased the success of revenue extraction over the Tamil provinces. The establishment of the naya/la system over the Tamil country was preceded

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

by several recorded resistance movements of the lower classes of society. What are sometimes called the Valangai-Idangai revolts are recorded in nine inscriptions from tlle greater Kaveri delta (Fig. 10.3). These resistance movements explicitly targeted oppressive tax assessments and loss of control over land and its produce (Karashima 1992: 141-58). Although tllere were independent peasant proprietors who owned and f.1rmed their own land, it appears that an increasing portion of agricultural land was coming under the control of a few landlords who leased it out to tenant cultivators. A powerful subtext of these revolts relates to the growing monetization of the period and resistance to expanding market mechanisms that followed both from the dependent status of tenant farmers and from demands for taxes in cash. The terms Valangai and Idangai refer to broad social/occupational categories (literally, the "right hand" and "left hand"; see discussion by Appadurai 1974; B. Stein 1980) that grouped agriculturalists in the right-hand category and non-agricultural groups such as merchants and craftspeople in the left. Although there are exceptions to this categorical division, the basic economic interests of each group differed and it is worth noting the earlier record of conflict (some violent) between Valangai and Idangai groups. In 1429, agricultural tenants and craftspeople - Valangai and Idangai groups together - rose in open revolt against landlords and the state, and successfully (for a time) negotiated lower tax rates and an end to money taxes on fanners (Karashima 1992: 141-8) that forced food producers into market participation. Craftspeople, who in any case were largely dependent upon markets for food, continued to pay taxes in cash. Karashima (1992: 142) summarizes part of onc inscription: 1. Wc, the people belonging to Valailgai 98 and l<.\ailgai 98 ofV~ludilampanu­ uchavadi [a territorial division], assembled in this temple in full strength and let the following be engraved on the wall of said temple. 2. In this mmlr/alam (ValudilampaHu), even if the IIclJiiJlar/i pmdlJiilli (the local Vijayanagara governor), Va'll}iyar (military people), and jiJlitalilliimr (holders of official [land] tenure) coerce us, or the Brahmana and Vellalla Iliilliyiilal" (holders of Iliil}i [land] right) try to oppress us in collusion with the i1·iijagamttiir (government officers), wc shall never submit to such oppression. 3. If there appears any single person among us who helps the intruders, betrays us ... or destroys the (cmrent) measuring rod [tor land assessment], wc shall assemble as of today and enquire into it ...

It may be worth noting that local elites (Brahmins and others possessing certain rights in land, in particular) as well as "intruders" came in for criticism. Several other inscriptions stress the corporate nature of the uprising and the importance of unity on the part of the oppressed (Karashima 1992: 144). That this at least partly successful resistance was based in the resource-rich Kaveri delta, a ricegrowing area critically dependent on labor beyond that available to most landholders and where corporate organizations of agriculturalists and others have a

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long history, may not be coincidental. Onc further contrast between the Kaveri delta and the Vijayanagara hinterland is, of course, precisely its location far from the putative scat of imperial power in the north. The inscriptions relating to the movements of 1429 refer both to the imposition of Vijayanagara rule (Karashima 1992: 144) and to more proximate concerns of control over land and its produce. It is impossible to say whether non-local rule was a cause or simply an idiom of discontent; one suspects that the oppressed were concerned more with their structure of access to resources and less with the regional identity of their oppressors. Interestingly, the revolt of 1429 and other episodes of unrest were led by precisely those people who are most severely affected by lamines in stratified, market-based societies - landless laborers and craftspeople. Further, the specific complaints taxation and land control - directly implicate both access to productive potential and the price of {(Jod (cf Sen 1981). The historical record indicates a series of famines in southern India during the late fCllIrteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The famine of 1396 was particularly severe and widespread, causing large-scale depopulation, and was also said to last f(Jr twelve years (Appadorai 1936: 748; Loveday 1982 [ 19141: 17), as unlikely as that may be (cf. Watkins and Menken 1985). The 1423-4 f:lI11ine is also said to have al}Ccted the entire DecGll1 (Appadorai 1936: 748; Loveday 1982 [ 1914]: 17), as did the f:\I11ine of 1471-2. Not only do the famines of the filteenth century coincide with the period ofullt"est just described, but they also coincide with the lull in construction and settlement expansion seen archaeologically. Whether or not there is some causal link between bmine 011 the one hand, and dissent on the other, is difficult to say. But it is certainly intriguing that issues of price and of exchange entitlement (in Sen's [ 1981[ terms; encompassing land control and market participation) were the very issues disputed and the very f:1Ctors that have proven so important in the historical study of f:\I11ines. Although the {(mus of data are not strictly comparable, the contrast between the sitllation of small-scale l:mllers in the Vijayanagara hinterland and that of Kaveri delta laborers and craftspeople is striking. The latter, hundreds of kilometers /i'om the capital and incorporated in a relatively loose way into imperial political struct ures, {:1Ced diflerent structures of power and had different possibilities {(1I' redress. In this IlIsh, irrigated rice-growing region, the operation oCcanal networks was linked on a regional scale and demands Ic)r labor were high. These conditions contrast with those of the more ecologically and economically isolated dry 1:1l'I11erS of the Vijayanagara region, These {:1l'I11erS, not joined together by the flow of irrigation water, managed very small-scale l:lcilities and grew crops oflittle political and ritual value. In the Tamil provinces, corporate structures f()r local action were well developed and it may be that social conditions {()I' sllch concerted em)rt a\so differed, The later imposition of the 1JfI)'11IW system over this region was certainly not a simple response to these lCw eft()rts at resistance, but it may be significant that, although rc/erences to peasant flight from hardship continue, there do not seem to be any further recorded episodes ofslIccessful uprisings.

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FORAGER-TRADERS OF THE WESTERN MOUNTAINS: ON THE MARGINS OF EMPIRE

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In South Asia, peoples involved in the hunting of wild animals and the gathering of wild plants have long been involved in relations of exchange and interdependence with agriculturalists. These relationships, far from being immutable and historically fixed, were marked by a high degree of variability and flexibility with specific groups altering their strategies in relation to ecological, demographic, and political imperatives. I consider here some of the changes in the organization of foraging/trading groups in southwestern India. These changes were coincident with the political and demographic expansion of the Vijayanagara and other lowland polities and peoples, and with the expansion of the coastal spice trade and the increasing integration of this region into a world economy between about 1400 and 1700 C E. In so doing, I want to illustrate how imperial expansion created, mostly inadvertently, conditions under which strategies of commercial foraging expanded. I suggest that the movement of hill peoples into diverse kinds of subsistence economies including the collection and trading of forest products constituted, in spite of its great social and economic cost, a kind of successful resistance to incorporation into lowland polities and societies, a strategy persisting to the present. The southwest coast of India is set apart from much of the rest of the peninsula by both physiography and climate. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on one side and the Western Ghat mountains on the other, this region consists of evergreen and semi-evergreen tropical forests dissected by well-watered alluvial valleys. The Ghats' orographic effect on summer monsoon precipitation not only ensures high rainfall along its western slopes but also creates the semi-arid conditions of the interior plateaus. The Malabar coast was the primary (but not sole) locus of spice production in India, of which the most important was pepper (Piper nigrttm), indigenous to the region. Forests inland and upland from the Malabar coast also contained other important forest products including ginger, cardamom, honey and wax, various gums and resins, dyes and scented woods, and medicinal and poisonous plants (B. Morris 1982). In India today, as in the Vijayanagara period, a number of "tribes" subsist in the Malabar Ghats by hunting and collecting forest products for external markets, trading those products, and by wage labor and agriculture (Fox 1969; B. Morris 1982; Hockings 1985: 226; Bird-David 1992; Stiles 1993). Many forest groups depend on lowland products, notably food grains, textiles, and iron, fur their basic subsistence. Thus, such exchange relations are essential rather than simply incidental. Although the orthodox perception seems to be that contemporary furagers are descendants of an unbroken tradition dating back as far as the Mesolithic, there are alternate routes by which groups could have moved into specialized collecting and trading. Hockings (1980, 1985), for example, considers the case of refugees from caste society - marginalized groups who move into the forests to take up new opportunities or to escape intolerable situations in their home-

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

land. Even if some upland groups represent refugees from tlle intensively cultivated lowlands, it is also likely that other specialized forager-traders reliant on imported foodstuffs began as more generalized foragers and/or as swidden agriculturalists. I suggest here that the sixteenth and seventeentll centuries constituted a key period in the move toward specialized foraging, a period in which the options open to hill peoples became greatly reduced. This transition may have been responsive to two factors. The first relates to the demands of the spice trade and other, politically based demands for forest produce. The second factor is more indirect but no less important, and this is the pressure on the forests from below created by expanding agriculture. Both the land use "push" and tlle political "pull" or demand for produce from below forced foragers and forager/agriculturalists into an increasingly specialized and increasingly marginalized position as participants in a world market. By the first few centuries BC E, an extensive network of exchange stretched across the Indian Ocean, indirectly connecting tlle Mediterranean witll East Asia. Historians of both Europe and South Asia (Braudel 1972; Digby 1982; Mathew 1983; Chaudhuri 1985) are in broad agreement that the volume of pepper, as well as of other products such as ginger and cardamom, increased significantly in the sixteenth century, and the structure of the trade in pepper and other South and Southeast Asian forest products has been extensively discussed. The expansion and restructuring of demands for produce that accompanied tllis growth promoted changes in the opportunities and strategies of different collectors and producers and fostered relationships of economic interdependence between them that survive, in altered form, into the present. Briefly, the expansion of the spice trade prompted changes in both lowland and upland subsistence strategies. In the lowlands, increased demands for rice may have prompted expansion and intensification of production. One significant factor in this may be direct demand for tribute in the form of rice, in order to supply Portuguese forts and settlements (Subrahmanyam, this volume). These demands fell almost exclusively on the kingdoms of the Kanara coast, particularly Honawar, Bhatkal, and Basrur (Desai et al. 1981; Subrahmanyam 1984: 445). The amount of rice involved was considerable; convoys of several hundred small ships, often under Portuguese guard (Pearson 1981: 77), sailed up the coast to Goa. In the 1570s and 1580s three to four convoys per year to Goa alone are reported (Pearson 1981: 77). In addition to the consumption of rice in the lowlands, the intensification of pepper production may have also created an escalation in demand fur rice and other staples as pepper producers (and gatherers) focused their attention away fi'om subsistence crops. As discussed below, the shipment of staples to the forested interior was necessary to support the foragers and cultivators of spices. Increased demands on forest products followed fi'om the expansion of the west coast trade. In the most direct way, the demand for pepper and other goods was accelerated by purchases and forcible extractions that followed on

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Portuguese colonization. Numerous other small polities stretched up and down the coast, however, and these were also engaged in the spice trade. The Vijayanagara empire never controlled large portions of the west coast, and in those areas it did claim there is little evidence of central involvement in tlle spice trade. However, Vijayanagara did figure as a major consumer of products involved in tlle trade of the west coast (Subrahmanyam 1990b: 78-9), and its contribution to tlle survival oftlle Portuguese trade empire has often been noted (Heras 1927). Connections between primary producers and collectors and colonial or indigenous governments benefiting from forest produce were generally indirect. Intermediate brokers or "secondary traders" (cf. Dunn 1975: 99) forged relations of dominance and indebtedness with forest peoples and these brokers dealt Witll more proximate political autllOrities. Thus, a multi-link chain of power stretched from the coast into tlle mountains. The contractual system depended on keeping foragers constantly in debt and personally dependent on the broker, who also acted as the supplier of subsistence goods (B. Morris 1982: 23,94). Tribute could also be exacted tlll'ough local leaders, ratller than directly from producers or collectors, in a way similar to that used to collect taxes from agriculturalists. Between tlle nintll and thirteenth centuries C E, Chola kings demanded tribute in forest products from territorial units located in the Ghats (Hockings 1985: ll5; see also B. Stein 1982). Fox (1969: 144) notes early reports tllat the K1.dar made periodic visits to Tripura to carry tribute and to exchange "gatllered" items such as tame elephants, wild honey, cardamom, and otller forest products for rice, iron, chilies, and opium. B. Morris (1982: 23) cites inscriptional evidence for a contract between the local Icing of Attingal and the Hill Pandaram, appointing the latter "tenants" of the forest, in rcturn for which the muppan, or chief, should bring certain forcst products to the capital cvery year. In return, cloth and other "gifts" would be given. In this case the local king was subject in turn to the Raja ofTravancore, to whom he had to pay tribute. Thus, forest products moved down from the mountains to the coast through an ever-widening circle of political authority. The Portuguese, too, used this system ofintermcdiaries (see Diffie and Winius 1977: 319 on Sri Lanka). The Portuguese purchased goods on fixed-price contracts with a go-between. The Portuguese did prefer, however, to induce local rulers to supply them with spices at an agreed-upon price (Danvers 1966 [1894]; Mathew 1983). Presumably, then, these rulers cmployed the intermediaries. Pearson (1981: 28) notes that the Portuguese had no direct control over pepperproducing areas and thus were dependent upon coastal rajas and local merchants for tllcir supplies. As an empirical pattern, then, we see with increasing scope of political authority an increasing physical distance from the source of the product, an increased concentration of stored goods, an increase in settlement nucleation, and an increase in the status oflandholding groups. Along parts ofKanara coastal strip, for example, Brahmins were the major landowners in the sixteenth and seventeenth centlll'ies. Further inland, landholding was largely in the hands of

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

tlle Bant, a "clean" Sudra caste (Subrahmanyam 1984: 439). Still further inland were tlle tribal swidden farmers and hunter-gatllerers. This social ordering corresponded well Witll the pyramidal strucnlre of power relations tllat knit together large areas of forests with fewer inland riverine towns and even fewer coastal cities. The scheduling demands of pepper cultivation, and particularly of pepper collection, are of particular interest. Cultivation of pepper in mid-elevation, mixed crop swidden fields seems to be most appropriate for the requirements of tlle plant. Its drainage needs often result in its groWtll on hill slopes (Aiyer 1980: 269). In modern varieties, tlle harvest time falls between February and March (Aiyer 1980: 276), but "wild" strains usually have fruit at all stages of maturity on the vine at any given time. According to Buchanan (1988 [1807]: 334), dry rice in tlle Anamalai region of the western mountains would have been harvested at about the same time as cultivated pepper, occasioning conflict in scheduling and labor demands involved in the different activities (and see Subrahmanyam 1990b: 66). Thus, demands of labor and scheduling for grain production and pepper production (and even more, the collection of wild pepper) had to be balanced. While specialized pepper production in the context of hill swiddens might have met the demand for pepper, the scheduling requirements of such a strategy would seem to preclude at least some forest gathering activities. B. Morris (1982: 63) notes that the more sedentary Hill Pandaram who have made a commitment to their swidden fields can only go for daily foraging trips. What, then, were the effects of the sixteenth-century spice trade on Ghat tribes? It is difficult to say with any certainty since historical data tend to focus on the coasts and on literate societies, and archaeological data are scanty. Still, it may be significant that cultivation of pepper is only occasionally mentioned in historical documents until the sixteenth century, while there are abundant references to the pepper trade in both this and earlier periods. For example, in the corpus of Tamil Sangam poetry, dating to the first thrcc or four centuries C E, some poems mention a coastal intra- Indian trade in pepper and honey, both forest products (Nilakanta Sastri 1975: 110; B. Morris 1982: 15). Indo-Roman trade also included such forest products as sandalwood, ivory, pepper, ginger, cardamom, myrobalan (Terminalia chebula and T. bellirica) (B. Morris 1982: 15), as well as other woods, aromatics, and dyes (Ray 1986: 114). Finds of Roman coins are reported from both coastal and inland sites in southwest India (Begley and DePuma 1991). Thus, there is no doubt that pepper and other forest products had long been items of trade. While some of these forest products may have been collected by lowland traders or agriculturalists, the degree of specialized knowledge involved and the dispersion and seasonal availability of such products suggest instead that they were collected by upland groups at least partially specialized toward gathering and trading of forest produce. In a review of archaeological data from the Nilgiri mountains of the west coast, W. A. Noble (1989) concludes that these mountains were not occupied prior to

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the first century C E. Pollen data from northern Kerala analyzed by Caratini et al. (1990-1) also suggest at least small-scale occupation of the Ghat forests (and probable swidden cultivation) by the first few centuries C E. While reconstruction of subsistence is still far from clear, it seems that there existed a complex mosaic of practices that included swidden agriculture, gathering of forest products for trade with lowland groups, and no doubt gathering and hunting for subsistence as well. There are hints of the presence of specialized foragers in inscriptions predating European documents. But certainly by the time documentary sources become abundant from the sixteenth century onwards, there are clear indications of the presence of named groups engaged in specialized collection offorest products for exchange, as well as subsistence activities that included agriculture, gathering, and hunting. In South India, inscriptional evidence from at least the tenth century CE has as a constant theme the expansion of agriculture at the expense of forests (B. Stein 1980, 1982), a pattern consistent with what little palaeoecological data exist (Morrison 1994). In tile Nilgiris, Hockings (1980) has documented the expansion of the Badagas ("northerners"), a refugee group supposedly fleeing the destruction of the Vijayanagara empire in the late sixteenth century. The Badagas were accommodated by various hill groups and, according to the soil evidence (von Lengerke and Blasco 1989: 44), established permanent fields about three or four hundred years ago. Thus, forest dwellers have come under increasing pressure as the result of agricultural land use practices, as well as from demands for produce. In the Vijayanagara empire, agricultural expansion was particularly rapid during the sixteenth century, and there may have been significant pressure on the eastern foothills of the Ghats at this time. Several different options may have been available to upland groups faced with both pressures on land and demands for produce. One such option was, evidently, to begin producing rather than simply collecting pepper. Pepper growers, then, concentrated on their agricultural plots and the scheduling demands of those plots almost certainly limited the spatial scale of their gathering and hunting. An alternative strategy available to groups with knowledge of forest resources would be to abandon cultivation as a major subsistence activity and become specialized forager-traders, collecting ginger, cardamom, and other forest products. It is difficult to say to what extent competition for land at lower elevations (where swidden plots of pepper were presumably appearing) would provide the "push" for the adoption of this strategy and to what extent scheduling consideration would have come into play. Such strategies, which are ultimately dependent on long-distance rather than local exchange links, and on world markets, are inherently risky. The relations of domination and the precarious nature of forager-trader economies point to the marginality of their position. This marginality is not, however, eternal but has been created by a complex set of historical and ecological circumstances, only a few of which I have been able to sketch here. The marginality of southwestern Indian forager-traders is historically constructed, not given, and a great deal

Local processes and imperial strategies in Vijayanagara

more research - particularly archaeological research - remains to be carried out tllat will more fully and accurately explicate tile nature of tllat construction. In considering tile situation of Western Ghat cultivators and collectors, we move beyond the conventional boundaries of the empire to suggest tllat tile consequences of the political, economic, and ecological expansion of tile Vijayanagara period had implications for the lives of even those outside direct imperial rule. Ghat hunter-gatherers had few, if any, of tile organizational tools we see employed by the Valangai-Idangai groups of the Tamil country and operated in an environment quite unlike either agricultural landscape discussed above. Although in a sense they participated in both Vijayanagara and Portuguese empire-building, in neither case can tlleir plight be understood solely witll reference to policy, intent, or elite goals. Instead, they responded to a complex and diverse set of ecological, social, and political pressures to forge a series of strategies for survival and, through their withdrawal, perhaps for resistance as well.

COERCION, RESISTANCE, AND POWER: CONSTRUCTING VIJAYANAGARA In beginning to break apart the experiences of a variety of subjects under the Vijayanagara empire, particularly those on the economic or social margins, and their variable degrees of success in resisting and simply surviving structures of power, I am suggesting that processes of imperial expansion and incorporation are fundamentally responsive to both imposed and extant conditions as well as to contingent circumstance. By this, I mean that structures of power are themselves constructed under specific material, organizational, and historical conditions at both "centers" and "peripheries," by both ruler and ruled. This construction is not simply creative or free but labors under parameters of environment, social organization, and politics, as well as will. In studying the courses and consequences of imperial expansion, consolidation, and even disintegration, we would do well to consider both action and intent at the imperial center as well as the diverse responses and conditions of incorporated peoples. In the expansion of the Vijayanagara empire, some groups of people - certain weaving communities, warriors, and others - were able to parlay their economic and political roles in the empire into either forms of upward social and ritual mobility or simply economic success. Others became marginalized or fbrther marginalized by structures of power and privilege largely beyond their control. These people on the edges of the system - dry f'anners, gatherer-hunters, landless laborers - were simultaneously marginal participants in the empire and integral parts of it. Their precarious positions were enhanced or, in a few cases, even created by the political economy and political ecology of the period. Their positions were, however, not merely byproducts of imperialism, but fundamental aspects of its operation, props for the forms of elite power and lifestyle that scholars often concentrate on, or even valorize as being the real loci of imperial

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Kathlem D. Morrison systems. Marginalized participants in and on the boundaries of Vijayanagara imperial expansion were not, however, simply hapless pawns of this South Indian polity. Efforts to resist exploitation and the appropriation of produce are evident in records of farmers fleeing heavy taxation, in continuing creative modifications of the physical landscape in ways that enhanced agricultural productivity, in the overt rebellions of the fifteenth century, and in the forms of avoidance and cultural separation that kept forager-traders from being assimilated into lowland society. In the course of Vi jayan agar a imperial expansion, regions, peoples, and polities were incorporated in divergent ways, ways that changed through the life of the empire. Such variability complicates scholarly efforts at model building in as much as models are by their nature ideal and systemic, often glossing over problems of failure, miscommunication, resistance, and compromise and ignoring contingency altogether. Thus, to consider Vijayanagara as a particular type of empire (see Barfield, this volume) is an analytical exercise that may capture something valuable for comparison, but it is also an exercise that elides process altogether. The level of current disagreement about the "fundamental" nature of the Vijayanagara empire and, indeed, about the analytical category empire itself, reveals something both about the variability (through space and time, and across social distance) of this and other empires and about scholarly comfort with such variability.

PART IV IMPERIAL IDEOLOGIES Sllsan E. Alcock and Kathleen D. Morrison

If"empire" is a difficult enough word to define in such a way as to achieve broad consensus, "ideology" is even harder. In our original position paper for the Wenner-Gren conference, the term was taken "to encompass the broad overlapping spheres of religious belief and ritual, of power negotiations and relations, of self-definition and self-representation, or human understanding of 'world order.»' While an admittedly rather ample embrace of potential meanings, such an open-ended definition suits the variety of approaches and treatments which appear in this volume. Imperial ideologies arc here considered in a number of lights and along a number ofaxes: ruler cult (see papers by Kuhrt, MOl'kot); the manipulation of provincial memories (Alcock, Yates); highlighting symbolic distinctions between centers and peripheries (Brumfiel, Liverani, MacCormack); articulating difterence and facilitating relationships between two imperial systems (Barfield); and the creation of new imperial cultures (Woolf). What this broad range of approaches and our broad definition would suggest, then, is that "ideology" cannot be taken simply as a more fashionable term for what used to be glossed as "ideas." Ideologies certainly engage ideas about the world, blit, critically, articulate with political and social action and organization. Much previous scholarship had tended to treat the ideological realm as epiphenomenal to the "real" f.1cts behind processes of empire-building and social domination - the post hoc justification, the frosting on the cake. Also following such a broadly historical materialist vein is the notion of ideology as necessarily "f.1Ise," a perspective which follows directly from its position as a secondary or

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derived phenomenon. In this tradition, the complex interplay between thought, belief, and action is ignored or minimized, making ideology seem to be, quite literally, an afterthought to what are presumed to be more fundamental material factors. What we suggest, however, and what many of the contributors to this volume stress, is that there can be no simple divide between mental and material, and that the notion of ideology encompasses a tangled skein of connections that tie together beliefs and belief systems, rituals, representations, forms of organization and association, and even possibilities for action. To label ideologies, then, as "false" or "true" is willfully to overlook their complexity. Alterations (or resistance to alteration) in people's beliefs, symbols, rituals, memories, or cosmologies are taken as essential in understanding the impetus to conquest, the attitudes that could support or deter military and ideological expansion, and the control and restructuring of imperial society; both central polity and annexed territories are here involved. Despite their diversity, certain attitudes do bind together the majority of contributions in this section. Above all, awareness of the centrality of ideology and ideological transformations to imperial dynamics is everywhere apparent. This increasing recognition and stress on such factors in the study of empire is a significant development, and one in keeping with broader trends in the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology and history in the later twentieth century. Yet a balance is maintained here; none of the chapters in the volume, for example, follows the controversial model of Conrad and Demarest (1984), in which a defined set of ideological motivations is identified as the primary force driving the growth of empire. Indeed, Brumfiel takes on one of their principal examples - the Aztec - and, by expanding the contexts in which to examine Aztec ideologies, reveals just how partial such views can be. While an overtly war-like Aztec religion has dominated the scholarly imagination, Brumfiel unpacks other manifestations of symbolic and ritual behavior among non-elite peoples and noncentral places, ideological structures very different from what has been assumed as the violent norm. Canonical Aztec militarism emerges as but one active ideological phenomenon, targeting the youththl male elite, while other more local concerns - fertility, commonality - engaged and influenced other Aztec hearts and minds. This by no means implies that the ideology of blood was "imperial" and other versions were not. Rather, Brumfiel makes the case for conceiving of multiple contemporary strands of religious thinking and feeling, all engendered and fostered within the imperial framework and leading to the production of social difference across that framework. The existence of such plural ideological responses and strategies is crucial to the arguments of several other chapters as well (e.g., Alcock, Moreland, Morrison). Brumfiel's invocation of "hearts and minds" raises the possibility of reflecting on the personal impact of empire, on the degree to which imperial activity could make a significant impression not only on the more material aspects of how people lived their lives, but on how they perceived their lives and their place in the cosmos. Most fundamental to this, perhaps, is the issue of memory. Alcock's

Part IV Imperial ideologies

chapter discusses a reconfiguration of social memory, a reformulation and representation of what the Greeks of the eastern Roman empire chose (or could afford) to preserve of their past. She particularly stresses the untapped potential of archaeology in recovering something of the spectrum of memories and counter-memories that would have existed inside an extensive and plural empire. As Woolf notes more generally for the Roman empire, the construction of a powerful notion of citizenship, of a (ruling) Roman people, was part of a critical Roman "myth" that f.Kilitated the operation and expansion of the Roman imperium, a myth that, while based on shared imagination, was far from being frivolous, passive, or - one might add - superstructural. In his chapter, Yates explores how the Qin overrode and overwrote preexisting moralities, boundaries and memories to create a new, "Chinese" people. The specificity and precision of Qin intrusions - revising and naturalizing acceptable conceptions of the body, of time, of the cosmos - may be the sharpest example of the depths to which empire could reach, but several chapters mention similar steps, such as the revision of calendars and ritual schedules, new modes of dress or self-presentation, innovative educational systems, or reorganized patterns of dwelling in the landscape (see Alcock, Deagan, MacCormack, Woolf). While the degree and nature of such ideological intervention would obviously vary from empire to empire, the burden of proof today would lie with those who might claim that imperial annexation would make little difference in the everyday hearts and minds of the conquered. Another customary way to conceive of imperial ideologies has been as a kind of "imperial glue," as a cohesive force employed in tandem with the ever-present threat of military coercion. Such a role is certainly acknowledged here, in the supremacy of the Achaemenid ruler who fought the Lie for all his people (Kuhrt), in the spread of Christianity (Deagan), in the incorporation of local deities into orthodox Hindu pantheons (Morrison), in the imperial cults of Nubia (Morkot) or Rome (Woolf) or Peru (MacCormack). But the possibility of rejection or subversion of such umbrella-like ideologies is also conceded. Strategies of resistance in its various torms - both violent and passive - are explored, if rarely explicitly foregrounded, in several chapters (see discussions in Alcock, Brumfiel, Deagan, Morrison, Yates). Rome's self-declared position Jlisa-JJis natural and cosmological "constants," Woolf argues, generated a commandingly pervasive imperial vision of "empire as cosmic domination"; yet even here a counterpoint narrative of subversion and destabilization is evident, springing up fi·om and inverting these same Roman myths of unity and supremacy. Although this volume engages with the subject of imperial ideologies in myriad specific ways, its essential lesson is relatively straightforward. It asserts the immense potential for ideological manipulations and transformations, be they blatantly relentless or elegantly subtle, across the territorial and social expanses of empire. Indeed, one might argue (as some conference participants did) that empires always build on some form of ideological transformation involving, minimally, constructions of sovereignty or rule. Chapters in this volume unveil

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a range of reconfigurations in the ideological sphere, while also offering various models of how to access and measure such change. All manner of sources (textual, art historical, ethnohistoric, and, of course, archaeological) are here deployed and, in the best cases, combined - as they must be, if we are even to begin to recover imperial ideologies in their boundless complexity.

11

Aztec hearts and minds: religion and the state in the Aztec empire Elizabeth M. Brumfiel

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Like other imperial rulers, the Aztec kings invested heavily in religious monuments and rituals. The Aztec kings built and repeatedly enlarged the Great Temple, a massive six-story-tall structure in the center of Tenochtitlan. They commissioned great works of monumental sculpture tllat embodied the basic concepts of Aztec cosmology. They supported a large priestllOod that made daily offerings at tile Great Temple and otller ceremonial structures. And, tlu'ough warfare, the Aztec kings provided a steady stream of captives for ritual sacrifice. Such investments have been regarded as acts of piety by some scholars and cynical efforts to manipulate the subordinate class by others. But despite the debate as to whether state religion served pious or Machiavellian purposes, it is universally accepted that religion had significant political consequences. As a discursive and emotion-laden means of communication, religious ritual is a powerful political instrument. Rituals declare the existence of social statuses, rights, and obligations, and they present explanations of why the social order is just, or at least inevitable (Durkheim 1915; Turner 1967). Through monuments, costuming, and skilled ritual performances, state personnel communicate their view of the social order in emotionally striking and therefore particularly forceful ways, and they endow this view with an aura of permanence and certainty (Brumfiel 1987; M. W. Helms 1993; DeMarrais et al. 1996; Joyce 2001). Who was the audience for imperial religion? Scholars most frequently cite the effects of state religion on subject populations. For example, imperial religion is said to integrate heterogeneous imperial domains by creating a uniform worldview and a common value system (Freidel 1981; Kolata 1981; L6pez Austin 1988; Yates, this volume). Or, imperial religion is said to sanctify the ruler in the eyes of his subjects so that those subjects accept his authority (Conrad 1981; Demarest 1981; Bauer 1996; DeMarrais et al. 1996; McCormack, this volume). Or, imperial religion is said to magnify the ruler's power so that subjects accede to his demands (Gilman 1996). Less often, state religion is seen as affecting only part of the subject population, specifically members of the ruling coalition. It has been proposed that

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Elizabeth LvI. religion is a particularly effective means of binding elites or state personnel to courses of action that enhance the power and unity of the state (Abercrombie et al. 1980; Baines and Yoffee 1998; Brumflel 1998; see Deagan, Moreland, and Woolt~ this volume). Very rarely, state religion is considered an ideological resource for subject groups, accepted by subjects, at least in part, because it legitimates their demands upon the state (Hicks 1999; Alcock, this volume). The political consequences of state-sponsored religion would not necessarily be the same fiJl' all ancient empires; different (C)l'Jm of religious practice would produce different political results. For example, DeMarrais et al. (1996: 17) suggest that rulers can choose ft'om an array of fC)l'Jns of religious action; they can commission rituals, icons, public monuments, or written texts. Their choices depend upon the availability of raw materials and labor and the audiences with whom they wish to communicate. Depending upon the chosen media, ideological messages reach groups of different sizes and compositions, with differing ideological commitments (Alcock and Woolt~ this volume). Rulers can also send different messages to different groups, tailoring their communications to suit l10bles or commoners, men or women, native or f(JI'eign-born (Brumfiel 1998). Thus, the political consequences of state religion would not necessarily be the same (c)r all segments of an imperial population. This paper explores the impact of state religion upon various groups within the Aztec empire. The Aztec empire was a military alliance created by the rulers of three central Mexican towns: Tenochtitian, Texcoco, and Tlacopan. Shortly after its fC)l'Jnation in 1430, this alliance established control over the entire Basin of lvlcxico, and its dominion expanded through nearly a century ofcontil1uous warbre (Fig. 11.1). By 1521, the Aztec empire extended Il'olll the Gulf to the Pacific coasts and (l'om central Mexico to the Isthmus ofTehuantepec, encompassing 200,000 square kilometers and a population of five to six million people (Annillas 1964: 324). Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) had become the dominant partner in the alliance, a situation that is acknowledged by calling the ruler ofTenochtitian "the Aztec king" and the city itself" the Aztec capital" (Gibson 1971: 383-9). This chapter examines the impact o('state religion upon nobles and commoners in Tenochtitlan and its subject communities. It draws upon ethnohistOl'ic records o('ritual activity in that Aztee capital and in a provincial town, Tepepolco, and it supplements these records with archaeological data drawn fi'om Tcnochtitian and surrounding provincial towns. These data indicate that, in Tenoehtitian, the Aztec state used sacred and secular rituals to glorify warf;lre and sacrifice, but few o('these rituals were reproduced in provincial towns or even in commoncr households within the Aztec capital. The state's emphasis upon warf;lre and sacrifice seems to have significantly af'fected only a narrow target group: the young, male population ofTenochtitlan, the core of the Aztec army. Rather than promoting a unifc)l'Jn world-view, Aztec religioll produced cultural difference within the empire's boundaries.

Rcl~qioll

aIld state ill the Aztec

285

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I Tenochtitlan-

TARASCAN STATE

~ Tlateloc~ I~LAXCA~LAI \

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TEOTITLAN , - ,

DE .-' CAMINO',

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Xoconochco

Pacific Ocean

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SAHAGUN'S RECORD OF AZTEC RITUAL Ethnohistoric data fix this study come fi'om two works by the sixteenth-century Spanish fi'iar Bel'l1ardino de Sahagllll. The first is Sahaglll1's twelve-volume encyclopedia of' Aztec culture, the F/o},CIItille Code.,', compiled in tvlcxico City li'om 1561 to 1565 (Dibble 1(82). Sahaglll1 hoped that the F/ol'Clltillc Code:.: would provide an account of' Aztec religion and culture that would be used by fi'iars ministering to new Indian converts to the Catholic chlll'ch. As Sahaglll1 observed: The sins of'idolatry, idolatrous rilllais, idolatrous superstitions, auguries, abuses, and idolatrous cerelllonies are Ilot yet cOlllpletely lost. To preach against these llIatters, and even to know if' they exist, it is lleedllJi to know how [the Aztecs I pract iced t he III in the tillles of' their idolatry, I()t', through [OUl' [Iaek of' knowfedge of' t his, they perf(ll'Ill llIan), idolat rous things in our presence without our understanding it. (Sahagltn 19H2: 45)

In addition, Sahaglll1 intended the text of'the HOI'C1Itillc Code:.: to supply a lexicon of the Aztec language and examples of' Aztec syntax, usage, and oratory (Sahaglll1 19X2: 50). These would aid Spanish priests preaching the Catholic doctrine.

11.1 'UJC Aztcc clJIjiil'l: ill 1511). [){lJhed lilies depict illljicrial/JIl/l1Idfll'ies; illdejlclldcnt districts tlrc i1Jdimted ill cajlitallct/cl's.

286

.

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Elizabeth M. Brumfiel The Florentine Codex consists of three interdependent parts: a Nahuatl text, a Spanish text, and illustrations (Nicolau D'Olwer and Cline 1973: 189). The Nahuatl text was solicited from native informants using a structured interview protocol (L6pez Austin 1974). The Spanish text is Sahagt1l1's translation of the Nahuatl original. The illustrations, which accompany each paragraph of text, were drawn by native artists altllough tlley often incorporate European elements. Baird (1993: 116) suggests that these illustrations helped to elicit information from Sahagun's informants who were more used to working witll pictorial documents tllan written records. Sahagun composed the Florentine Codex witll tlle help of ten native leaders from Tlatelolco/Mexico City (Sahagun 1982: 54). These leaders were male members of the Aztec urban nobility who had reached maturity prior to Spanish conquest. They were also Christian converts and members of the developing colonial enterprise. Sahagl1l1's account of Aztec religious ritual was undoubtedly colored by the noble, male, urban, Christian perspective of his informants; it was also shaped by Sahagl1l1's own scholastic training (L6pez Austin 1974). Nevertlleless, tlle precision and detail of the Florentine Codex make it an essential source for tlle study of Aztec religion. In particular, the work enables us to differentiate with some clarity between the religious practices of the state and those of Tenochtitlan's commoners. The difference between state and commoner religious practice enables us to gauge the extent of ideological domination and cultural homogeneity within the imperial capital. The Primeros Memoriales were Sahaglll1's prototype for the Florentine Codex. Sahagl1l1 compiled this early draft of what would eventually become the Codex in 1559-61, at the end of an eight-year stay in the provincial town ofTepepolco (Nicholson 1973). Like the Florentine Codex, the Primeros Memorialeswere prepared with the help of native informants. Their words were recorded in Nahuatl, and each paragraph was accompanied by a picture drawn by native artists. The range of topics was more limited than those presented in the Florentine Codex, and when the two texts cover the same material the Tepepolco texts are much shorter. The Primeros Memoriales are often regarded simply as an early version of the later, more polished Florentine Codex, and thus of greatest interest, perhaps, for showing the evolution of Sahagl1l1's "ethnographic" method. However, because they were compiled in a provincial town, the Primeros Memoriales also provide a valuable account of Aztec culture outside the capital. As Nicholson (1973: 208) observes: "The fact that the P[rimeros] M[emoriales] provide a view oflate pre- Hispanic culture from the standpoint of a subordinate community lends them special ethnographic value." The descriptions of religious ritual in the Florentinc Codex and the Primcros Memorialcs permit us to determine how [.1r the official religion of a provincial capital resembled those of the Aztec state. Hence, these documents reveal the extent of ideological domination and cultural homogeneity in the imperial hinterland.

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

AZTEC STATE RELIGION In Tenochtitlan, religious ritual was organized by two religious calendars, a 365day solar calendar and a 260-day rinlal calendar. Altllough the ritual calendar required interpretation by ritual specialists, and tl1l1S seems to offer great potential for state control, state-sponsored religious ritual emphasized the solar calendar. 1 The Aztec solar calendar was divided into eighteen montlls of twenty days each. Each month culminated in a ritual performance dedicated to one of tile many Aztec gods. The five days at the end of the year were a dangerous, liminal period, tile Nemontemi (Sahagun 1981: 171-2). During tllese days of ill fortune, the Aztecs abstained fi'om bOtll work and ritual activity, for any activity undertaken was bound to end badly. Aztec monthly rituals were complex affairs, with many seemingly disconnected events going on simultaneously: "some feast, dance, and make merry, while others fast, are punished, or are sacrificed" (Pasztory 1976: 195). Priests, rulers, nobles, warriors, merchants, young men and young women, commoners of different urban wards and individual households all carried out ritual acts during one or more of the montllly celebrations. For example, during the third month, Tozoztontli, the old men of the urban ward ofYopico sang and shook their rattle boards. Commoners went to the fields to gather flowers to offer at the altars of all the gods, and they ate tamales of wild amaranth seeds. The urban ward of Coatlan made offerings to its patron deity, Coatlicue. And a procession of warriors carrying the month-old skins of sacrificial victims wound through the streets of Tenochtitlan to the temple at Yopitli where the skins were buried (Sahaglll1 1981: 57-60). Some of these activities were orchestrated by the state; others were in the hands of individual households. Aztec religion has often been viewed as supporting militarism and encouraging imperial expansion. For example, in his classic analysis of Aztec religion, Alfonso Caso described how religion inspired the Aztec warrior (and see Fig. 11.2): Each prisoner taken by the Aztecs was a star that was to be sacrificed \"0 the sun to nourish him with the magical sustenance that represents lite and \"0 forti!)' him for the divine combat ... Hence the pride orthe Aztec, who looked upon himself as a collaborator of the gods ... In a sense the universe depended upon him for its continued existence; upon him depended food for the gods, upon him depended the beneficence of the gifts which they showered on mankind. (Caso 1958: 93)

Conrad and Demarest agree, stating that religion was what "set the [Aztecs] apart from their ncighbors and predecessors and ... launch[ed] the armies on a divine quest, a quest which would result in the sprawling Aztec Empire" (1984: 42). Leon- Portilla (1963: 61) concludes: "The mystical vision of the cult of Huitzilopochtli transformed the Aztecs into great warriors, into 'the people of the Sun.'"

287

288

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

Elizabeth M,

289

Tabk 11.1. Com1Jlollers' ho/tsehold ritllals during the eighteC1J months of the Aztec solar year 52.

11,2 War mptil'rs alld slal'cs JIIcrc JI1cl'~{icrd at stl1tc tClI/phs to 1lOlIl'is/i //ic SIl1I II' it" /J111/l1111 blood, Accordillg to Aztu state rc/i,tTi01I, /J111/l1111 blood strcllgt!JCllcd //ic ,1'//1/ ill itJ dl1i~}' S/I'I(f(lr/C I1gl1illst t"r.filrus I!f' d11 rIm css,

And ytt, at its cort, Azttc rdigion/ixustd on subsisttnct conctrns rathtr than on war!;llT per se. In slatt ttl11pks, tht monthly rituals wtrt altuntd to tht agricultural cyck and nprtsstd conctrns with rain (during months I, (), 13, and 1()), ITlltWtd vtgttation (month 2), young corn (months 3 and 4), tht tarth (months g and 11), and tht sun (month 15). Othu subsisttnct conctrns WtlT also addrtssttl: salt (month 7), gamt animals (month 14), and I1rt (months 10 and Ig). Succcssful warl:ll't was a ()Cal conctl'l1 only in month 15, which was dtdicattd to tht Azttcs' patron, Huitzilopochtli, a warrior, solar dtity. Warf:ll't and human sacrif1ct apptar as ptrSistenl mol ifs in state rituals, cekbrated as tht necessary means of achieving ritual goals. Howtver, in the rituals of commonu households, subsistence concerns were paramount, and rew activities betrayed a concern with war(:lI'e or cosmic strife.

Houschold ritual in Tcr/ochtitian In Ttnochtitlan, the months wue markttl by offerings and sacrifice within individual homes (Tabk 11.1). Like the dedications made at state-sponsored tempks, household offerings were intended to rtpay the gods (lr thtir cf'/(lI'ts in maintaining life-sustaining conditions during tht prtvious ytar and to solicit

tvlonth

Commontrs' household rituals

1. Cuehuitlehua

Poles with paper streamers were set up in commoners' houses, on mountain tops, in young mtn's houses and the temples of the urban wards, to encourage the coming of ram.

2. Tlacaxipehualiztli

Commoners would feast their neighbors if a member of their household had captured an enemy warrior who was offered in sacriflce.

3. Tozoztontli

Commoners gathered flowers to offer the gods; they ate tamales of wild amaranth seed.

4. HuC},tozoztii

Commontrs gave gifts to young men who brought them green maize stalks to place in their houses. Then, commoners covered green reeds with their own blood as an offering to their household gods. At night they drank a special atole.

S, Toxcatl

Commoners offered quail and incense to Huitzilopoehtli, and children were cut on their stomachs, chests, and arms.

6. Etzaleualiztli

Commoners exchanged etzlIlli, a stew of maize and beans; people went ft'om house to house dancing and demanding etzl1fli. Commoners who witnessed the midnight sacrifice of victims to Tlaloc f:\Ilned their children with artemisia flowers to frighten worms tt'om their eyes.

7. Tecuilhuitontii

Commoners did not engage in any ritual activity,

R. Hueytecuilhuitl

Commoners received distributions of .Hole and tamalcs tt'om the ruler ofTenochtitlan. Then, all prepared tortillas (i'om the year's Hrst green maize. They also made plain tamales and fi'uit tamales fc)r themselves and to offer the gods.

9. Tlaxochimaco

Commoners went to the countT)'side to make flower garlands to offer the gods in their temples, the ward telllples, and homes. They made meat tamales oftmkey and dog, and they sang fc)r the gods well into the night.

10. Xocotlhuetzi

All the men and boys danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct and competed to climb the xocotl pole.

11. Ochpani)"tli

Comllloners who had distinguished themselves in warf:\I'e were given military array.

12, Teotieco

Commoners gave presents to )'oung men who brought fir boughs to their houses, and the)' offered balls of dough in the temples. The men and bo),s assembled to dance the serpen t dance.

13. Tepeihuitl

(:ommoners made wood and amaranth dough-images of mountains and presented offerings to them and to those who had died of water-related causes.

14. Quccholli

Commoners ofkred miniature arrows and pine torches and sweet tamales to the dead. Women offered sweet tamales at Mixcoatl's tcmple, and their children were held by the old women of the temple, All the men and boys participated in a ritual deer hunt on the hill of !',acatepee.

IS. I'anquetzliztli

Commoners prepared and ate amaranth seed t,\males, slicing them with a length of maguey fibel" Sleeping mats were rolled up, and commoners slept on the ground on old capes.

16. Atemoztli

Commoners htlfilled vows the), had made to honor the mountains. They prepared amaranth -dough images of the mountains, dressed them in paper garments obtained fi'om specialist priests, held an all-night vigil over them, and sacrifictll thcm by cutting

290

Etizabeth M.

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

291

Table 11.1 (cont.) Month 16. Atemoztli (cont.)

Commoners' household rituals them with a weaving batten in the morning. This vigil ended with a feast fl)r f~lInily and friends.

17. Tititl

Commoners engaged in a mock battle with paper- and grass-stuffed halls.

18. Izcalli

Youths and boys captured small animals to be thrown on to the brazier of the fire god Xiuhtccutli. All the commoners exchanged very hot tamales stuffed with amaranth greens. Every f<>urth year, small children had their car lobes pierced, were "singed" over an open fire, and were given pulque. Afterw,lrds, commoners danced in their homes.

their aid for the future. Offerings and sacrifices were often described as "paying a debt" to the gods, and the gods were said to expect these of'(erings. Offerings and sacrifice at the household level were not dependent upon state-sponsored religion or warfare. As indicated in Table 11.1, Aztec commoners made a variety of offerings including songs, flowers, incense, quail, and blood fi'om their own bodies (Fig. 1l.3). All of these offerings could be produced at home or purchased in the marketplace, without state intervention. Other forms of ritual activity at the household level included the preparation and consumption of special seasonal f<JOcis and the bringing of'ritual objects into the home. The preparation of seasonal t()()ds generally did not require the intervention of the state; the only exception occurred in month 16 when commoners had to obtain ritual paper garments lI'om specialist priests to complete their amaranth-dough figlll'es. Ritual objects were also brought into the home without state assistance. For example, in month 9, people went into the countryside to gather flowers to make into garlands f
CalplIlco jJwrticijHttiort in state ritlUtI Beyond the household, commoners were drawn into ritual activity as members of err/plllli groups, which were ethnic groups that served as units of

11.3 111 TCllochtitlall, offcr b/ood-co}!cl'cd scdgcs I1nd maize g1'1lel (,Hole) i1l their houses during the.lilllrth mouth ofthc Aztec so/al' ca/cndfl/: «And allY yo 11 IIl1 1111111, quitc of his OWII will, drew blood .11'11111 his s/Jall/<J ol'.lhJIIJ hiscl1l's.» COIJlf/IIITJCI'S

----- .

state administration. Tenochtitlan's errtplllli groups were urban wards composed of commoners who preserved histories of their common origin and maps that defined their collective land holdings. The members of a wtplltti were jointly responsible t
292

Elizabeth M. Brumfiel

Table 11.2. Ritual actiJlities in the calpulcos during the eighteen months of the Aztec solar year

Month

Commollers' ritual actiJ1ities

1. Cuehuitlehua

.,

,.. ..

2. Tlacaxipehualiztli

The old men of tile calpltlco held a vigil for the captives and tile takers of tile captives in tile calpulco of tile captors (Sahagun 1981: 47). After tile sacrifice, tile old men of the calpulco received tile body of tile victim, dismembered it and prepared a stew of human flesh which would tllen be passed out in a feast in tile captor's household (Sahaglll1 1981: 48-9). Impersonators of all tile gods witnessed tile gladiator sacrifice, wearing the raiment tllat was supplied by tile various calplllcos (Sahagun 1981: 51).

3. Tozoztontli

Old men of the calpulli ofYopico sang and shook tlleir rattle boards until the first day of tile montll ended. The flower workers of tile calpulli of Coatlan made offerings to its patron deity, Coatlicue (Sahaglll1 1981: 5, 57).

4. Hueytozoztli 5. Toxcatl

The members of tile calpulli Huitznahuac made an effigy of tlleir patron deity Huitzilopochtli which was carried to the Great Temple to be offered quail and incense (Sahaglll1 1981: 71-4).

6. Etzalcualiztli

The fishermen, canoe makers, irrigation ditch workers, and water sellers sacrificed a slave representing their patron deity Chalchiuhtlicue (Sahaglll1 1970: 21).

C

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..

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.........

7. Tecuilhuitontli

Religion and state in the Aztec empire Some calpulli groups practiced human sacrifice. Many, perhaps all, calpulli groups sacrificed a slave to their patron deity during that deity's annual feast. These slaves were purchased in the marketplace, without the need for warfare or state intervention, but the sacrifice was carried out by state-sponsored priests. In month 3, the flower workers of Coatlan made offerings to their patron deity Coatlicue (Sahagun 1981: 5,57). In montll 6, the fishermen, canoe makers, irrigation ditch workers, and water sellers sacrificed a slave to t11eir patron deity Chalchiuhtlicue (Sahagl1l1 1970: 21). In month 13, the mat makers sacrificed a slave to t11eir patron Napatecutli; in month 14, the pulque makers sacrificed a slave to Izquitecatl; in month 15, the feather workers sacrificed a slave to Coyotl inaual (Sahagun 1970: 45; 1981: 210,137-8; 1959: 87). In addition, the old men of tile calpulli had ritual duties in montlls 2 and 10, when war captives were sacrificed. The night before the sacrifice, a vigil was held in the calpulli shrines for the captives and the takers of the captives (Sahagl1l1 1981: 47,113-14). The vigil ended at midnight when the captors cut hair from the crowns of their captives' heads. The next day, when the captives had been sacrificed, the old men of the calpulco received their bodies, dismembered them, and prepared a stew from their flesh that would then be served at a feast in each captor's household (Sahagl1l1 1981: 48-9). The old men of the calpulli also performed these duties when slaves rather than war captives were offered for sacrifice (Sahagl1l1 1981: 133,138,144).

8. Hueytecuilhuitl 9. Tlaxochimaco 10. Xocotlhuetzi

The old men of the calpulco held a vigil for the captives and the takers of the captives in the calpltlco of the captors (Sahaglll1 1981: 113).

11. Ochpaniztli 12. Teotleco 13. Tepeihuitl

The mat makers sacrificed a slave representing their patron deity Napatecutli (Sahaglll1 1970: 45; 1981: 210). After slave women were sacrificed to the mountains, their bodies were returned to the calpulli groups that sent them, to be dismembered by the old men of the calpu/co(Sahaglll1 1981: 133}.

14. Quecholli

The pulque makers sacrificed a slave represeming their patron deity Izquitecatl. The old men of the calpltlco held a vigil for the slaves and the owners of slaves to be sacrificed (Sahaglll1 1981: 137-8).

15. Panquetzliztli

The feather workers sacrificed a slave representing their patron deity Coyot! inaual (Sahaglll1 1959: 87). The merchants offered slaves to Huitzilopochtli (Sahaglll1 1981: 144).

16. Atemoztli 17. Tititl

Impersonators of all the gods appeared in state-sponsored ceremonies, wearing the raiment that was supplied by the various calplIlcos (Sahaglll1 1981: 156).

18. Izcalli

The dressing of the god of fire, Xillhtecllhtli, was the responsibility of the calpltlli Tzonmolco (Sahaglll1 1981: 168).

Telpochcalli participation in state ritual Young men were articulated with the state through their membership in young men's houses (telpochcalli). Boys entered these houses between the ages of 10 and 15 and left them upon marriage, in their early twenties (Calnek 1988: 171) . While in the telpochcalli, the boys were under the authority of a state-appointed leader (Sahaglll1 1978: 55). The boys maintained their telpochcalli by sweeping it and gathering firewood, and they f()I'flled work parties for communal labor projects assigned by the state: "they undertook the preparation of mud [for adobes], walls, agricultural land, canals. They went in a bunch or they divided into groups. And they went to the forest. They took, they carried on their backs what they called torches for singing" (Sahaglll1 1978: 56). As the boys worked, they trained for their nltl\l'e role as Aztec warriors. Some of the boys' activities had religious overtones (Table 11.3). For example, in months 4 and 12, the boys fanned out into the countryside to collect corn stalks and fir branches to bring to people's homes (Sahaglll1 1981: 62, 127). These materials were used in household rituals. The tepochcalli boys sometimes engaged in mock battles with the boys of the more aristocratic schools, the calmecacs, or with adolescent girls (Fig. 11.4). As discussed below (pp. 296-7), these battles were imbued with symbolic meaning (Sahagl1l1 1981: 62--4, 157-8). After a day's work, the boys gathered at the ruler's palace for dancing and singing from

293

294

Elizrtbeth M.

B1'tm~fiel

Religion Ilnd ,rtMe in the Aztec empire

295

Table 11.3. Actipities fill' telpochcalli youths during the eighteen mOllths ofthc Aztec sO/fir ye(//' Month

Youths' ritual activities

1. Cuehuitlchua 2. Tlacaxipehualiztli 3. Tozoztontli 4. Hueytozoztli

5. Toxcatl

Thc tcljiochCfllli youths fanned out into the countryside to collect corn stalks to bring to people's homes. They engagcd in mock battles with youths tt'om the call1/ccacs. Young girls in a procession honoring Chicomecoatl taunted boys who had not distinguished themselves in war (Sahaglll1 1981: 62-4).

11.4 In Tmochtitlflll) thc boys of the tclpochcalli fight a 1Il0c/l battle with the boys of the caimecacs ming long stOtl t reeds bound together with cords dt/ring the fifteenth month of the Aztec solar CtTlcndal: "It was as ifwal'cs were b/'CtTlling 011 the shore. Verily they hflrmed one at/other; pcrily they JIIcre hl4rt.))

The tcljiochCll1li youths joined their leaders, the masters of youths, and the young seasoned warriors to dance the serpent dance while maidens danced the popcorn dance (Sahagl1l1 1981: 75).

6. Etzalcualiztli 7. Tecuilhuitontli 8. Hueytccuilhuitl

Tellochtitlan's military elite in hIll array danced with maidens while tclpochcalli youths stood by holding fire ladles to light their way (Sahaglln 1981: 1(1).

9. Tlaxochimaco

The tclpochcalli youths, the masters of youths, and the seasoned warriors danced together in the courtyard ofHuitzilopochtli's temple. 'Nomen danced \00, but "those who cm braced the women were only the great, bravc warriors" (Sahagl1l1 1981: 110).

10. Xocotlhuetzi 11. Ochpaniztli 12. Tcotleco

Youths limned out into the countryside to collect Hr branches to bring to pcople's homcs (Sahagl1l1 1981: 127). All the men, youths, and small boys ofTenochtitlan gathered to dance the serpent dance (Sahaglll1 1981: 129).

The, valiant, men, the chief warriors put on neck bands of large white gastropod shells or of gold ... As onc's adornment, car plugs were worn, turquoise car plugs werc worn, hcron leathcrs were worn, nctted capes were worn ... This nett cd capc was of twist cd magucy libcr, knotted, likc a net set with small, white ga~trop()d shells. The rulers had golden gastropod ~hells in their netted capes.

13. Tepeihuitl

(Sahagllll 1978: 56)

14. Quecholli

Joyce (200 I) points out that these dances provided opportunities fClr dclinition of value though beauty; attending these dances, boys became committed to their future roles as Aztec warriors.

15. l'anquetzliztli 16. Atellloztli

17. Tititl

Boys pelted maidens in the strcets ofTcnochtitlan with net balls stuffed with grass, shreddcd paper, or green maize leaves (Sahagl1l1 1981: 157--8).

18. [zcalli

dusk until midnight. Although these dances were recreational, they may have been regarded as a /Cll'll1 of offering. In one passage, Sahaglll1 (1997: 57) refers to dancing and singing as "tribute with song." The boys' leaders also danced; as successful warriors, they provided role models for the boys. The boys were also present when warriors danced on more fCll'll1al occasions (Sahaglll1 1981: 75, 101, 110). These dances provided opportunities fc)r accomp
ished warriors to display the sumptuary goods that they had won through their exploits:

The elahoration Tertochtit/rtrt

(~f'tt

JJJa1:!ttre-centered ideology in

Although a direct concern with warl:1l'e was clearly expressed only during the month of Panquetzliztli, three ritual practices highlighted the importance of state-sponsored wad:ll'e. These included the sacrifice of war captives, mock battles, and public per/(lI'Inances that /Catured successful warriors. The sacrifice of war captives in state rituals directed attention to the importance of state-sponsored warl:lre, even when the captives Were offered to gods of agricultural tertility rather than Huitzilopochtli. Por example, a multitude of captured enemy warriors were sacrificed in month 2, even though month 2 was ostensibly dedicated to Xi pe Totec and concerned with the renewal of vegetation

"1

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d

'i

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."

296

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

Elizabeth M. Brttmfiel

at the start of the rainy season (Sahaglll1 1981: 47-8). Another war captive was sacrificed in month 5, a month dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, a god related to tile creation of the cosmos. More captives were sacrificed in montll 10 in a ceremony dedicated to Xiuhtecutli, the god of fire (Sahagun 1981: 115). Even during the months when slaves ratller tllan war captives were sacrificed, tile slave sacrifice was preceded by the sacrifice of enemy warriors, which were said to provide a "fundament" or foundation for the sacrificial slaves, This practice implied that no human sacrifice could be properly carried out in tile absence of warfare (Sahagun 1981: 94,148,164; L6pez Austin 1989: 377-8). The state made sure that tile sacrifice of war captives would not be ignored. Highly dramatic ceremonies of human sacrifice took place atop the Great Temple. Because of the temple's height, the sacrifices could be seen from all parts of tile city. To draw public attention, tllese sacrifices were announced Witll the beat of drums and tile blare of trumpets. The noise and tile spectacle were impressive, as Diaz del Castillo, a Spaniard who fought with Cortes against the Aztecs, records: again there was sounded the dismal drum of [Huitzilopochtli] and many other shells and horns and things like trumpets and the sound of tllem all was ten'if)'ing, and we all looked towards the lofty [pyramid] where they were being sounded, and saw that our comrades whom they had captured ... were being carried by force up the steps, and they were taking them to be sacrificed. (Diaz del Castillo 1956: 436)

Smell also brought human sacrifice to public notice. In month 3, the skins of sacrificial victims were worn by penitent individuals who walked through the streets ofTenochtitlan begging for gifts: they went stinking; they went in a group. So did they stink [that the stench] verily wounded the head. It could not be endured. There was holding of the nose when they were met, when they went among people. (Sahaglm 1981: 58)

To maintain public interest, the number of war captives was increased over time and new forms of sacrifice were introduced (Duran 1967,2: 171). The importance of human sacrifice was also emphasized through works of monumental sculpture commissioned by the Aztec state. For example, the Aztec calendar stone bears symbols that refer to cosmic cycles: the four creations that preceded the current onc, the twenty days of the Aztec ritual calendar, and the solar and starry skies that alternate with day and night and change with the seasons. The importance of human sacrifice in this cosmic scheme is underscored by the deity figure at the center of the calendar stone who has a sacrificial knife protruding from his mouth and whose talons on either side of his f.1ce grasp human hearts (Townsend 1979: 63-70). The monumental sculpture of Coyolxauhqui, which lay at the base of the Aztec Great Temple, celebrated the victory of the Aztec solar deity Huitzilopochtli over his perennial opponents, the moon and stars of the nighttime skies (Matos Moctezuma 1988: 135-42). Warfare was also incorporated into Aztec rituals in the form of mock battles

297

Table 11.4. Mock battles dttring the eighteen months of the Aztec solar year Month

Mock battles

1. Cuehuitlehua 2. Tlacaxipehualiztli

A mock battle occurred between those wearing tlle skins of sacrificial victims and Tenochtitlan's warriors (Sahaglll1 1981: 55-6).

3. Tozoztontli 4. Hueytozoztli

The boys fi'om the telpochcalli fought mock battles Witll YOUtllS from tlle calmecacs. Young girls in a procession honoring Chicomecoatl taunted boys who had not distinguished themselves in war (Sahaglll1 1981: 62-4).

5. Toxcatl 6. Etzalcualiztli 7. Tecuilhuitontli 8. Hueytecuilhuitl 9. Tlaxochimaco 10. Xocotlhuetzi 11. Ochpaniztli

A mock battle was fought between the impersonator of the earth goddess Teteoinnan with her "Huastec" companions and Tenochtitlan's warriors (Sahaglll1 1981: 123).

12. Teotleco

13. Tepeihuitl 14. Quecholli 15. Panquetzliztli

A mock battle was fought between the slaves about to be sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli and Tenochtitlan's warriors; another battle was fought between the priests and the youths (Sahaglm 1981: 141,149) .

16. Atemoztli 17. Tititl

Boys pelted maidens in the streets ofTenochtitlan with net balls stuffed with grass, shredded paper, or green maize leaves (Sahaglll1 1981: 157-8).

18. Izcalli

fought in the streets of Tenochtitlan as a part of several monthly rituals (Table 11.4). Mock battles occurred in month 2 (between those wearing the skins of sacrificial victims and Tenochtitlan's warriors), month 4 (onc battle between young men residing in the temple schools and young men residing in calpttllisponsored young men's houses; another battle [of words] between young girls carrying ears of maize to Chicomecoatl's temple and the young men whom they encountered), month 11 (one battle among the female companions of the earth goddess Teteoinnan; another battle between the impersonator of Teteoinnan with her "Huastec" companions and Tenochtitlan's warriors), montll 15 (one battle between tile slaves about to be sacrificed to Huitzilopochtli and Tenochtitlan's warriors; another battle between the priests and the youths), and in month 17 (when people fought each other in the streets ofTenochtitlan with

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Elizabeth M. Brumfiel

Table 11.5. Warriors) activities during the eighteen months of the Aztec solar year Month

Warriors' activities

1. CuehuitIehua

Throughout tIle year, the captive warrior who impersonated TezcatIipoca walked tIle streets of tIle city, reminding residents of his inevitable sacrificial deatII in montIl 5 (Sallagun 1981: 9).

2. Tlacaxipehualiztli

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4. Hueytozoztli

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The limbs of captives who were sacrificed were returned to tIleir captors, who added tIlem to a stew of dried maize. The stew was used to feast friends and relatives, who bore witness to the worthy acts of tIle captor (Sahag{1I1 1981: 49). A mock battIe occurred between tIlose wearing tIle skins of sacrificial victims and Tenochtitlan's warriors. The leaders of young men's houses, the warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in tIle civic-ceremonial precinct in tIle company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagun 1981: 55-6). The captors of victims sacrificed in Tlacaxipehualiztli led a procession tIlfough the streets ofTenochtitlan .

",

The leaders of young men's houses, tIle warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in tIle civic-ceremonial precinct in the company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagl1l1 1981: 75).

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7. TecuilhuitontIi 8. HueytecuilhuitI

The leaders of young men's houses, the warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct in the company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagl1l1 1981: 98).

9. Tlaxochimaco

The leaders of young men's houses, the warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct in the company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahaglll1 1981: 109-10).

10. XocotIhuetzi

Huitzilopochtli's envoy, Paynal, appeared on the Great Temple, seized war captives by their hair, and dragged them to the top of the temple for sacrifice (Sahagl1l1 1981: 115). The limbs of sacrificial victims were added to a stew of dried maize and served to friends and relatives, who bore witness to the worthy acts of the captor (Sahagl1l1 1981: 115). The leaders of young men's houses, the warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct in the company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagllll 1981: 116).

11. OchpaniztIi

A mock battle was fought between the impersonator of the earth goddess Teteoinnan with her "Huastec" companions and Tenochtitlan's warriors. The young maize god Cinteotl traveled to enemy lands to deposit a mask made from the skin of a sacrificial victim (Sahagl1l1 1981: 122). Costly war insignia were distributed to warriors. The leaders of young men's houses, the warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct in the company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagl1l1 1981: 123).

~:

12. TeotIeco

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

299

Table 11.5 (cont.) Montll

Warriors' activities

13. TepeihuitI 14. Quecholli 15. Panquetzliztli

A mock battle was fought between the slaves about to be sacrificed to HuitzilopochtIi and Tenochtitlan's warriors. The leaders of young men's houses, tIle warriors who had taken four or more captives, and young men who had taken onc or two captives, danced in tIle civic-ceremonial precinct in tile company of maidens or "pleasure girls" (Sahagiln 1981: 141).

16. Atemoztli 17. Tititl

Boys pelted maidens in tIle streets ofTenochtitlan WitII net balls stuffed witl1 grass, shredded paper, or green maize leaves (Sahagun 1981: 157-8).

18. Izcalli

net balls stuffed with grass, shredded paper, or green maize leaves) (Sahagllll 1981: 52,62,119-21,146,149,157-8). The repeated use of mock battles in the montllly rituals emphasized antagonistic competition as a mode of divinely sanctioned interaction. 4 Finally, a concern with warfare was expressed by giving model warriors prominence in both ritual and secular performances (Table 11.5). The ritual performances included the incarnation ofTezcatlipoca by a captive warrior chosen to impersonate the deity. For a year until his sacrifice in month 5, this exemplary warrior walked the streets of the city, serving as a reminder that glory on the battlefield and death in sacrifice was the highest destiny that young men could achieve (Fig. 11.5; Sahaglll1 1981: 9). In month 10, Huitzilopochtli's envoy, Paynal, appeared on the Great Temple, embodying the perfect warrior as he seized war captives by their hair and dragged them to the top of the temple for sacrifice (Sahaglll1 1981: lI5). In month 11, the young maize god Cinteotl played the ideal Aztec warrior as he fearlessly travcled to enemy lands to deposit a mask made from the skin ofa sacrificial victim (Sahaglll1 1981: 122). Successnll warriors were also recognized in secular ritual. As mentioned above, the men who had taken captives and offered them in sacrifice in months 2 and 10 were celebrated with household feasts featuring a stew made from the limbs of sacrificial victim. Friends and relatives came to bear witness to the meritorious acts of the captor (Sahaglll1 1981: 49). In month 3, the men who had taken captives carried the skins of their sacrificial victims through the streets of Tenochtitlan (Sahaglll1 1981: 58). In month 11, the Aztec ruler distributed costly war insignia to warriors according to their achievements on the battlefield (Sahagllll 1981: 123). These eye-catching items of military attire and civilian dress were distributed according to a strict sumptuary code (Duran 1971: 197-8; Sahagllll 1979: 76-7). The iconography of the costumes ensured tllat

300

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Elizabeth M. Bl'ltlllfiel

11.5 III TCllochtitlrtll, a wm' eaptipc without physical blcmish was choscn to impersonatc the god Tczeatlipoea jiJ1' a yem: He aNearcd ill public, hOllorcd by 1IIC/l mid W01llCII, until hc was sacrificed d1lring the fifth mO/lth afthe Aztec ealendm:

successful warriors would be associated with, and perhaps kel themselves united with, supernatural powers of various sorts (Anawalt 1992). In months 2, 5,8,9, 10, 11, and 15, Tenochtitlan's warrior elite danced in the civic-ceremonial precinct (Fig. 11.6; Sahagl1l1 1981: 55-6,75,98,109-10,116,123,141). The dance rhythms and the songs of the warrior elite carried across the city on the nighttime air. In months 2, 11, and 15, the warriors participated in the 1110ck battles already described, gaining public recognition. The state also set aside a series of private spaces 1<:>1' the cultivation of warrior identity. When warriors had taken filtlr captives, they gained entry to the Cuauhcalli, the Eagle House, a special hall associated with the ruler's palace (DllI'
battle or sacrifice; transported to the sky, they accompanied the sun across the heavens (Sahagl1l1 1969: 162). Within these private spaces, elite warriors could be subjected to intense ideological indoctrination. Finally, the warrior ideal was celebrated in monumental art. For example, on the great sacrificial stones of Moctezuma and Tizoc, Aztec rulers were depicted as warriors seizing enemy rulers by their hair, taking them captive ft)r eventual sacrifice (Soils 1992; Umberger 1996a). In public per(i)l'(l1anCeS and exclusive gatherings, then, young Aztec men were glamorized as captors and captives, participants in ceaseless (cosmic) warf:lI'C.

DISCUSSION The basic orientation of Aztec monthly rituals toward the agricultural cycle is somewhat surprising. Tenochtitlan was, aller all, a conquest-based urban capital, apparently insulated fi'ol11 rural concerns with rain, fCrtility, and harvests. But when harvests arc small, peasants meet their own subsistence needs Ilrst, and even slightly substandard harvests create noticeable shortages of marketed (Clod. In times of t:lmine, people who arc detached (i'om the land suffcr the most (I-licks 1987; Melior and Gavian 1987: 540). Basic subsistence issues werc reHected in ritual activities of Tenochtitlan's hOllseholds. Household ritual activilY (i)llowed an annual round that paralleled state ritual without actually being a part of it. Household ritual ttxused on honoring rain and fCrtility gods; households celebrated warbre only when household members oHcred captured enemy soldiers ft)r sacrifice, an act recognized by feasting in the warrior's honor. C'a!jllIlli.\,\vere more active participants in state rituals, but their activities, too, mostly supported the monthly rituals of the agricultural year. Like households, the wljlllltiswere most commonly drawn into the celebration of'\varf:lI'e when their members offcred enemy soldiers li)r sacrifice. However, both ethnohistoric and archaeological data (I'om Tenochtitlan suggest that Aztec rulers did target a specific group (t)r ideological indoctrination: namely, the young, male population of Tenochtitlan. More resources were

301 11.6 Danccrs in thc Aztec I'IIlcr's palace. Dallces proPided ojijlol'tllllities jii/' accomplished warriors to display the slllllptuary goodJ that thcy had won through their exploitJ. "And all the onloo/lcl'S, the bc/aped old IPOIIICII ... raised a tcm/it! cry ... They said: '77JCJc arc ollr bclopcd sow wholll we Jce hcre. If ill jipe days, in ten days thc [war is} mmolt1lccd, ",ill thc)' ... cOllie rctllrNing?»)

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Elizabeth M. Brumfiel

devoted to engineering consent within this group than in other segments of the commoner population. Some concern with warfare and human sacrifice may have entered commoners' consciousness as a product of the numerous state-sponsored sacrifices, mock battles, and celebrations of warriors to which tlley were exposed. Tllis is possibly reflected in tlle analogies tllat were sometimes made between household implements and weaponry. For example, spindle whorl designs sometimes replicate tlle designs on warriors' sllields, suggesting tllat tlle two might be equated (McCafferty and McCafferty n.d.).6 Weaving battens were used to "sacrifice" the amarantll images of mountains tllat were placed in commoners' houses during montll 16, as if the battens were warriors' swords (Sahaglll1 1981: 29). Burkhart (1997: 26), following C. F. Klein (1994), goes so far as to argue that the ideology of warfare suffused Aztec households: "an ideology of male-female complementarity was maintained tlu'ough an investment of the home with the symbolism of war." But Klein's and Burkhart's claim seems to be based upon literary texts produced by elite male segments of the Aztec population, who may have read military symbolism into women's roles in ways not shared by commoner women. The rarity of elements of warfare and human sacrifice in monthly household rituals suggests that warfare was not an orienting ideological principle at the household level, although as we shall see below (p. 306) it may have influenced commoner tllinking to a degree.

AZTEC RELIGION IN THE HINTERLANDS TEPEPOLCO Tepepolco was a town of more than 10,000 people, located 72 kilometers northeast of Tenochtitlan, between the Basin of Mexico and the state of Tlaxcala (Gebhard 1993: 53). Tepepolco was subject to the ruler ofTexcoco throughout most of the fourteenth century and fell briefly under Tepaneca control in 1418. In 1430, Tepepolco was restored to Texcoco's rule and was thereafter firmly a part of the Aztec empire (Alva Ixtlilx6chitl 1975-7: I, 317, 380; I1, 53). Tepepolco's ritual calendar closely resembled that ofTenochtitlan. The solar year was divided into eighteen months. Most of these months bore the same names as the months in Tenochtitlan and were celebrated with similar rituals. However, these similarities do not necessarily demonstrate Tenochtitlan's influence on Tepepolco because this pattern of religious practice was probably well established in central Mexico prior to Aztec expansion, as discussed below. Like Tenochtitlan, Tepepoko worshipped Huitzilopochtli (Acuna 1986: 175), but it is not clear whether the worship of Huitzilopochtli in Tepepolco began during the fifteenth century under Aztec domination, or whether this worship originated a century earlier, having been introduced by a group of Aztec refugees who entered Tepepolco after the disintegration of the town of Culhuacan (Acuna 1985: 6,85; Alva Ixtlilx6chitl1975-7: 1,433). Despite fundamental similarities, tllere were also some very clear differences

Religion and state in the Aztec empire

in the ritual cycles ofTenochtitlan and Tepepolco. Specifically, almost all of the practices tllat underscored the importance of state-sponsored warfare in Tenochtitlan were less prominent in Tepepolco. For example, tllere was less human sacrifice and less sacrifice of enemy warriors in Tepepolco. In Tenochtitlan, montll 2 was tlle occasion for tlle mass sacrifice and flaying of captured enemy warriors. But in Tepepolco, both captured enemy warriors and slaves purchased for tlle occasion were sacrificed and flayed (Sahag6n 1997: 56). In Tepepolco during montll 5, a maize-dough image of Tezcatlipoca was sacrificed in place oftlle living warrior sacrificed in Tenochtitlan (Sahag6n 1997: 56). In montll 10, tlle merchants ofTepepolco sacrificed slaves to their patron, Yiacatecuhtli, in contrast to the practice in Tenochtitlan where merchants offered their slaves in montll 15 to the warrior god Huitzilopochtli (Sahaglll1 1997: 61). In Tepepolco, it seems that merchants attended to their own affairs, sacrificing to tlleir own patron instead of competing Witll warriors for public recognition by sacrificing to Huitzilopochtli. Also in month 10, Xiuhtecutli was given only blood from the ears of the winner of the poleclimbing (xocotl) contest in Tepepolco, but in Tenochtitlan, Xiuhtecutli received a sacrifice of enemy warriors (Sahagl1l1 1997: 61). In month 13, birds were sacrificed to the mountain gods in Tepepolco while humans were sacrificed in Tenochtitlan (Sahag(1I1 1997: 64). In month 17, no human sacrifice was carried out in Tepepolco, but a living impersonator of I1amatecutli was sacrificed in Tenochtitlan (Sahag(1I1 1997: 66). Month 18 ended with the sacrifice of a living impersonator of Ixcozauhque in Tepepolco, while in Tenochtitlan, no slaves or captives were sacrificed for three conseclltive years; however, every fourth year, numerous captives and slaves were slain in Tenochtitlan (Sahag(1I1 1981: 162; 1997: 67). Successful warriors in Tepepolco played a much less prominent role in public ritual. Dancing and singing during the monthly celebrations in Tepepolco often featmed the entire population or non-warrior segments of it. For example, in month 1, the entire population delivered sacrificial papers to Tlaloc's mountaintop shrine: "In the courtyard of the temple of the devil, there the people paid their debt [to the gods]. All the commoners, noblemen, [and] lords took [the papers] there ... " (Sahag(1I1 1997: 56). In month 2, all the nobles and commoners gathered in the marketplace to dance with their rattles: "everyone paid tribute with song in the center of the city" (Sahagl\l1 1997: 57). In month 5, a procession of women planted sacrificial papers at the temple of Tezcatlipoca (Sahagl\l1 1997: 59). In month 6, there was "singing by the women," and a procession of youth carrying birds tied to poles (Fig. 11.7; Sahagl1l1 1997: 59). In month 7, there was again "singing by women for twenty days" (Sahaglll1 1997: 60). In month 8, women once more sang for twenty days and danced in new clothing with garlands of flowers around their necks and on their heads (Sahagl1l1 1997: 60). 111 month 9, when the xocotl- a great ceremonial pole - was brought into the town, "everyone went out to receive it," and "everyone pulled it in" (Sahagl1l1 1997: 61). In month 11, there was again "singing by women for

303

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Elizabeth M. Brumfiel

Religion and state in the Aztec empire 65-6). There is no record of mock battles between the wearers of sacrificial skins and the warriors in month 2, between the telpochcalli and calmecac youths in montlls 4 and 15, or of verbal battles between young men and women, also in month 4: all of which are recorded in Sahaglll1's account of ritual in Tenochtitlan.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE HINTERLANDS

-,

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-,

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'.' ~,

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11.7 In Tepepolco, rituals associated JlIith the sixth morlth of the solar calelldar: JlIomen sirlg, a processioll of youths carry birds tied to poles, priests (?) lie on rushes for jil'e days, fasting, alld all impersonator of the rain god, Tlaloc, is sacrificed arId placed in a cal'e.

twenty days," and everyone danced, including the seasoned warriors, the offering priests, and all of the commoners (Sahaglll1 1997: 62). In month 15, all the villages surrounding Tepepolco had the task of singing in the city center. All of the maidens and youths danced and made offerings of large, long tortillas to Huitzilopochtli (Sahaglll1 1997: 65). Successful warriors were exclusively featured only once each year in Tepepolco; in month 11, men danced in the courtyard of Huitzilopochtli's temple with all their insignia and war array (Sahaglll1 1997: 63). Mock battles were also less common in Tepepolco than in Tenochtitlan. In Tepepolco, mock battles are recorded for only three ceremonies: in montll 11, the impersonator ofTeteoinnan engaged in tile Battle with Straws; in month 15, tile impersonator ofHuitzilopochtli engaged in the Battle ofChochayotl; and in month 17, people fought each other with "barn owl" balls (Sahaglll1 1997: 6,

The extent of the warfare-centered ideology disseminated to subordinate populations can also be gauged using archaeological evidence. In the first place, monumental sculpture bearing images of elaborately dressed warriors is rare in provincial towns outside of the Basin of Mexico (Umberger and Klein 1993; Umberger 1996b). These durable testimonies to the glorious life of the warrior were mostly confined to Tenochtitlan. Secondly, the style and frequencies of Postclassic figurines from three provincial towns (Huexotla, Xico, and Xaltocan) suggest a low degree of acceptance of the Aztec ideology of warfare and sacrifice. Small, molded ceramic figurines occur in low frequencies at almost all Postclassic rural sites in the Basin of Mexico. These figurines were made by craft specialists (C. Cook 1950; Otis Charlton 1994), but they were used in household contexts - at least this is suggested by the invariable association of figurines with household debris in archaeological contexts. The figurines may have been used in ritual activity at the household level, or they may have been toys. In either case, they should reflect popular priorities and concerns. The frequencies of different types of figurines in hinterland communities before and during the period of Aztec dominance should provide a valid indication of the extent to which popular consciousness was affected by state ideology. The figurines are usually anthropomorphic. Details of clothing and anatomy can be used to identify males and females, and in pre-Aztec contexts, males and females occur in an approximately even ratio. In collections dating to the period of Aztec dominance, however, female figurines become more fi'equent; they outnumber male figurines by a ratio of three to one (Brumficl 1996). Moreover, the male figurines dating to the period of Aztec dominance are often not warriors. They sit rather than stand, and they hold drums rather than the implements of war. This suggests that hinterland commoners were not preoccupied with male warriors and their work. Female figurines, too, differ from the idealized images of women presented by the Aztec state. In state-sponsored arts such as sculpture and manuscript painting, women are posed in a controlled kneeling position, perhaps in reference to their role as producers of cloth and food. In contrast, female figurines more often stand than kneel, and they fi'equently hold one or two children, perhaps in reference to their reproductive roles (Fig. 11.8). Again, this suggests that commoners were not preoccupied with the state's definitions of social roles and status (BrumfielI996).

305

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Elizabeth M. Bl'umjicl

Religion and state ill the Aztec empire

DISCUSSION: OlUGINS, INNOVATIONS, AND STRUCTURAL POSES IN AZTEC RELIGION Human sacrif1ce and the glorification of warriors were more muted in hinterland towns than in the Aztec capital. This raises two important issues, one concerning the originality of the Aztecs' wartu'C-ccntered ideology and the other concerning the constraints on the diffusion of this ideology to hinterland communities. The Aztecs have been considered the originators of their warf:lI'e-centered ideology. For example, Conrad and Demarest state: The original contribution of the lVlcxica to the evolution of lVlcsoamerican civilization was an ideology that successttdly integrated religious, economic, and social systems into an imperialistic war machine. The ideological changes which caused this integration were the work of the same handful of men (Itzcoati, Tlacaelel, IVloctezuma I, ete.) who had ... instituted other rcl(JI'Il1s.

(1984: 37)

11.8 All Aztccperiod ccramic fiHlIrillc (!(a 1I'01lla1l holdillFIWO childrcn. Hci.!J/;t /9 CIII.

The period of Aztec domination did produce a new figurine type, the temple replica. Temple replicas arc 10 to 20 cm tall; they arc models of temple pyramids topped by temple structures or deity figures. The deities on the temples arc usually male, and they often hold weapons. Kaplan suggests that the temple replicas may have integrated peasant ritual with the cults of the urban elites (Pasztory 1983: 289-91 ). This is probably true, but it is important to recognize the rarity of these replicas in figurine assemblages. At Late Postclassic sites in the Basin of Mexico, temple replicas always constitute less than 10 percent of the figurine collections, and usually less than 5 percent (Brumf1elI996: 155; Parsons 1972: 105-6, M. E. Smith in press). The low fi'Cquency of warflre-centered images in the material culture of hinterland populations suggests that the ideology of cosmic warf:lre did not diffuse to rural regions of the empire; hinterland commoners were not impressed by the state's claim that military activity was crucial for their existence. In contrast, a collection of seven f1gmines fi'om Metro excavations at Mexico City/ Tenochtitlan included two temple replicas and f()llr women presented in a kneeling pose (Arana and Cepeda 1967). This suggests a somewhat greater degree of acceptance of state ideology by (commoner?) households in Tenochtitlan, as suggested by C. F. Klein (1994) and Burkhart ( 1997).

Conrad and Demarest's view is supported by ethnohistoric documents that clearly describe how new practices were introduced by Aztec rulers and their advisors. For example, the documents state that the Aztec king Itzcoatl awarded the first titles to successful warriors, and Moctezuma instituted the Hrst sumptuary laws that raised successful warriors above their peers (Oman 1967: U, 98, 236-8). Moctezuma is also credited with having set aside a gathering place f()r celebrated warriors (Oman 1967: 11, 213; Sahaglll1 1979: 43). Moctezuma's advisor Tlacaelel is said to have introduced a new f(mn of sacrifice that tcatlll'ed mock combat (Oman 1967: II, 171). But many of these "innovations" wCl'e present in central Mexico bcf()re the Aztecs' rise to power. For example, warriors and human sacrif1ce arc highlighted in sculpture and carved fi'iezes at Tula, an important regional center 95 km north of'Tenochtitlan that flourished 900-1050, f()ur to live centuries prior to the Aztec state (Oiehl 1983; Cobean and Mastache 1995; Jimcnez Garcla 1998). Tula contains a colonnaded hall with masonry benches depicting processions of richly dressed males similar to those 1()lll1d in the Eagle House in Mexico City. The similar plans of' the two structures, and their use of benches bearing almost identical designs, suggest that Tula's colonnaded hall anticipated the Aztecs' Eagle l--louse as a gathering place f()r elite warriors. In the Aztec empire, the geographic distribution of tribute payments in elite warrior costumes suggests that such costumes were manut:lctured at several places in central Mexico, particularly in the central and northern provinces (Broda 1978). The central and northern provinces coincide with the boundaries of the ancient Toltec empire (compare Bro(ia 1978: 148 and Anawalt 1992: 138), raising the possibility that Toltec rulers also used fCathered warrior costumes to reward successful warriors and that this cultural legacy was available to Aztec empire-builders.

307

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Elizabeth M. Brumfiel In Aztec times, sculptures, structures, and warrior costumes celebrating valiant warriors were broadly distributed in the political capitals of central Mexican states that lay outside of the empire. For example, the drawings of costumed warriors in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala suggest that the Tlaxcalan kingdoms shared the Aztec institution of military orders. Mural paintings found at the Late Postclassic sites ofTlaxcala and Puebla bear militaristic motifs (Contreras Martinez 1994; Sisson and Lilly 1994a, 1994b; Pohl 1998); perhaps these rooms served as gathering places for military elites. This would imply that such places were not the exclusive invention of Aztec rulers and that the rulers of many Late Postclassic states shared the Aztecs' concern with warfare and sacrifice. How can the evidence for a cult ofwarf.lre prior to the Aztec empire, and in kingdoms beyond its control, be reconciled with the statements in ethnohistorical documents that Aztec rulers and their advisors invented the cult of warfare and sacrifice? And what explains the greater emphasis placed upon agricultural fertility in provincial towns that were a part of the empire such as Tepepolco, Huexotla , Xico , and Xaltocan? Perhaps neither the cult of sacrifice and warfare nor the cult of agricultural fertility had a clear chronological priority. Instead, the two cults could have coexisted in time, as a function of the political status of various towns and cities. The religion of Late Postclassic Mesoamerica may have rotated through two "structural poses" (see Leach 1954). When central Mexican polities were in ascendance, they adopted the cult of sacrifice and warfare, "inventing" it as they introduced it to the local scene. This cult was used to socialize young men, to make them into warriors and to create a cohesive force that would carry out the ruler's coercive policies. The ideological message of cosmic warfare was used to capture the commitment of these men by conferring upon them a place of dignity and high status within the state's view of the universe. This ideology sought to establish the moral worth of military achievement by linking it to cosmic structure and human smvival and by rewarding it with social differentiation and esteem. Young men joined the state in its "projects" of warfare and human sacrifice, their actions being shaped by their "images and ideas of what constitutes goodness - in people, in relationships, and in conditions oflifc" (Ortner 1984: 152). This warfare-centered ideology was effective only when it was properly "materialized" in monumental sculpture, built spaces, and special costuming (see OeMarrais et al. 1996). It was an expensive ideology, and it could only be supported in political centers like Tula and Tenochtitlan that collected substantial tribute. Once instituted, it produced a cohesive fighting force that carried out more conquests and produced more tribute to finance the cult of sacrifice and warf.lre and create a larger and even more cohesive army. When central Mexican polities were politically subordinate, like Tepepolco or Xaltocan under the Aztecs, they adopted a less militaristic, less expensive ideology better suited to their limited means. The rulers of subordinate politics concentrated on "bread and butter" issues, such as rain, fertility, and bountiful harvests, on sponsoring religious rituals that drew wide participation. Provincial

Religion and state in the Aztec empire rulers may have used these rituals to mask the emerging differences between tllemselves, whose interests came to coincide with those of tile Aztec elite, and their people, who bore the brunt of Aztec tribute demands (M. E. Smitll 1986). This, in turn, suggests tllat the focus upon human sacrifice and warf.lre did not serve as an integrating mechanism in the Aztec empire. The sacrifice of captives and the deeds of warriors were emphasized only in the Aztec capital, and perhaps in the most wealthy allied towns that surrounded it (i.e., Texcoco, Xochimilco, and Tlamanalco, see Umberger 1996b: 166). Because human sacrifice and warfare were not heavily celebrated in provincial capitals, hinterland people would not have been convinced of their importance or of the importance of tile state's activities in providing nourishment for tile sun.

CONCLUSIONS Aztec state religion was not necessarily geared to produce a uniform world-view and a common value system within Tenochtitlan, nor to sanctit), the ruler in the eyes of his subjects. Rather, it was intended to win the loyalty of a relatively small target group, the young men who formed the core of the Aztec army. This achievement-based system of social status cut across particularistic loyalties of kinship and ethnicity. From the beginning, Aztec rulers rewarded both their own warriors and men from other city-states who distinguished themselves in the Aztec cause (Oman 1967: 11, 100). This centralized system of reward and prestige created a cohesive imperial force at the expense of various kinship groups, ethnic groups, and local city-states. In Tenochtitlan, members of commoner households were frequently exposed to the sights and sounds of the cult wad-are and sacrifice, and, on occasion, household members were drawn into these cult activities. Figmines from Tenochtitlan indicate that commoner thinking came to incorporate some of the definitions and priorities implicit in the imperial cult. But the ethnohistorical record suggests that commoners had no special enthusiasm fc.>r imperial religion; the warrior ideal was not often celebrated in monthly household rituals. Instead, these rituals focused on commoners' own concerns: agricultmal fertility, successful childbirth, and good health. Provincial clites may have embraced the cult of warfare and sacrifice. As Michacl Smith (1986: 75) observes, the Aztec rulers invited provincial clites to witness rituals in Tenochtitlan that involved massive human sacrifice. At these festivals, provincial clites were given sumptuous gifts of clothing, jewels, and military insignia (Oman 1967: I1, 174-5,279,293,308-10, 325, 345,415-16, 437, and 483). It is possible, as M. E. Smith (1986) suggests, that the rituals and gifts won over the regional elites and created a cultmally cohesive ruling class. But if regional elites supported the cult ofwarf.lre, its influence is not apparent in the rituals that local rulers sponsored in provincial capitals. According to the ethnohistoric record, rituals in provincial capitals joined many different sectors of the local population in activities to ensure rain, fertility, and bountiful

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harvests. Archaeological investigations of peasant houses in the provinces are consistent with the ethnohistoric record; they yield few indications of militarist ideology (BrumfielI996; M. E. Smith in press). This variation in ideology across divisions of age, gender, class, and locality may be typical of ancient empires. Given the mosaic of economic, political, and cultural circumstances in ancient empires (D'Altroy 1994; Morrison 1997a; Sinopoli 1994a; Smith and Hodge 1994; G. Stein 1994) and the difficulties of communication in the ancient world, it is probably unrealistic to expect that whole empires could be integrated by a single dominant ideology. More likely, dominant ideologies were specifically tailored and selectively deployed in ancient empires to win the support of strategically important groups. In Tenochtitlan, tllis was young men of fighting age, tlle core of the Aztec army. ~,

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Inventing empire in ancient Rome GregWoolf

INTRODUCTION Ancient empires may be characterized as geographically extensive political entities. Most were ruled by elites who were often centrally located and internally divided, and whose power was severely limited by low levels of surplus production and preindustrial communications and technology. Imperial aristocracies thus depended on devolving a great part of their running costs on local elites of various sorts: creoles, descendants of traditional rulers, new cadres recruited from subject societies, and the like. Ancient empires were therefore of necessity tolerant of regional diversity and their rulers set themselves modest goals, often little more than maintaining their security against internal and external threats and extracting sufficient profit to reward those on whom imperial power depended. Despite, or perhaps because of, the resultant lack of homogeneity, many ancient empires were very long lasting. The early Roman empire of the first three centuries of the Common Era broadly conforms to this pattern (Fig. 12.1; for general accounts see Garnsey and Sailer 1987; Jacques and Scheid 1990; Goodman 1997). At the center an imperial court coexisted with a senior (senatorial) and a junior (equestrian) aristocracy. Tensions existed between the emperors and the senate, within both the senior and junior aristocracies and between aristocracies and the court. The emperors' power was based on their control of the empire's finances, of its administration, and of the standing army. But they also cultivated a reputation for generosity and virtue with all sectors of society: especially with the army and with the privileged populations of the capital and of Italy (Veyne 1976; Millar 1977). In the course of their conquest of the Mediterranean basin and its continental hinterlands, the Romans had absorbed kingdoms, cities and temple states, federal leagues, and sedentary and semi-nomadic tribal societies ofvarious types. The early empire was divided into provinces, but each governor presided over a large number of semi-autonomous communities, most notionally organized as republics, but in f.1Ct differing from one another widely except in tlleir duties to the Roman state, principally the maintenance of civil, social, and religious order. The communities of the empire had their own cults, constitutions, generally their own laws, and often their own monetary systems (Lepelley 1998).

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Again, despite this diversity, the empire was very long lasting. Most ofit was eonquered in the last two centuries BeE, with expansion being most rapid in the period 70 BC E to 10 C E. That period was also marked by a series of civil wars that ushered in the monarchical system described above. Despite a brief crisis in the third century C E, the emperors ruled the entire Mediterranean basin tCll' five hundred years, and parts of it {c)r much longer. Rome was more than simply a typical early empire: in some senses it was an archetypal one. The repeated use of Rome as a model of empire, fi'om the Christian and Islamic middle ages, through the early modern period into more recent times, is well known. Moreland and MacCormack treat some of these issues in their chapters in this volume, and a fldl account of the afterlife of Rome would extend well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to include the overtly Roman styles of Napoleonic, Victorian, and l
But if Rome appears to us as an archetype of empire, the same was not true t()l' the Romans. Hitler's Third Reich and Palmerston's "civis Brital1nicus sum" were expressive slogans precisely because they appealed to preexistent notions of what empire was. The first Roman emperor called himself the princeps, the first man or leading figure in Rome; used the title imperator, literally "commander" and an honor armies sometimes awarded their generals after victories; and created a new honorific title AllgltstllS, which conveyed a helpfully vague sense of numinous dignity. His successors imitated him, and in addition appropriated his family name, Caesar. Augustus' titulature is explicable partly as political tact he was attempting to minimize the violence his accession did to traditional teJl'I11S and institutions and partly as an elaborate way to avoid the (locally) negative associations of kingship. But it was also an attempt to describe a role felt (01' claimed) to be historically uniq ue. The lack of precedent affected more than the title of the ruler. Nothing on the scale of the Roman empire had existed bct()['e in the Mediterranean world. Leading Greek cities had occasionally exercised some hegemonic power over smaller areas, such as southern Greece, the Aegean Sea, or the eastern parts of the island of Sicily. They expressed their position either in terms of alliances and leagues, or metaphorically as in the trope of the "tyrant city." Beyond the Mediterranean, Achaemenid Persia, discussed by Kmht (this volume), might have provided a model, but the Persians were regarded as barbarous and as the predecessors of Rome's only real rival power, the Parthians. The closest analogies to Roman rule were the states set up by Alexander and his generals after they had conquered and dismembered Achaemenid Persia. But their imagery of power, derived It'om a mixture of Macedonian kingship and Persian precedent, and consciously an idiom developed {c)r an international community of states, was only partially suitable f
AN IMPERIAL PEOPLE The lirst emperor began the account of his own lite which, as he had requested, was inscribed on a monumental inscription outside his tomb in Rome, and also published throughout the empire, with the f()llowing words. "These are the deeds pert
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out the idea of empire as the power of the Roman people, a phrase that recurs several times in tius inscription and is ubiquitous in Roman writing in contexts where we would write "the Roman state." Treason, for example, was defined as a crime against tile maiestas populi Romani, tile dignity of tile Roman people. Allies were "allies of tile Roman people" and so forth. Roman writers and orators in tilis respect followed, as in much else, Greek precedent. Where we write of Atilens' war witil the Peloponnesian League, ancient writers wrote of tile war between tile Athenians and tile Peloponnesians. Polybius, a Greek intellectual and statesman who spent many years in Rome as a hostage and became a confidant of some leading Roman aristocrats, began his great lustory of Rome's conquest of tile Mediterranean by announcing his subject as the process by which "control of almost tile entire world has, in less tilan fifty-three years, come under the sole power of tile Romans" (Polybius 1.1.5). Ratiler than seeing what we tilink of as imperialism as the mastery by one state of otiler states (or tribal peoples), Greek commentators and their Roman imitators thought of it as the power of one people over others . The imperium of tile Roman people was not a mere metaphor or conventional usage. Being a Roman citizen, however poor or of whatever status, conferred in the early imperial period - a whole series of privileges tilat were denied to the richest and best-connected non-Roman subject. Rome certainly was a state, but Romans tended to speak of themselves as a people first. It helped that Roman ethnicity coincided closely with Roman citizenship. Citizens served in elite military units and were paid more for doing so; they had access to imperial law and could hold office in the imperial administration; they could inherit from and marry other citizens; they were spared the more arbitrary and brutal forms of judicial investigation and punishment; and so on. Roman imperialism might be glossed ethnic domination, a dominance exercised not through rank, class, wealth, or gender but by virtue (and, as will emerge, Romans would have understood "virtue" literally here) of membership of a particular people. It is not easy to know at what point Romans first came to think of themselves as an "imperial" people. The earliest Latin literature was not produced until the third century BC E, and the first su bstantial prose in the early second centl\l'y. Equally, despite some passing references in earlier works, the first significant account of Rome by an outsider was that of Polybius, composed in the early second centl\l'y BC E. In other words, we know little of Roman attitudes before Roman expansion beyond Italy was well underway. It is not entirely a matter of chance that our first reliable evidence for Roman imperialism coincides with the period when Roman expansion was at its height. The attention of Greek writers was first drawn to Rome by the expansion of its power. More importantly, Latin literature was in part created as a response to the Greek literatl\l'es tllat the Romans encountered as their power expanded. Roman ways of describing themselves underwent numerous transformations, but from as early as we can hear their voices, Romans are declaring "We are not Greeks":

InJJenting empire in ancient Rome

for tile most part via media adopted from Greek sources. The invention of Latin literature can be seen in this context. While writing was in widespread use in tile polyglot world of the Mediterranean fi'om at least tile fifth century BC E, literatures were very rare, and most were written in Greek. Some early Roman writing f.'llls into this category, but in tile tilird century B CE - at around tile same time Rome was establishing herself as a Mediterranean power - a series of works began to appear in Latin, some translations of Greek works, some loose adaptations of tilem, and some original works, yet virtually all in genres developed by the Greeks and all showing extensive knowledge of Greek literature and myth. Creating a literatl\l'e of their own - a literature that both invited comparison with that of the Greeks and simultaneously expressed its difference from it - was one way in which Romans began to construct tilemselves as a world power. The fullest representations of the imperial character of the Roman people were created a little later. Under Augustus and his immediate successors an educational canon was established based on a selection of works composed in tile last generation of the Republic by Cicero, Sallust, Caesar, and others, together with some works produced under (and sometimes commissioned for) Augustus. This too formed part of the development of a consciousness of empire. The "classicization" of Latin Iiteratl\l'e was a cultl\l'al project, to some extent consciously directed to provide the Romans with a high cultl\l'e equal to that of the Greeks, and appropriate to their new status as rulers of the world. Vergil's Aeneid and Livy's History offered new formulations of Roman identity, of the Romans' shared past, of their destiny, and of their special relationship to the gods and the cosmic order. It is easy for modems to dismiss literature as a relatively peripheral area of cultl\l'al activity, enabled by wider social and political changes and commenting on them, and relatively lightweight in the hierarchy of causes as opposed to effects. But there are good reasons to think that literatl\l'e was rather more central to Roman cultlJl'e. Emperors and aristocrats patronized, and sometimes wrote, Iiteratll1'e. Literary representations of the past were closely related to those on monuments and those dramatized in festivals. The study of literatlJl'e and practice of rhetoric were central to the educational canon. Finally "subversive" books might, under the empire, be burned and their authors exiled or executed. The centrality of literary activity in Roman cultlJl'e and Roman politics seems patent. What sort of imperial ethnicity did Latin writers f.'lshion for the Roman people at the turn of the millennium? Each formulation differed in details, even when more or less authorized versions appeared in the Latin canon and in the inscriptions and other monuments of the capital. Any abbreviated account l'lIns the risk of gross oversimplification, but a few central themes may be emphasized. To begin, as has been mentioned, Latin accounts established for themselves a complex relationship with their Greek models (Feeney 1998; Hinds 1998). The Romans' collective story too was to be ancient, its origins set in the mythical age with links to be established with the Fall of Troy, the travels of Herakles, the

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Greg Woolf oracle of Delphi, and other central figures, narratives, and places of Greek myth. These stories, together with the genres in which they were related, served to orientate Latin literature and Roman sensibility on Greek models, and to establish Greekness as a point of reference against which Romanness was to be defined. Specifically Roman concerns and emphases established the difference as well as the comparability of the Roman past. Greek foundation stories, for example, stressed the common descent of a given people from demi-gods, founders, heroes, and the like, an emphasis that sometimes led to the creation of elaborate genealogies and fictive kinships. Divine ancestors (several) featured in Roman myths too. But from Cato's Origines, written in the early second century B CE, through to the versions that became canonical around the reign of Augustus, more stress was placed on narratives of successive incorporation, of new arrivals and additions to the Roman people. Trojan rehlgees married Italian princesses, Romulus stocked his new city with wanderers from all Italy, women were kidnapped from the Sabines, noble families claimed Greek or Etruscan ancestors, and so on. The story of Rome was told as the story of the emergence of a strong martial, moral, pious character type from very mixed stock. But in tension with these successive stories of recruitment were successive tales of division and conflict (J. Henderson 1998): the wars the Trojans fought against Italians when they arrived, the fratricidal murder of Remus by the city's founder Romulus, the conflict between the patrician aristocracy and the plebeian commons, the exiled Coriolanus leading enemies against Rome. If some stories represent civil strife averted, others show the consequences of conflicts that are not. The unity of Rome, repeatedly established and repeatedly placed in jeopardy, is a constant theme of accounts of Rome's origins and early history. Roman ethnicity was unusual in the ancient Mediterranean world in the relative unimportance given to descent (Woolf 1998: 48-76). Descent from Romans did confer membership of the Roman people, but citizenship was also liberally awarded to former allies, subjects, and even some defeated enemies and exslaves. Romanness carried moral and cultural obligations, and conforming to these was not easy even for emperors. Romans were also one of only a small group of peoples who spoke Latin, and by stages annexed the wider Latin ethnicity until Latinitas denoted a limited form of citizenship. Roman identity also had a religious component: Rome had its own gods and ritual system, controlled by the Roman elite, who were carehll to naturalize any foreign cults permitted to enter. Finally, Roman ethnicity was closely linked to Roman citizenship. While Greeks lived in hundreds of autonomous city-states, the Roman people was, and always had been, a political as well as an ethnic community. Although the admission of citizens was as carehllly controlled as the admission of new gods and cults, the f.1Ct that Roman ethnicity was thought of largely as a matter of custom, cult, and language had important implications for the recruitment of individuals and communities to the Roman people. Conversely, the close links between political

ImJenting empire in ancient Rome unity, religious and cultural conformity, and Roman identity meant that cultural change, religious dissent, and especially political division were particularly threatening to Romans' collective sense of self. The two preoccupations I have been picking out - the idea of Rome as a melting pot, and that of Rome as an ever-threatened unity - are therefore easy to understand in the period in which Romans were building an empire against the backdrop of constant civil war.

EMPIRE AS COSMIC DOMINION By creating a new literature the Romans mobilized existing symbols to construct a new tradition. A tradition was needed so that Roman achievements might stand out as unique and unprecedented. Other examples of this mode of selffashioning might have been chosen for discussion. For instance, a number oflate Republican generals and early imperial princes seem to have shared a f.1scination with Alexander the Great. However unsuitable in some respects - as a king, as a Greek (or barbarian Macedonian), as lacking in Roman dignity - the scale of his conquests and the subsequent use of his image, titles, and so forth by successive Hellenistic dynasties, made him an obvious standard against which Roman generals might measure themselves (and be measured). Pompey adopted Alexander's title "The Great" and also his hairstyle; Caesar was said to have wept before a statue of Alexander, in shame at his own meager achievements; Antony named one of his sons by Cleopatra after him; Augustus visited his tomb, while Caligula raided it so he could wear Alexander's breastplate in a parade. A second instance would be the effort expended by many of the same individuals to rebuild Rome in a style comparable to (but of course more splendid than) the greatest Greek cities of the eastern Mediterranean - above all Athens, Pergamon and Alexandria. New porticoes, theaters, and huge Hellenistic piazzas transformed Rome, in two generations, from a ramshackle urban sprawl with a few tu fa temples in the center, to a city of huge vistas and planned monumental complexes, finished with marble and other imported stones, and adorned with complex iconographic programs (Zanker 1987). But in this section, I want to move the focus to a second - complementary strategy used by Romans to establish a sensibility of the empire. This strategy involved relating Roman identity and history to a series of cosmological and natural "constants" against which Roman power might be stabilized, justified, explained, and understood. Consider, for example, the relationship between the Roman empire and its geographical environment, that world over which the power of the Roman people extended. Passages in which Augustus and Polybius each claim that Rome effectively ruled the entire world have already been quoted. The idea of world rule is also expressed clearly in a series of images portraying Augustus holding a globe. Vergil's Aeneid has Jupiter promise the Romans imperiwm sine fine (Limitless power? An empire with no frontier? An empire with no end in time?). It is easy to dismiss these claims as hyperbole, as gross exaggeration. But claims

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of this kind are very common in the way empires have portrayed themselves, despite their obvious falsehood. Yates in this volume discusses the cosmological claims of the Son of Heaven who ruled over the Middle Kingdom, outside of which were only barbarians. The Thousand Year Reich and the Sun Never Setting on the English Flag belong to the same mode of representing empire. In the case of Rome, claims to have conquered the world first appeared in the period of most rapid expansion, and continued to be proclaimed throughout the imperial period (Brunt 1990). Successive conquests were accompanied by the writing of new geographies, and of a closely allied genre, "universal" histories. Many of these were written, like that of Polybius, by Greek intellectuals with close connections to Roman leaders (Momigliano 1975). Again there are precedents in the work of intellectuals working in the wake of Alexander's conquests. In Rome this activity provided the basis for pageants, and for monumental displays like the huge map of the world set up by Augustus' lieutenant Agrippa (Nicolet 1988). Outside the capital, triumphal arches represented Romans defeating western and eastern barbarians alike. On monuments and in monumental histories Romans celebrated the conquest of the Alps and the Pyrenees, the crossing of the Ocean and mastery of great rivers like the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates. Augustus' Res Gestae (26) again provides a good example. Of all the provinces of the Roman people on the borders of which were peoples who were not subject to our ;1I1pc,.iuw I extended the frontiers. The Gallic and Spanish provinces, and German}' too, all that the Ocean encloses from Cadiz to the mouth of the river Elbe, I pacified. The Alps, from the part next to the Adriatic to that bordering the Tyrrhenian Sea, I made peaceful but waged unjust war against no people in the process. My fleet sailed through the Ocean from the mouth ofthe Rhine eastwards to the borders of the Cimbri lone of Rome's ancestral enemies] where no Roman had gone before that time, neither by land nor sea: the Cimbri and the Charydes, the Semnones and the other German peoples of that region sent ambassadors to ask for my friendship and that of the Roman people. At my order and under my auspices, two armies were led at virtually the same time into Ethiopia and into that part of Arabia known as Arabia fclix and in each case a great mass of enemies were cut down in battle and many of their fortresses were captured. In Ethiopia the army reached Nabata on the borders of Meroc and in Arabia the army reached the frontier of the Sabaeans and the town of Mariba.

The relationship between imperialism and geography is in all periods a complex phenomenon. Conquests and military expeditions provided new information, and the establishment of administrative infrastructure - roads, frontiers, provincial boundaries, and the like - depended on geographical research. It is not surprising that generals writing dispatches and orchestrating triumphal pageants sought to magnify their achievements by representing themselves as having been the first to cross such and such a boundary, or to have conquered the whole of such and such a region. The physical world represented a fixed standard against

Inpenting empire in ancient Rome

which achievement could be measured. It is an easy step to see the exploration and systematic description of the world as one way of mastering it. Roman writers and leaders also appealed to other kinds of absolutes. One explanation of Roman success was to see it as a result of the virtue and piety of great Romans, both the heroic figures of the past stretching back to the mythical founders, and more recent leaders up to and including the emperors themselves. A series of statues of these summi piri, foremost men, formed part of the monumental program of the new Forum of Augustus. Livy's history correlated an account of Roman triumph, disaster, and recovery with a narrative of virtue, decline, and moral rearmament. Political debate was suffused with a discourse of morality (Edwards 1993), and the immorality of princes was felt to lie behind many of the occasions on which the unity of the Roman people had been put in jeopardy. These ideas might be expressed in a religious idiom. Roman religion, like other aspects of Roman culture, was defiantly "not-Greek." Like Roman etl1l1icity, it was closely intertwined with the political contours of the state (for an account, see Beard et al. 1998). Augustus' Res Gestae and Aeneas' journey to Rome are infused with their respective pie ties, and both men became gods after their deaths. All Romans, in theory, worshipped the gods of Rome who were worshipped in quite the right way and form by no other peoples. That exclusive relationship makes it unsurprising that the rise of the Roman people to greatness came to be represented as a result of divine favor, that the Roman people had a mandate from heaven to rule the world: subject of course to the continued virtue and piety of their leaders (Brunt 1978). Some traces of this view are already apparent in the early second century BC E in the tone of inscriptions recording dealings with other states (Ferrary 1988; North 1993), but the transition from justilYing wars as individually just to regarding all wars as justified seems to have occurred in the late Republic when both views can be attested in the writings of Caesar and Cicero. Closely cohering with these cosmological perspectives - by which Romans were centered in relation to the world, to moral values, and to the gods - was a developing sense that the Romans had a civilizing mission, again at heaven's bidding, to preserve what had been invented but then lost by Greeks, and to disseminate it throughout the world (Woolf 1994, 1995). Romans' dealings with various subject nations were strongly influenced by the role they assigned each in a geography and history of the spread of civilization. Equally, metropolitan culture, from literary polemics on the conduct of emperors to the games in the arena, revolved around the patrolling of a set of norms conceived of as normative not just for Romans, but for all mankind. Much more might be said on all these topics, and on other areas where Romans expressed their position as unique in relation to some supposedly fixed, absolute standard. The imperial cult is onc case in point (Price 1984); so too are the development of a Roman notion of "barbarism," and the use of Stoic philosophy and of law to provide intellectual descriptions of the social order. But

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BELIEVING IN EMPIRE

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The previous sections have sketched out two sets of procedures by which Romans made tlleir power and historical situation appear special: special in relation to (non- )precedent, and special in relation to eternal verities. Other procedures might be uncovered, just as other examples of the two I have discussed might be found. But together these two suggest some preliminary answers to tile question: how did Romans represent their power in ways tllat we recognize as "imperial"? The issue matters for the comparative student of empires in several ways. Most obviously, despite Rome's creation of one archetype of empire, not every empire was a successor to Rome. Something like this idea of empire has been invented on several occasions in world history. Yates' chapter on China and Kuhrt's on Persia (this volume), and some other cases, for example Egypt (see Kemp 1978), suggest that my second stratagem - what might be called the cosmological naturalization of power, perhaps a variant on Weber's "theodicy of good fortune" (Gordon 1990) - has been a widespread device. Empire seems often to have been represented as part of the exclusive character of one polity or of a Chosen People like MOl'eland's Franks (this volume). It is less easy to think of other examples of the construction of empire by differentiation from supposedly nonimperial precedents: perhaps in this respect the Romans were unusual. The nature of these claims and ideas is also important for the definition of empire, an essential prerequisite of comparative analysis, and by no means an easy first stage in this case. Many of the characteristics of empire sketched in the first paragraph of this chapter are true of all states. The main exception, size, is a difficult one to operationalize, given the huge variations in our sample. The study of imperial ideals provides an additional approach, and onc which makes use of the perceptions of those who inhabited, lived, suffered, and dreamed empires. How many of the latter did accept these ideas, and with what degree ofskepticism? Many subjects of the Roman empire may be presumed to have lived as if the Roman order was in some senses natural and eternal, and in tunc with cosmological verities. The image of empire Romans had fashioned was made accessible through a variety of media. Perhaps the most complex formulations were those presented in the Latin literature through which most of the e1ites of the empire, and some others, were educated. The close connection between education, social mobility, and acculturation suggests these representations played a role similar to that envisaged by Brumfiel (this volume) for what she terms Aztec ideology in creating an imperial elite by binding local elite groups to the empire. But we are not dealing simply with the beliefs of the elite. Most Roman subjects may have been illiterate, but images on statues, on architecture, on coins,

InpC1'lting empire in ancient Rome and in many otller contexts presented versions of tile same ideas. Emperors were represented as heroes, as conquerors in military costume, as benefactors in civic dress; their images were associated with personifications of plenty, victory, and peace and of course with portrayals of tile gods and of their predecessors - categories that overlapped in some cases. Those motifs recur on gemstones and in private architecture, suggesting that some at least internalized tllat world-view. Ideas of empire were also dramatized in festivals, for example the annual celebration, in every city and province and army camp of the empire, of tile imperial cult, with its attendant gladiatorial combats in which deviants, criminals, and aliens were slaughtered in a celebration of the repeated victory of cosmic order over chaos. Those festivals were just some of the events marked on civic calendars, realigned since Augustus' reign on to imperial time, and punctuated by imperial birtlldays and accessions. Civic coinages bore the emperor's image, which was also ubiquitous in public spaces, in bath-houses, in temples, and in the houses of the wealtllY. While it is impossible to assess the degree of conviction with which Romans and their subjects accepted these notions, it is clear that tile world tlley inhabited was shaped by these visions of empire. Empire was inscribed in the way time was measured and dates and years calculated. It was imprinted on the coinage of the empire; it structured the syllabus for those who went to school; it fixed the holidays for everyone and shaped the built environment of the cities of the empire in which celebrations took place. And through cult, empire was written in the stars. Empire, personalized - as in China - in the bodies, lives, and figures of individual emperors, was everywhere visible. Most tellingly, what intellectual resistance existed reflected Roman images of empire. Romans had created empire partly by differentiating themselves from traditions, the prestige of which they thereby authorized. Those traditions mostly Greek - were as a result available as the basis for subversive and variant accounts. Alcock's chapter (this volume) discusses in detail the reuse of the Greek past in the Roman empire, but a few additional examples may be suggested here. Onc was the creation of a sequence of empires, evident for example in the Panegyric of Rome composed in Greek by Aelius Aristides. The notion of empire constructed by Rome was thus projected back in time to give a new status to, for example, the power of Macedonians, Spartans, and Athenians, while Rome's cosmological claims to eternal power were tacitly undermined by presenting Romans as (merely) the latest (but not necessarily the last) imperial people. If the Greeks were able to draw on a past authorized by Rome, the same was not true of those subjects, mostly in the west of the empire, whom Roman views of the world had relegated to, in Eric Wolf's famous (1982) phrase, "people without history." Rather than authorize their pasts, Rome had offered westerners a reassuring place in the imperial and thus the cosmic order. If their ancestors had been barbarians, so too had been the ancestors of all Romans. If their ancestors' barbarism explained (and justified) their conquest, the f.1Ct that they

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Greg Woolf themselves were now civilized offered them a place in the divinely sanctioned destiny of the Roman people, conquering those who were still barbarous, and recruiting them to an empire in which they now had a share. As a result, there is no sign of any distinctive intellectual resistance in the West, and something similar may have applied to non-Greek traditions and identities in much of the Roman Near East (Millar 1993b). Challenges also emerged from within Roman culture, and again these traced the contours of imperial myths and imagery. Greek cultural confidence continued to dent Roman cultural self-esteem, by resisting the claims of Latin literature to have surpassed and superseded Greek (Swain 1996). More dramatically, the very tactic Roman writers of the Golden Age had turned against those Greeks they constructed as their predecessors was turned against them by Latin writers oflater periods. Lucan produced an epic poem closely modeled on Vergil's, but based it on the fall of the Roman Republic, stripped out the gods, heroized the opponents of Caesar, and so attacked the cultural foundations of the empire. Similarly Juvenal's satires mobilized the literary and ethical bases of Roman selfdefinition to attack Romans as uncultured and immoral. As each generation of L'ltin writers devoted their energy to rendering their predecessors obsolete, they destabilized Roman understandings of their imperial identity. Other challenges were aimed at Rome's cosmological pretensions. Florus (1.1), for example, attributed the collapse of the Romans' conquest of the world to the "laziness of the Caesars." When the emperors of the third century CE failed to ensure the peace and prosperity of the empire against barbarian raids, their prestige collapsed dramatically into fifty years of rebellions and assassinations, coups and counter-coups. That the Romans and their subjects shared these cosmological perspectives is indication enough of the centrality of Roman imperial ideals in creating and sustaining the fact of empire and shaping the thoughtworld of its inhabitants.

13 The re configuration of tnemory in the eastern Roman empire Susan E. Alcock

Some very odd things happened in the Greek east under Roman rule. A 500year-old temple was carefully demolished, transported, and rebuilt in the center of the city of Athens. Once every two weeks, a procession wound its way through Ephesos, following a route designed to highlight the city's antique origins and sacred history. A shrine dedicated to worship of the Roman emperor was placed inside a Bronze Age tholos tomb some 2000 years old. Audiences packed theaters to hear rhetorical performances upon such topics as "Demosthenes swears that he did not take the bribe of 50 talents" - this some four or five centuries after Demosthenes was dead. Mythological tales, such as the voyage of the Argonauts, were assigned precise topographical locations in the present-day landscape, local priests and tour guides bitterly opposing any alternative suggestions. Visits were paid to the tomb of the fifth-century BC E Athenian leader Pericles, and spectators watched revivified antique customs, for example a rite in which young men were apparently whipped away from the altar of Artemis Orthia in Sparta. This list, which could be greatly extended, testifies to what has been called an "obsession with the past" in the Greek provinces of the Roman empire (very roughly, modern-day Greece and Turkey; Fig. 13.1). Long acknowledged, the phenomenon has remained very poorly understood, most often being unsympathetically viewed as escapist nostalgia on the part ofa defeated people whose past was bigger than their present. Only recently has this dismissive attitude been challenged, and the "presence of the past in the present" been taken seriously as an active clement in the Greek response to Roman imperial rule. This reevaluation of Greek cultural archaism, quite rightly, is taking many forms. Yet at heart what is at stake here is a matter of collcctiJlc 'I'flc'I'flory: what to remember and to celebrate, and what to forget. The Greeks of the Roman empire made certain memorable choices, as do all peoples incorporated within imperial systems. Considering the role and the power of social memory in imperial societies will help to answer both particular questions (why bother to move an old marble temple?) and more general ones (how does any society remember its past, as its present and future are reshaped through the interventions of others?).

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SOCIAL MEMORY AND THE STUDY OF EMPIRES Undcr discussion hcrc is social mcmory, thc I11cmory not of individuals but of largcr groups such as f:lmilics, communitics, or nations, thc mcmory that "idcntifics a group, giving it a scnsc 0(' its past and defining its aspirations fc)r thc lilturc" (Conncrton 1989; Assmann 1992; Fcntrcss and Wickham 1992: 25; Gillis 1994). Intcrdisciplinary work in rcccnt dccadcs has radically transtclI'Illcd prcvious conccptions of mcmory as a static rcscrvoir to bc visitcd and tappcd whcn ncccssary (on ancicnt and mcdicval altitudcs to mcmory: F. A. Yatcs 1966; Carruthcrs 1990; Coleman 1992; Small 1997). Instcad, social mcmory is now charactcrizcd as dynamic, as multiple, and as powcrful. Acknowlcdging its volatility gocs back to thc carly theorist of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, who argued in works such as I,cs Catircs sociall:>: dc /11 lt11:1II0il'c that people remember (or fc)rget) their past according to the needs and stimuli of their present (Halbwaehs 1975 [19251,1941,1950,1992; Button 1993: 73-90). Halbwachs also established the multiple nature ofsocialmemOl'Y, the realization that difh:rent groups posscss difkrent remembrances or remember the same things in different ways; in other words, difkrent IIICIIIII1')' ClIlllltlllllitics everywhere exist (Burke 1989: 1(7). Sometimes variant versions of the past coexist peacdillly; sometimes they come into conflict as counter-memories collide with more dominant discourses (Foucault 1977; Appadumi 1981; Nora 1989; Wickham 1994). Finally, social ml'mor)/ is perceived as a political tCH'Cl' to be reckonl'd with. Patrick Gcary, in a study ofelevl'llth-century Europl', put it most

flatly: "Those who could control thl' past could direct the tilture" (Geary 1994: 6). Social memory offers an arena tc)r political contestation, with different agents seeking to harness its inhercnt dynamism and multiplicities and to bend the past to their own ends. This combination of attributes fickle, multiple, persuasive, highly charged makes social memory a fascinating space to watch, and increasing numbers of studies, notably in history, anthropology, and sociology, arc doing just that. So far, most of these studies lie in the early modern or modern world, especially the "invented traditions" of the nation-state, although studies of earlier periods also exist (modern: e.g., Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Alonso 1988; B. Anderson 1991; Zerubavcl 1995; pre-modern: e.g., Geary 1994; Foxhall 1995; ]onker 1995; WoolI' 1996). All of these studies share two basic premises. First, groups remcmber and fc)rget (or fc)rget and then remember, or "invent" and remember) in a dynamic and meaningfiIl f:lshion through time. And second, such fluctuations in memory inevitably and profclUndly shape our own understanding of the past. I I' these premises arc accepted, then social memory becomes a central and unavoidable issue: "\Ve swim in the past as fish do in water, and cannot escape fh)m it. But our modes of living and moving in this mediulll require analysis and discussion" (Hobsbawl11 1972: 17). "Living and moving" in the fluid realm of social memory appears to me a natural topic fc)r the analysis of premodern empires. Already manifest is a growing interest in the consequences of imperial activity fc)r conquered or incorporated peoples, the challenges offered to their sense of local coherence, the degree to which they offered some fCll'lll of group resistance (e.g., fc)r the Roman world, Webster and Cooper 1996; Mattingly 1997; Van DOlllmclen 1998). Disquiet along these lines quite obviously reflects the anxieties of scholars living themselves in a postcolonial world. What so f~lI' has been less explicitly drawn is the connection between such enquiries and the study of social memory, the academic vogue fc)r which is also unashamedly linked to contemporary concerns ([ ,e Gof'/' 1988; Davis and Stam 1989; Thclen 1989; Vidal- Naquel 1992). I f' social memory is never inert, reworking of the past is most pronounced in periods ofdralllatic social transf()('Jllation. Empires, notably in their initial stages of' creation and expansion, emerge as strong candidates fc)r thc manipulation of' memories, both by core powers and by peripheral peoples. Empires also ofkr an intriguing range of' possible agents fc)r such reslTuct lII'ing of the past, ft'om emperors to imperial administrators, /i'om local clites to the silent majority of'the population. That conquerors mess with people's minds is a standard trope of imperial studies, although highly visible acts, such as the destruction of revered monulllcnts or the snatching o/'sacred images, arc Illore often discussed in terms of displaying power or disrupting loyalties, than of rewriting local memories. Fewer attempts have been made to analyze the transmutations of memory, including the generation of counter-memories, that emerged fi'om within incorporated societies themselves (Abercrombie 1998; on representations of altered

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memories, see A. G. Miller 1991; Kiichler 1993}. The diversity of empires is such that no single trajectory for social memory should be expected; in fact, this is another means by which contrasts, both between and within imperial systems, can be mapped. What cannot be contested, however, is that empires, however apparently distant or non-interventionist, will inevitably touch and transform the collective memory of groups within tl1eir ambit.

How do societies remember? To assess tl1e twists and turns that social memory may take following imperial annexation, it is first necessary to have some sense of how societies remember. Connerton has highlighted the role of commemorative rituals, such as observances at war memorials, in transmitting shared memories and in creating an arena where tl1ey could be absorbed or argued; elsewhere emphasis has been placed upon written records (notably archival traditions) and oral lore, as well as upon personal autopsy of commemorative activities (Baker 1985; Blu·ke 1989; Connerton 1989; Zerubavel 1995). Of tl1ese possibilities, premodern empires often offer written histories and textual accounts of commemorative rituals, but these will primarily, in some cases even exclusively, reflect a limited and elite point of view. Recovering social memory - in at least some of its intricacy - in early empires requires otl1er forms of investigation and other categories of evidence. The material sphere, of course, also holds keys to the remembrance of the past. It is almost a truism to say that places summon up (or discourage) certain memories, and that memories recall particular places. From poetry to psychological experimentation, from Cicero to Proust, a range of approaches and authors converge to agree that memory is spatially contextualized (Bachelard 1964; Casey 1987: 181-215; Neisser 1989; Nora 1989; Coleman 1992: 39-59; Tilley 1994: 26-9; FalTell 1997). Halbwachs emphasized this spatial setting, for example coining the term cadre materiel to describe traces of the past inherent in the physical topography within which people live, move, and remember. In Connerton's words, Halbwachs: went on to show how no collective memo!"}' can exist without reH::rence to a socially specific spatial framework. That is to say, our images of social spaces, because of their relative stability, give us the illusion of not changing and of rediscovering the past in the present. We conserve our recollections by referring them to the material milieu that surrounds us. It is to our spaces - those which we occupy, which we frequently retrace with our steps, where we always have access, which at each moment we are capable of mentally reconstructing - that we must turn our attention, if our memories are to reappear. Our memories are located within the material and mental spaces of the group. (Connerton 1989: 37)

Halbwachs, and those who followed, corrected, and further developed his ideas, saw these material spaces as encompassing a broad spectrum: dwellings, streets,

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urban designs, monuments, ruins, landscapes (Halbwachs 1941; Jonker 1995: 16-22). All tl1ese, of course, are familiar territory to tl1e archaeologist. In order to track tl1e locations of social memory, this material framework can be broken into two rough categories for consideration. First come monumentsplaces, structures, or objects deliberately designed, or subsequently agreed, to provoke memories and often to serve as the site of commemorative rituals (Harvey 1979; Schwartz 1982; Lowenthal1985; Azaryahu 1993; Bradley 1993; Rowlands 1993; Tatum 1995). What happens at these sites will be essential in tracing discontinuities in remembrance: "by their very construction [monuments] are difficult to eliminate from human memory, but when tl1at does happen it offers one of the most promising routes to the study of social change" (Bradley 1993: 5). Monuments are obvious things to consider, but when mapped against the full range ofHalbwachs' cadre materiel, they form only part of the context of social memory. The second category to monitor is the matrix within which monuments are placed, the more general physical framework of people's lives: urban organization, settlement patterns, land divisions, the distribution of holy places, and so on. For want of a better term, landscape, a heavily used but usefully capacious concept, can be applied to this second domain (Morphy 1993). Such a scale might appear unwieldy - what isn't part of a landscape? - but it would be a mistake to leave such elements out of consideration, for they too were involved in strategies of social power: "The analysis of any space brings us up against the dialectical relationship between demand and command, along with all its attendant questions: 'Who?', 'For whom?', 'By whose agency?', 'Why and how?"'(Lefebvre 1991: 116}. Monuments then might testify most immediately to changes in commemorative practices, in what was considered worthy to remember or wise to forget . Stability or disruption in the landscape could point to conditions favorable for either conservation or loss of memories, as normal patterns of transmission and reinforcement were maintained or disturbed. Monuments, settlement patterns, urban organization, sanctuaries: these are well-established subjects for archaeological investigation, providing standard evidence for analyzing economic, social, and ritual dimensions of imperial control and provincial response. It would seem that an archaeological contribution to the study of social memory may require not so much new targets for fieldwork, as a reassessment and reuse of data already in hand. Making a different argument about "sites of memory," Nora sensed the same thing: "This is what makes the history of lieux de memoire at once banal and extraordinary. Obvious topics, classic material, sources ready at hand, the least sophisticated methods: one would think we were returning to long outmoded historical methods. But such is not the case" (Nom 1989: 24). The aim now is not only to chart how particular places and spaces were used and transformed through time, but to ponder the impact such transformations may have had upon the memories accommodated within them.

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Digging for memory It is important to understand what archaeological investigations into social memory can and cannot do. For example, while the scrutiny of places and monuments extends and amplifies the "visible spectrum" of remembrance, many memories and memory communities will have left no recoverable traces. Nor are the messages transmitted by monuments easily interpreted, an elusiveness which abets their part in contestations over memory. "A monumental work ... has a horizon of meanings: a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of - and for the sake of - a particular action" (Lefebvre 1991: 222 [original emphasis]; Lowenthal 1985: 243; Bradley 1987, 1993; Barrett et al. 1991: 6-8). Exact interpretations of any monument must give way to a range of readings, the precise content of the memories evoked to a spectrum of possibilities - albeit a spectrum controlled by available textual and iconographic sources. Analyses of diachronic human landscapes are, of course, no less involved. This endeavor is not one for the faint of heart or for those fond of clearcut answers; it can be likened to mapping a dynamic and complicated terrain with elaborate but often refractory instruments which on occasion break down completely. But the subject is too important to ignore. What must, above all, be accepted is that the goal here is not to "retrieve past minds" or to "remember for the forgotten" - resounding as such phrases undoubtedly are, Commenting on the relationship of history and memory, Patrick Hutton has remarked: We cannot rethink what historical actors once thought. Even when memory remains alive ... it has been endlessly revised, for living memor}' continually updates the past to reflect present preoccupations. It is too malleable, therefore, to be a reliable guide to the past. Commemorative representations, by contrast, fix the past in images that historians may consider more objectively. Like watercourses that have run dry, these emptied forms provide testimony of the channels through which living memory once coursed, and so serve as our most reliable means for reconstructing the traditions they have hewed out of the past. History is commemorative, not because it resurrects living memory, but rather because it is constructed out of these ruins of the imagination. (1994: 96-7)

What archaeology, through monuments and landscape, can contribute is a reconstruction of those dry channels "through which living memory once coursed," a reconstruction of the frameworks that guided memory and the constraints placed upon it, observing what was remembered and what consigned to oblivion as societies were transformed in the process of imperial expansion.

GREEKS AND ROMANS From this assessment of the vitality of social memory and the potential ofarchaeology for its investigation, we can return to the obsessed Greeks and their Roman

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rulers. For a long time, the relationship of Greeks to Romans was taken to be an unusual case of reverse imperialism, of vanquished conquering victor: in the words of the Roman poet Horace: "Greece, the captive, took her savage victor captive, and brought the arts to rustic Latium" (Epistles 2.1.156). The profound influence of Greek, or Hellenic, culture upon that of Rome, discussed by Woolf (this volume), has tended to deflect analysis of Rome's impact upon Greek society. What instead attracted comment was the clear fascination their own past held for Greeks in the early imperial period (first to third centuries CE), the centuries following the final consolidation of Roman rule in this area (usually associated with Augustus' defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 B CE). The past primarily, but not exclusively, celebrated was the "classical" age of the fifth and fourth centuries BeE, an age of multiple and politically independent city-states and peoples. The term "Second Sophistic" has been loosely applied to the literary and rhetorical output of the early imperial east; the name derives from the author Philostratus (jl. c. 200 CE) who explicitly related the sophists (prominent and often influential rhetoricians and educators) of his own age with their "predecessors" - the first Sophistic of the classical era (Philostratus, Lilies of the Sophists 1.481). In public performances, such men spoke for Demosthenes or exhorted the Athenians to return to their villages after the Peloponnesian War battle of Aegospotami - which occurred in 405 BeE. Fascination with the past took on a variety of manifestations, ranging from such sophistic displays on antique topics, to the use of a pure form of Attic Greek based on classical models, to the giving of hallowed names such as Achilles or Theseus, to the employment of archaic systems of dating or measurement, to the use of old-fashioned styles in inscriptions, to the writing of "guidebooks" (such as Pausanias' Description of Greece) which lingered on antiquities, while frequently disregarding more recent monuments (Howic 1974). While remembrance and glorification of previous epochs had been a pronounced feature in Greek self-presentation before the Roman conquest, obsession seems not too strong a word for this investment in the past on the part of a provincial people.

The world of the Second Sophistic As already observed, the world of the Second Sophistic long dismayed classicists, who found it a sad come-down from the truly memorable Hellenic past, that classical history of independence, action, and glory (to quote just one example, in the Second Sophistic: "one is not transported into a real world, but into a sham one, a museum of fossils"; Van Groningen 1965: 52; also Reardon 1984; Gleason 1995: xvii-xx). This assumption of decline, which runs in parallel to the notion of reverse imperialism, helped to shape later assessments of the Greeks under Roman rule, not least a relative lack of interest in the subject. Celebration of periods of freedom, oblivion for periods of conquest: this is hardly an unusual pattern in scholarship, and it was here compounded by the embarrassment of

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recognizing Greeks (perceived founders of western cultural achievement) as powerless subjects, seemingly happy to harp nostalgically, and repetitively, on the glories of their own history. That sour dismissal - of obsession with the past, of the Greeks under Roman rule - has not worn well. Objections have arisen on a number of levels. First, other snldies, especially archaeological analyses, point to significant restructuring in many important spheres (not least urban landscapes and the rural sector): this is not a region drifting into either stagnant passivity or terminal decline. Second, in other contexts the phenomenon of cultural archaism has been recognized, not as mere "flight" from an unpleasant present, but as a deliberate response to that present, a form of vital self-representation and prideful selfassertion (e.g., Pocock 1962; A. Cohen 1969; Eisenstadt 1969, 1973; Scott 1985: 178-9; A. P. Cohen 1989). Finally, most of the evidence so far adduced has been drawn very much from the elite stratum of life in the Greek provinces. One result of Roman rule, as so often in imperial settings and as documented throughout this volume, was the promotion oflocal wealthy and well-born families, to carry the administrative burden for a remarkably understaffed imperial bureaucracy. Elite families came to underwrite, and dominate, all aspects of provinciallife, and traces of their behavior inevitably are most obvious to us. But they form only part of the picture. What was essentially at issue among the Greeks of the early empire, of course, was the selection and celebration of memory. The questions then become, to use Peter Burke's formulation: "Who wants whom to remember what, and why? Whose version of the past is recorded and preserved?" (1989: 107; cf. Davis and Starn 1989: 2). More sophisticated attempts at addressing such questions have begun to be made (Woolf 1994; Gleason 1995; Swain 1996; see also Millar 1969; G. Anderson 1993). For example, Simon Swain argues that the male Greek elite were at work defining themselves both in relation to the Roman presence and in relation to those of lower political and economic status within their own communities. For Swain, the turn to the past was no epiphenomenal cultural development, but "a feeling of great political importance touching on the sources of power and rights to exercise it. We are concerned, in short, with the culture-political identity the Greek elite now adopted." Links to the past gave these men a "special confidence ... due to their perceived closeness to the classical Greeks" (Swain 1996: 6; also Glcason 1995: xxi, on rhetorical displays dramatizing the gap between educated and uneducated as "in no way arbitrary but the result of a nearly biological superiority"). The attitudes of the imperial center have also come in for examination, for it is clear that Roman respect, even veneration, for the Hellenic heritage aided in converting that particular past into a "channel of communication" between conqueror and conquered, and into a potent resource for the latter (Woolf 1994; Swain 1996: 78). In a frequently quoted letter, Pliny - himself a provincial administrator in the east - wrote to a colleague who was on his way to serve as

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overseer to the free cities of the province of Achaia (mainland Greece and the Cycladic islands): Remember that you are sent to the province of Achaia, to the true and pure Greece, where civilization and literature, and even agriculture are believed to have originated ... Pay regard to their antiquity, their heroic deeds, and the legends of their past. Do not detract from anyone's dignity, independence, or even pride, but always bear in mind that this is the land which provided us with justice and gave liS laws, not after conquering liS but at our own request. It is to Athens you go and over Lacedaemon that you will rule, and to deprive them of that last shadow and trace offreedom which is all that their title is, would be tile harsh and wild act of a barbarian. (Pliny, Epistles 8.24)

The letter's emphasis - on the past glories of the Greeks as their chief current claim to respect - is very typical. The fate of a community, in terms of imperial recognition and favor, was frequently linked to its mythic genealogy and history; the undistinguished Arcadian village of Pall ante ion, for example, was made a free and tax-free city on the grounds that Evander, a legendary settler of Rome, originally hailed from there (Pausanias 8.43.1-2). Examples of this type of pro motion-by-pedigree can be multiplied across the Greek east and over time; civic genealogies, and t1ll1S civic ancestral memories, were reorganized to garner such benefits (e.g., Spawforth and Walker 1986). Lest this center-periphery relationship sound serenely amicable, it should also be noted that apparently genuine admiration for Greek achievements in the past could mingle effortlessly with apparently genuine contempt for the Graccttli ("Greeklings") of the present. If a handful of recent revisionist studies, placing the nostalgia of the Second Sophistic in social and political context, has undoubtedly gone f.1r towards problematizing the phenomenon, not all avenues have been explored. So far, for instance, most work done in this area remains concentrated on literary and rhetorical texts for the period, thus maintaining a focus on central and elite behavior and more or less losing sight of the "ordinary people" who lie beyond the scope of such sources (Swain 1996: 65,72,418). Nor have any of these studies explicitly addressed in detail the topic of social memory in the Greek east, although many of their observations and conclusions are highly pertinent to that subject. What can be added at this point is a consideration of archaeological evidence, specifically the categories of landscape and of monuments, to broaden reinvestigation of this turn to the past. In this necessarily bricfreview, four arguments will be put forward: first, that attachment to the past, across the spectrum of Greek society, was more profoundly challenged by Roman annexation tllan has previously been accepted; second, that memory theaters emerged to offset this potential insecurity; third, that memories of the past, far from being isolated or "frozen" in time, were incorporated and synthesized with emblems of the present, creating entirely new conceptions of just what was memorable; and fourth, that alternative memory communities can be discerned within this imperial society.

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Landscape studies What is most ironic about considering the Greek east as lands quietly musing on past glories is the fact that the period witnessed radical transformations in certain key areas. For the purposes of this chapter, these changes can be traced most clearly in Achaia, or "Old Greece" itself, where substantial amounts of regional survey work have been done (investigations elsewhere in the eastern provinces are only patchily available, but equally fail to suggest an unchanged landscape). One place to begin is with episodes of imperial interference in the landscape. Several foundations of new cities and colonies took place, the extensive hinterlands for which were provided through the forced restructuring of previous territorial boundaries, and the populations for which were at least partially acquired by forced resettlement from surrounding communities. In some cases, tllese displacements were accompanied by the destruction of city walls, or the removal of cult images to the favored population celHers, Traces of land divisions in the vicinity of the new foundations reveal fresh allocations of the land (for a review of these developments see Alcock 1993: 129-71). Such vigorous interventions in Greece are localized in both time and space. They mainly occurred in the early years of imperial control (Julius Caesar and Augustus are primarily responsible). They are chiefly to be found on the westel'l1 side of the peninsula, such as the colony at Pau'as or the "Victory City" (Nikopolis) built by Augustus to commemorate Actium, or at important transit points such as Corinth on the isthmus connecting central and southel'l1 Greece. These foundations are usually considered as playing a part in stabilizing, consolidating, and economically encouraging those parts of Greece which, for various reasons, were thought to be in particular need of imperial support. All true: but they also significantly reconstructed the landscapes, topographic and symbolic, that framed the memories oflocal peoples, and indeed of communities elsewhere in Greece. Such dramatic changes were echoed in other parts of the peninsula that served as battlegrounds for the Roman civil wars of the last centmy 13 C E: vulnerable regions (such as Boeotia) saw several cities destroyed; Athens itself was sacked. Again, these events are usually assessed in terms of economic or demographic consequences, but another dimension is their fundamental reworking of community and cultic structmes, the social ft'amework of people's lives. Moreover, Roman intervention signaled the introduction into the region of new residents, and thus new memory communities: groups of foreign businessmen, or the imported residents of foundations such as Corinth and Nikopolis, or the "Romans who live in Patt'as" (e.g., Strabo 10.2.21; Rizakis 1997; C. K. Williams

1987). Other changes in the landscape can be linked, more indirectly, to the imposition of Roman control. Around this time occmred one of the most radical alterations ever observed in Greek settlement patterns: the emptying out of the rmal landscape as settlements, chiefly small-scale sites (farmsteads or hamlets), disappeared. The dating of this phenomenon is loose, in most smveys attributable

Reconfiguration of memory in the eastern Roman empire

only to the Hellenistic and Early Roman periods (c. fourth century BC E to third century CE), although indications ti'om some regions place its beginning in tlle late Hellenistic period (second to first century B C E, or the period when Roman intervention, if not formal control, begins in Greece). How gradual, or abrupt, this process may have been is difficult to discern, and survey's chronological imprecision does not allow it to be associated solely with Roman activity (although I would emphasize that link). The changes observed bespeak significant developments. First, a measure of decline in regional population numbers is reflected, a trend lamented over (and undoubtedly exaggerated) in Greek and Roman literary somces for the period. Second, a centuries-old custom of living on the land, if only by a minority of the chiefly mban-dwelling Greek population, appears largely to have come to an end. And third, land holding patterns arguably shift in favor of fewer and larger elite-owned properties, sometimes marked by ostentatious villas or grandiose tombs which now, almost for the first time, appear in the rural countryside. If the human countryside was in a process of transformation so, it would appear, was the sacred landscape. Archaeological evidence is of somewhat less direct help here, but the testimony of the traveler Pausanias suggests that, while many rural sanctuaries did endure, many were reported "in ruins" in his time (second century CE). Again, the time-scale involved in this process is often unclear, but some degree of correlation between human and divine abandonment of the countryside must be accepted. Elite financing of the major festivals that did continue suggests that, to a great extent, they were in a position to decide which cults survived and which did not (Spawforth 1989; Alcock 1993:

210-12; 1994). These are complex developments, pieced together fi'om difficult and patchy data; all are interrelated and, I would argue, all should be linked to changes resulting fi'om, first the Roman presence in this area, and then its incorporation into empire. The point here is not so much to explain the hows and whys of these changes in "Old Greece," as to note what they left behind - which was a very different countryside, in both the human and the sacred spheres. Put all this evidence together, and the early imperial period in Greece emerges not as a "museum," if by that is meant a ft'ozen, f()ssilized version of its former self~ but as a very dynamic landscape. Obviously, not all these changes occurred simultaneously, and it might be argued that some took place so gradually that they would not be noticed, or seen as threatening, at all. While it is true that massive changes can be routinely absorbed and assimilated, it must be remembered that the transformation witnessed here would also have been coupled with other markers of an imperial presence - be it armies, tax demands, new types of coinage, or the imperial cult. Literary testimonia do evince awareness and concern about such issues as rural depopulation or the abandonment of sanctuaries, although these texts should be read as reflections of elite anxieties and not as mirrors of what actually happened (e.g., Plutarch, The Obsolescence of Oracles; Dio Chrysostom, Euboean Discourse [01" 7]). As fur the reactions of the mass of

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SlIsall E. Alcod? the population, we catch occasional glimpses in anecdotal f(ml1, such as the story of the Aetolians who, when told to move to Augustus' fc)Undation at Nikopolis, fled instead to join fellow Aetolians in the town of Amp hiss a (Pausanias 10.38.4). vVhile wc remain uninf(Jt'med about how most inhabitants of the province saw their changed world, it seems unlikely that they were indifferent to it or remained passive within it. From the perspective of theorists in social memory, the situation seems clear. Unf:lIniliar landscapes would challenge people's ability, or desire, to preserve memories of the past unchanged; rethinking and reordering of what was thought memorable is onc predictable result of these transfe)f'(nations. Despite the reverence often shown to them, Greeks did not possess an essentialized, "genetic" sense of identity, one impervious to threat or alteration (Browning 1989). Instead, at this point around the turn of the millennium, many different trajectories could have been fdlowed - the most extreme of which might have been the "tc)rgetfulness" argued as characteristic of the western Roman provinces, where indigenous peoples appear to have relinquished elements of their past, including their own preconquest history (WoolI' 1996, and this volume, pp. 321-2). Obviollsly, that path was rejected in t:wor of a continuing sense of Hellenic identity rooted in myth and history. Against the backdrop provided by the landscape studies reviewed here, however, that "remembrance of things past" can no longer be taken {CH' granted.

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Mernory theaters Given that the cadrc mtltcricl of Old Greece, and quite likely elsewhere in the Greek provinces, was prot(HlIldly affected ill early imperial times, how were severe disjullctlll'es between past and present avoidedr Some of the steps taken at the elite level have already been touched upon (classicism in education, inlanguage, etc.), as has a powerfi.JI elite motivation fc)r preventing such a split: the past was too powerful a resource to lose. But another medium and another motivation may now be emerging, one that moved beyond that defined elite domain. More general promotion of a select past would help to bridge the perceptible dislocations in Greek lifC, and to act as a reminder of a common Hellenic identity more threatened than has been realized. While a full exploration of commemorative practices within Greek communities would embrace a range of media (civic fCstivals, oral traditions, artistic and numismatic imagery, displays of dedicatory inscriptions), at this point wc can turn fl'om the evidence of landscape to that of l1lonuments and monumental spaces. If the "masses" barred ft'om the educational regimens of the wealthy, speaking now a "tainted" !eml1 of Greek never fully participated in the cultural refinements and archaisl1ls of the age, neither did they dwell in a vacuum isolated !l'om these developments. Rather they lived in a world where l1lemorials and hallowed places provided them with a sense of their past. This was not an unimportant or accidental development. ~ar ft'om it: the early imperial period

witnessed the fCll'Illation of' lIICIIIII1,)' tllcatCI'J spaces which conjured up specific and controlled memories of'the past through the use ofmolluments, images, and symbols, spaces which served to remind communities at large of' just who they were by drawing on who they had been. The most eye-opelling theatrical example took place in the Athenian agora or marketplace, the time-honored heart of' Athens and a central hub fe)r religious, social, economic, political, and cOl11l11unicative activities (Figs. 13.2 and 13.3). This urban space underwent continual renovation and modification over the centuries, blll probably its Illost dramatic trans/(H'lllation took place during the early stages of'imperial control (roughly the Augustan/J ulio-Claudian era Icnd first century BeE/first century C El). Quite a bit of building and renewal

13.2 '1hc AtlJCllilT1I "!Tom in tllC Jccolld

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336

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13.3 Reco1JJtl'1lctioll (!f'the Athell in 11 ngol'll ill the second cwtlt!')' CB.

occurred at this time, but most remarkable was the movement into this space of classical architectural elements taken !I'om various points in the surrounding Attic countryside. Onc entire fifth-century BC E temple was transplanted (the Temple of Arcs), and portions of other fifth-century structures were incorporated within two other temples of uncertain dedication (the SW and SE Temples of Fig. \3.2). Altars were transplanted as well, including onc (probably dedicated to Zeus Agoraios) fi'om the Pnyx, the democratic meeting ground of classical Athens. Various other "old bits" of buildings were discovered in the agma excavations, although their origin or place of reuse remains unclear. Apart ft'om such movable elements, ill situ ancient monuments were also cherished; I(Jr example, an altar to Aphrodite, dating originally to c. 500 BC E, was preserved and set off by a new precinct and temple some five centuries later, in the first century C E. The debate over this extraordinary reuse and highlighting of classical material has had a long, and ongoing, history. The "imperial" in/illing (dominated by the construction of a majestic Ode ion associated wi th Augustus' general Agrippa) of what was l(ll'Illeriy a largely open, "democratic" space has been much remarked (f()I' a reconstruction of the visual impression made by the Odcion, see Fig. 13.3). The itinerant temples have been acclaimed as the nearest architectural equivalent to the classicism of the Second Sophistic. The agora's reconfiguration has also been interpreted as stemming li'om a desire to present the revered past in a kind of "sacred museum of religious art and architecture" (Walker 1997: 72); to preserve it as well, since it is usually (not necessarily correctly) assumed that many of these elements were being saved (i'om dilapidation and ruin in an

Rccrmjigltl'llti(J1/ of m ClII o)'y in the eastern Roman empire abandoned countryside (in general on this phenomenon: Thompson and Wycherley 1972: 160-8; Shear 1981; Camp 1986: 181-7). A related, but slightly different, way of conceiving of this space is as a "memory theater." Obviously the agora (the product of centuries of monumental accretion and often undirected growth) was not constructed de r/OjJO to serve as a "direct aid te)r the recall of the past" (in Yates' definition); nor can it be thought of in the sense of the highly ornate Renaissance conceptions of Giulio Camillo and others (F. A. Yates 1966: 129-72, 320-67; sce also Bergmann 1994). The use of the term here is perhaps more evocative than technically correct, but it does effectively convey onc role this public space would now work to serve. To enter the agora during imperial times would be to confront a space newly con figured and charged with monuments, statues, and structures, all carrying with them a burden of memory. That is not to say that the same burden would be felt by everyone in the cosmopolitan mix of people passing through on the ancient Street of the Panathenaia. One obvious question to ask is just who was responsible f(H' the agot'a renovations, but this cannot be directly answered. An argument for a Roman impetus, if not total responsibility, le)r the project has been made on various grounds, among them the honoring of Ares, a god less popular among the Greeks than his counterpart Mars among the Romans (Spawfe)l·th 1997: 186-7; Walker 1997: 71-2). It might be tempting to sce the agora, therd()I'e, as a carefully crafted museum catering to central imperial tastes, tastes which conceived of the Hellenic past in a 1:1shion different from local inhabitants (sec below, pp. 344-8). And in the "horizon of meanings" that monllments express, the agora no doubt accommodated such a purpose. But other experiences and melllories were contained within this space; the Greek response - in itself a variable thing must also be considered. From that perspective, we can look more closely at just what was celebrated in this memory theater. The classical date of'the materials transplanted points to the major epoch recalled, a period already selected I(:>r particular Greek attention. It should also be noted that the agora housed numerous memorials of the Persian War, the fifth -century BC E struggles between Greek peoples and the power of the Persian empire, a conflict marked by 1:lI110US battles sllch as Thermopylai, Marathon, and Plataea. This archetypal conflict - of Hellenes versus barbarians - continued le)r centuries to pattel'l1 Greek thinking about contact with non- Hellenes. Specifically Athenian memories were also celebrated in this space, with Attic cults rehoused, Attic political structures renewed, and Attic heroes represented: in close proximity to the Temple of Arcs, Pausanias ( 1.8.4) tells us, stood a statlle of the quintessentially Athenian hero Theseus and of the 1:1IllOUS Tyrannicides, early liberators of the city. The Athenian agot'a may be unmatched in the drama ofits reorganization, but other spaces too were newly designed to highlight past civic achievements and origins. City centers and sanctuaries throughout the cast were made over to

337

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SIIJ(Hl E. Alcod?

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accommodate new or renewed monuments and memorials to mythic heroes, civic founders, famous men. This devdopment can be traced archaeologically in places such as Argos, Sparta, Ephesos, and Cyrene; Pausanias, passing through cities and shrines large and small in the second century C E, also testifies to this public presentation of memory (e.g., Habicht 1985; Cartledge and Spawf()rth 1989: 127-36; Picrart and TOllchais 1996; Walker 1997).

Old JPine in new hottles? The most paradoxical thing about the "museum" of the agora is just how radically diftercnt it was from what came bd()l·e. Thinking about these spaces in terms of a memory thcater hdps to sce that they were not about preservation frecze tI'aming the classical past but about the creation and presentation of something entirdy new. Discussing the afterlife Nf monuments in a European context, Richard Bradley (1993: 129) remarked: monuments fCed off the associations, not only of'places, but also oj'other monumcnts. Monumcnts arc enhanccd and rebuilt; they arc reinterpreted and changed; and new constructions arc created around old ones. "Vc tend to lose that dimension of the archacological rccord as wc bccomc imlllersed in chronological analysis.

His point is equally valid in the imperial cast, wherc analyses often tend to dissociate "new" mOlHlments f"om the context in which they were embedded (though sce Spawf()l·tb 1994: 234). Phenol11ena such as the itinerant temples cannot be studied in isolation, losing sight of the f:lct that cheek-by-jowl with Theseus and the Tyrannicides stood emblems of empire: stallles ofthe emperor, his f:ll11ily or other Roman magnates, as well as monuments and inscriptions in their honor (Fig. 13.4). Festivals and shrines of'the imperial cult, in some instances sponsored by Romans but more fl'Cquently by members of the Greek elite themselves, would have been ubiquitous within these memory theaters (Bowersock 1984; Alcock 1993: 191-6; MiliaI' 1993a: 245-6). Presentatioll of the Hellenic past did not seck to escape the imperial present, but was continually and deliberately admixed with it, litting Roman elements into a Greek matrix, establishing a new amalgam of what was memorable in Greek eyes. Recollection of the past involved the synthesis and recreation, not the isolation and protection, of mcmories. In Asia, a well-known architectural complex and a bmous civic ritual - the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias and the Salutaris f(llllldation in Ephesos (both cities in thc province of Asia) also served as memory theatcrs, and likewise demonstrated how thc past was by no means quarantined /I'om the present. In the first century C E, a Sebasteion, an imperial cult center, was erected by two wealthy Aphrodisian f:lll1ilies f()lIowing a plan evincing distinct signs of Roman architectural influence, not least that of the imperial f()ra of Rome itself (Fig. 13.5). [n

13.4 'iliI'JO (la !rl/lfC mllrblc stMllc (!f'the cmperor Hlldl'ian (117-138 CE)/iJ/llld in the c.\·Ct1l'ntiol/J (!f' tJJt: Athenilln 1I11111'll. Oil his Im:lIstplntc, thc lloddcJJ At/mw, jllltl'OIlCSS 1!f'Athcns, stllnds IIbol'c thc Wol/ a/Rolllc, sllcldillll RamI/IllS 11 lid RmIIlS.

340

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13.5 i{ecoIIStl'llcted I'ielJl o/tllt: Sc/lI1steioll at Apbl'odisillS.

13.6 SClllpted pfltld ./1'11111 the SC/lI1stcioll at Aphl'odisias: tile cmpcrol' ClalldillS JltbdllCS the /n'ol'i1lce Id' ilritan1lia.

onc of the side porticoes, a line of sculpted relief panels depicting well-known Greek myths supported - architecturally and metaphorically - another tier of imperial images, including a heroically nude Augustus and emperors triumphant over defeated peoples (such as Claudius over Britannia, or Nero over Armenia; Fig. 13.6). The Sebastcion is, on the t:lce of it, a rather startling monument to find in an imperial province, paid for by provincial t:lI11ilies, not least because of its apparent glorification of the submission of conquered peoples. Yet these representations of imperial power were carefully located within a Greek frame ofref~ erence, with emperors contextualized by Greek myths and memories (R. R. R. Smith 1987, 1988; Alcock 20(0).

Recollfi.1l1l1·atio1t of mell/ory i1l the caste I'll Roman empire

341

342

Swan E. Aleael< The monuments and monumental spaces so far discussed, it must be remembered, would have been the f()Cus f()r ritual practices (feasting, processions, sacrifices) - activities vital in the reinforcement of prescribed memory. Among our most detailed descriptions of such rituals is the /(mndation (in 104 C E) of C. Vibius Salutaris, an Ephesian citizen and Roman equestrian official. Among other practices, Salutaris instituted a procession through the cityscape of Ephesos, a ceremony intended to serve as a recapitulation of foundation events in the civic past. As part of this remarkable "walk down memory lane," gold and silver images were carried through the streets, /()"owing a set route, on a regular basis (Fig. 13.7). These statues represented not only Artemis, the city's great patron goddess, and other mythic and historic /()Unders ofEphesos and Ephesian tribes, but also the emperor Trajan, his wite, and various Roman institutions (the Senate, the Roman People, the Equestrian Order to which Salutaris belonged). Guy Rogers has argued that these rituals, which involved practically the entire t1'ee male population of the city, worked to delineate proper civic order, while also maintaining the city's sacred identity against a "pervasive and persistent" Roma!) presence. At the same time, however, that very presence was integrated within the ritual, with Rome implicitly recognized as another /()Under in the city's history. Memories of the past were again recontextualized and redisplayed, with Artemis of the Ephesians carried in company with Trajan and the Roman Senate (Rogers 1991). The unease sometimes expressed at such a combination seems principally a modern problem. Moving the discussion to a more general level, it has been noted bcf()re that no stubborn archaism marks the architectural styles of the Greek cast; public buildings, including temples, were constructed 1()llowing Roman designs, and public spaces besides the Sebasteion show the distinct influence of Rome and its /()ra (Macready and Thompson 1987; WoolI' 1994: 125-30). Extant monuments too could be radically revised in their meanings, with standing structures or statues given new dedicatees, including Roman generals and emperors (Alcock 1993: 196-8; e.g., Pausanias 8.9.9-10). Antique sanctuaries received new imperial inmates, with statues of emperors and their t~lmilies joining the traditional Olympian pantheon (Price 1984: 146-62). Even a cult place as bound up with the high classical epoch as the Parthenon on the Athenian acropolis was not untouched, but received a bronze inscription honoring New on its cast architrave, a statue of Hadrian within, and a small round temple to Roma and Augustus bcfixe its chief entrance (J:lig. l3 .8; Spaw/()rth 1994: 234-7; Pausanias 1.24.7). To ossify urban or sanctuary spaces in some preconquest state was not, it would seem, a priority. On onc level, these arguments would appear to fly in the I~lce of another marked trend observed f()r the period. This is the prcicrential treatment received by cults or monuments perceived to be of particular antiquity, often recorded by Pausanias as the recipient of much attention and veneration. Attachment to sllch places can no longer be viewed, however, as a matter of simple continuity or of "business as usual" without close examination of their new symbolic and

RCCOllfilllt],rltirJII rlmeNlol'Y ill the eastern Romall empire

343

13.7 A "iell'l!fto1tl'i.l't t/'{/jjic in modem-day Ephcsos. social environment. To cite just onc example, Pausanias' stress on border markers in the Greek countryside, of't:en taken as echoing long-term Greek concern with boundaries, should instead be understood in its Roman provincial context, a context in which smaller cities often had to struggle to survive and to protect their territorial integrity (Alcock 1993: 118-20). The memorial landscape, then, was not so much concerned to preserve the past as to redeploy it -

344

Swrl1l E. Alcock

13.8 Rcc(l1Istl'llctirm (!{ thc 1/ol'thenst comcl'

(!t'tbc I'll I' thc 11 (Ill ill ROII/1I11 times. '11h' .l"Ifllllll'oll1ld tcmjilc jl/Jt beyolld the I'lll'thc1/o1/ 's mst sidc is tbe TClfljJlt: (!f'RolI/lI IIl1d AI(-'Tllstlls.

even reeonstruet it - to negotiate present contingencies. In this sense, with apparent "continuities" hiding significant change, these monuments and mOl1ull1enlal spaces match developments seen elsewhere in the Greek provinces lix exampk, in reforms of ritual practices or of institutional organization (Cartkdge and Spawf()rth 1989: 143-59; WoolI' 1994: 123-5; Swain 1996: 420; Philostratus, L~f'c o/Apo/lolliIlJ 1.2, 16; 4.27).

Whose past? Who was responsibk fc)r the creation of these memory theaters? The uncertainty about the Athenian agora aside, most epigraphic or literary testimony makes (:lirly clear that the usual decision-makers hne were local elite f:1I11ilies who, with their firm hold on purse strings and on political networks, now had charge of civic memory. The monumental sphere joins the other dimensions already discussed in which these individuals relied upon the past as a source of personal or

ReclII~fig1tl'atioll

of melllory iJ/ the eastcm Romall

class empowerment. Yet these are vny public declarative statements, suggesting that a wider audience was sought, and taught, through the careful selection and central rehousing of memories. No singk motivation can explain these public uses of the past, the links between the elite who paid f(lr the buildings and the many who walked past them daily. Obviously, control of memory, establishing an admired "past in the present," brought with it a 1(>1'111 of consensus and accepted order; as Swain notes, the "major beneficiary of the general respect Ic)!' tradition was again the mak establishment class" (1996: (5). Keeping authority in onc's own hands very clearly meant keeping good order in the cities; unrest quickly led to Roman intervention and Greek elite embarrassment. Yet because of the nature of the past employed, othn consequences of this strategy must be recognized, including the maintenance of allegiances shared by Greeks across the social spectrum and distinct from those of Rome. I have argued in another context that regional evidenee ft'om Achaia may well suggest that powerful families hesitated ft'om undertaking certain acts of social engineering potentially advantageous to themselves but deleterious to the population at large a decision pointing, as does other evidence, to continued local loyalties (Alcock 1997). Uses of the past, in other words, appear to have allowed sharp social polarities and asymmetries of power to exist side by side with the conviction that Greeks had mOl'e in coml11on with each other than they had with Romans a paradox that will not surprise other students of imperialism. This train of thought reminds us that memory in the Greek provinces - or indeed anywhere - cannot be reduced to a single unitary strand, but is better seen as, to borrow Said's phrase, "contrapuntal ensembles" (1993: 52). Hellenic identity always possessed multipk kvels: II'om a panhellenic consciousness (H elknes versus barbarians), to local civic-orientated patriotism (Athenian versus .spartan), to intra-city loyalties (diffCrent tribes, dif'lcrent social classes). The coming of Rome, of course, added an additional element, with subjects identif)'ing with the new ruling power. Despite signs of a developing supra-local aristocracy, as seen in other empires with affluent individuals traveling, owning land, and making religious dedications in a variety oflocales (including thc imperial capital) strong home town allegiances also endured. Prominent men can be observed adopting in turn a variety of identities: as Greeks, as citizens of a particular city, as members of a particular social group, in some cases as Roman citizens, and so on (Swain 1996: 68-71). Salutaris, the donor behind the Ephesian rituals described above, is just onc exampk of such polyphonic identities. That flexibility should also be read into l110numents and lllonumentalized spaces, already characterized as embodying "horizons of meaning." In the case of the Athenian agora, (II' example, specifically Athenian myths and memories were incorporated side-by-side with more all-encompassing ones. Indeed, the l110st successful commemorative narratives operated on more than one level.

345

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Susan E. Alcock Remembrance of the Persian Wars, for example, could simultaneously embrace both individual civic victories (Athenians at Marathon) and glorious defeats (Spartans at Thermopylai), as well as a more communal sense of Hellenic triumph over barbarian invaders. This elasticity of identity, its ability to zoom in and out, as it were, underlay in part the long-term success of Hellenism as an integrating force, a force outlasting tile Roman empire itself (Bowersock 1990). As flexible as tile dominant version of tile Hellenic past, embodied in memory tlleaters, may have been, it is nonetlleless possible to identifY distinctly alternative counter-narratives. Persian War traditions and memorials, for example, may have allowed pride in Hellenic achievement and pride in civic achievement; even Romans "remembered" and employed tllese conflicts as a way of modeling and celebrating their own rejection of an eastern (Partllian) threat (Spawforth 1994). Yet otller potential lessons to be learned from recollecting tile glory days - when Greeks rejected tile barbarian - came in for comment too: "Maratl1On, Eurymedon and Plataea, and all other examples that make tile many swell and snort witll false pride - tllese we leave in the schools of the sophists" (Plutarch, Political Advice 814a-c). The teacher and sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have almost embraced tile grave marker of Leonidas, the Spartan leader at Thermopylai, before climbing tile Spartan burial mound and declaring it to be tile highest point in Greece: "for those who fell here for freedom (eleutheria) made it as high as Oeta, and exalted it above many an Olympus" (Philostratus, Life ofApollonius4.23). Remembering such deeds, with memories prompted by ancient monuments and battlefields, potentially possessed a "subversive resonance" out of keeping with narratives of accommodation and synthesis (Spawforth 1994: 246; Alcock 1996).

Roman holidays and the people of Acharnai Other significant, alternative memory communities in the eastern empire were, of course, those of Romans themselves: emperors, administrators, soldiers, colonists, tourists, admirers. Educated and philhellenic individuals had their own particular expectations of what they would and wanted to find; they traveled to Greece "not to admire what they found there passively and uncritically, but to shape it according to their pre-existing idea of what Greece was" (Eisner 1991; Alcock 1993: 224-30; Swain 1996: 66). A corollary to this would be the requirement of a different version of the past, a version with memories more firmly fixed in time, a past to be visited in isolation from the concerns and pressures of the present. The reported conversation of young aristocratic Romans, as they strolled through Plato's Academy, illustrates this desire: Then Piso said: "Are we prompted, I wonder, by naUII'e or by f.1ntasy when, on seeing places which we know to have been the fm'orite haunts of distinguished men, we are more moved than when we hear of their deeds or read something

Reconfiguration of memory in the eastern Roman empire that they have written? Such is the emotion I now feel. For Plato comes before my mind - tradition says it was here he used to debate." (Cicero, About the ElIds of Goods and Evils 5.2)

Other memorable Athenian locales are canvassed: Plato's garden is close at hand and seems "to bring the aculal man before my eyes"; tile nearby village of Colon us summoned up its most famous inhabitant, Sophocles, and even a memory of Oedipus, who was buried tllere. Witll a blush, one young man confesses making a pilgrimage to the Bay of Phaleron, where Demostllenes declaimed above the waves, and to visiting the tomb of Pericles, before stating "in fact tllere is no end to it in tllis city; wherever you go you tread historic ground" (5.5). The very place-based character of the Roman "art of memory" is on display here (Vasaly 1993; Edwards 1996: 27-43), but so too is the nature of tile cultural tourism targeting Athens and other cities in the east (another case is Sparta with its revived ancestral institutions, including tile "contest of endurance" where youtlls and whips played a part in the festival of Artemis Orthia; Cartledge and Spawforth 1989: 190-211). As far as Roman visitors chose to remember a distant past, one uninhabited by tile less desirable modern residents of tllese lands, they essentially divorced past from present. Such a strategy reinforced their attitude of innate superiority to the people ruled, while at the same time allowing them to draw legitimacy from antique cultural traditions. Such a strategy, obviously, was very different from internal Hellenic attempts to harness past and present as a source of power and identity. Inevitably, such mismatches in memory generated tensions, not only in how individual monuments or spaces were viewed, but in the cultural and political relationship of Romans and Greeks, a relationship which would undergo constant contestation and reinterpretation as long as the empire lasted, and even beyond. While the compulsions of modern tourism (with its quest for "authentic experience" and its commoditization of the past) are not fully appropriate to the Roman east, modern comparisons do suggest possible sentimental consequences for native dwellers. Michael Herzfeld, in a study of a modern Greek community "famous for its past," remarked: Rethemnos is a lived place, and its people must deal with the realities of social existence. It is also a real topos, both in literature and in architectural history. The cultural topology imposes strains on the experience of physical and social place that a less visible and ideologically less interesting cultural conjuncture might have escaped. The residents of this ancient town certainly exploit the benefits of tourism, boast of their heritage and their monuments, and pride themselves on the literary attention that today exposes them to some, at least, of the pressure they encounter. Conversely, however, they want to get on with the comforting ordinariness of their everyday lives ... No attempt to monumentalize these histories in a single past can do justice to the complexities of its citizens' struggles for recognition. (1991: 258,259)

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Some of these same self-contradictory impulses and tensions could well have existed in Athens or other Greek tourist sites, requiring from us, as Herzfeld demands, the recognition of multiple histories within these communities. Without the kind of ethnographic witness available for Rethemnos, it is bitterly hard to recover this kind of complexity and heterogeneity of response. For a long time it was believed that the transplanted Temple of Ares had been removed from the Attic village of Acharnai, some 12 km outside Athens; this provenance is now contested, and the identity of the temple's original home remains uncertain. Whoever they were, missing from the story so far is the reaction of this community, and of any others so deprived of monuments and memories, to their losses. The "Acharnians" can represent the multiplicity of less "memorable" memory communities, those of smaller villages or less powerful cities. Elements of this diversity can occasionally be glimpsed, for example in the numerous civic rivalries for status and recognition, in which claims were based on local histories and were defended with verbal, textual, and monumental weapons (Robert 1977; S. Mitchell 1984; Millar 1993a). The existence of variant versions of the past can also be traced as "phantoms of memory" (to use Geary's phrase) in Pausanias' Description of Greece. Frequently, the traveler records accounts of mythic or historical events offered by local priests or guides. Sometimes these claims involved a clear practical advantage (establishing favorable boundaries, for example), but more often they asserted the local occurrence of memorable happenings, such as the birth of a god or a hero. Pausanias mentions these local tales sometimes only to dismiss, even snub them in f.1Vor of a better truth. The birth of a dominant commemorative narrative can be seen here, for Pausanias, the most comprehensive surviving textual source to deal with such matters, forms the principal memorial tradition on which we have relied (A1cock 1996: 260-7). The inadequacy of such reliance becomes even more apparent if we expand the time span under consideration. While the Hellenic past undoubtedly possessed great staying power, the world of the Second Sophistic nonetheless came to an end marked by great political, economic, and religious changes - not least the ultimate success of Christianity. Many factors have been canvassed to account for that new religion's expansion through the eastern empire in the first centuries CE, including the possible failure of memory to work its integrating magic: "we should at least note in the Greek world the likely appeal of a very different set of priorities and paradigms to those who had no secure or direct interest in the Greek past and who were excluded from its benefits" (Swain 1996: 422). This argument goes hand-in-hand with the suggestion that Roman interference in eastern landscapes and communities, shaking people out of their traditional social and spatial frameworks, also contributed to creating a more receptive audience for new messages (Silberman 1996; Horsley and Silberman 1997). Again, different trajectories of social memory are at issue here, as they shaped major transformations in "priorities and paradigms."

Reconfiguration of memory in the eastern Roman empire

CONCLUSION In conclusion, we can turn from tlle specifics of the Greek provinces of tlle Roman empire to a wider and more fundamental question for tlllS volume: is social memory a helpful topic for analysts of empire? If attitudes to tlle past what was remembered and what forgotten, who participated in memory communities, who was excluded - help to define the parameters of other social, economic, and political undertakings, then it would follow that to ignore tlle workings of memory would be to ignore a paramount factor behind the past decisions and processes that we set ourselves to understand. Chapters in tllis volume testif)' to this realization, and several have attempted to engage Witll "imperial memories" in a variety of guises: from the inscribing of new or altered memories upon the minds, bodies, and landscapes of imperial subjects (e.g., Yates, this volume), to the use and reuse of select memories of past empires - in many cases, that of Rome - as models and as cognitive categories by later imperial structures (e.g., MacCormack, Moreland, Sinopoli, and Woolf, tlllS volume), to legends about the past and their explanation of imperial collapse and loss (e.g., Liverani, this volume). Throughout these studies, a wide range of sources are employed, but perhaps a special stress can be laid upon the potential, and often unique value, of archaeology (including art history) to tllis type of analysis. Any archaeological approach to social memory, for example through my own lens oflandscape and of monuments, will prove no easy matter, and it may often seem wiser to turn such evidence on other, more traditional and more straightforward problems. Yet much would be lost if that cautious policy was adopted. The assertions set forth in this chapter concerning the relationship of Greeks to their past, and the complexity of that relationship, are all heavily dependent upon archaeological evidence. Given the materiality of the framework that makes, and breaks, what people can remember, social memory becomes an issue archaeologists of empire will find increasingly difficult to avoid. There is also an issue of responsibility. In the particular case examined in this chapter, failure to integrate the Greeks' "obsession" with their past with the study of their centuries under Roman rule both distorted our understanding and did them an injustice. Groups negotiating their identity in contexts of domination and exchange persist, patch themselves together in ways different from a living organism ... Metaphors of continuilY and "survival" do not account for complex historical processes of appropriation, compromise, subversion, masking, invention and revival. These processes intorm the activity of a people not living alone but "reckoning itself among the nations." (Clifford 1988: 338)

Maintenance, modification, or abandonment of a shared past and shared identities dictated the conditions under which peoples of all empires reckoned

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themselves "among the nations." From that perspective too, memory is a matter archaeologists of empire cannot forget.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For comments and help with this chapter, I would like to thank all the participants in the Mijas conference, in particular Liz Brumfiel, and audiences at the University of Chicago and Trinity College, Dublin who also listened to bits and pieces of it. Other wise voices included John F. Cherry and Antony J. S. Spawforth.

14 Cosmos, central authority, and communities in the early Chinese empire Robin D. S. Yates

'1 I

INTRODUCTION: THE MYTH OF EMPIRE AND CULTURAL MEMORY

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That there was from time immemorial such an entity as the "Chinese people," an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally homogeneous group dwelling in the East Asian subcontinent, has been one of the abiding myths of the Chinese from ancient times. Similarly, that this people's natural disposition was to live in harmony together within a single unified bureaucratic empire presided over by a single emperor, the "Son of Heaven," is likewise taken as an indisputable fact. Dynasties rose, flourished, declined, revived, then collapsed, in continual succession, like the seasonal rhythms of nature: the "dynastic cycle." Yet these views are just that - myths. Ethnicity was constantly negotiated by different groups that came into contact with the dominant culture, and that culture changed markedly over time as it absorbed and modified new external influences (for example, Buddhism, the customs of southern and western minorities, cf. M. Wang 1992). There was no essential, pristine "Chinese culture" lasting thousands of years from the mists of the prehistoric past down to our own times. This chapter will discuss how this "imperial myth" was formed in the course of the creation of the first Chinese empire, the Qin, the state that unified China, conquering its rival regional city-state systems in 221 BC E.l It collapsed shortly after the first emperor's death in 210 BCE, but its successor empire, the Han, lasted (with a short interregnum at its mid-point) to 220 CE, parallel with the Roman empire in the west (Fig. 14.1). In addition, I will argue that ritual performance and cosmography or cosmology lay at the heart of the Chinese imperial enterprise and of Chinese imperial design, despite their remarkable achievements in military art and technology, blJl'eaucratic organization, and legal systematization.

"EMPIRE" IN CHINA When focusing specifically on the issue of the Chinese "empire," it should be remembered, first and foremost, that the Chinese identified it not with a

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sociopolitical system established by a legally defined conquering people (e.g., the Roman citizens), the basis of whose claim to rule rested on the concept of sovereignty (cf. Doyle 1986; Woolt~ this volume), but rather with the person of the emperor, his activities, and his patrilineal ancestral line. Traditional scholars often had violent disagreements as to who should be reckoned to be the true "Son of Heaven," or which dynasty should be honored as continuing the legitimate "correct line" (ZbC1lgt(lIIg) of rulership, and which left out. ~rom the eleventh century C E, the orthodox "nco-Confucian" view was that the state that f(mnded the imperial order in 221 BC E - the Qin - was not to be counted as legitimate (cr Trauzettel 1967). The reason was that the Qin chose not to abide by the precepts of Confucian morality, but, it was claimed, rather oppressed the people unmercifully, even going so far, in 213 BC E, as to burn the sacred texts that transmitted Confucian doctrine and the historical records of all the states that Qin had conquered, an inf:lmous and eternally unforgivable act proposed by the prime minister Li Si (Bodde 1967).2 Confucian doctrine was only adopted as the state orthodoxy under the Han seventy years after the Qin 's collapse:~ Second, ft'om the ethnic point of view, between the fCllll1ding of the Chinese empire in 221 BC E and its demise in 191 1, the unified Chinese empire was ruled over by racially pure native Chinese emperors only half the time (Holmgren 1991). Yet this f()l'Cign dominance was not seen to be incompatible with legitimate imperial rule. What mattered was that the new rulers accepted Confucian morality, per/(:lI'll1ed the correct rituals in which they embodied and ensured the harmony of the cosmos (Zito 1997), and acted in accordance with the "Mandate of Heaven" (til1mllilllT). In other words, they were perceived to have been entrusted with the overlordship by Heaven and to have demonstrated the legitimacy of their stewardship of the "all under heaven" by caring f()r the welf:lI'e of the people (l'clImill) and by per/()f'flling the sacrificial rituals to Heaven and the spirit world that were considered appropriate to the status and position of "emperor." No matter how tense the relations between the conquering elite and the subject Chinese were in real life, provided that their rulers conf()I'I11ed to the ritually sanctioned precepts, domination of the polity by a minority ethnic group (at least on the ideological level) was not of substantive concern to the Chinese. Third, the expansion of the Chinese empire was conceived of as a "civilizing project" in Harrell's terms (1995), in which the emperor through his civil bureaucrats presented himself as "rcf()rming the customs" of recalcitrant subjects and benighted "peripheral" peoples. He possessed the moral authority to educate them and lead them to a higher stage of social practice and to a greater unij(H'lnity with the rites of the center in short to "signify' them (cf. Ho 1998).4 More generally, a unified "empire" was seen to be the natlll'al sociopolitical l
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Robin D. S. Yates believed that the entire area of the known world was ruled in the distant past, from the beginnings of time itselC by sage kings. In more recent history, the three dynasties - Xia, Shang, and Zhou - had governed what they termed the "all-under-Heaven." Unf()l"tunately, the Zhou dynasty had decayed morally and spiritually, and, even though there still was a Zhou king on the throne, he was in actual control only of a very small parcel of territory surrounding his capital located in what is now known as Luoyang, just south of the Yellow River in Henan in the North China Plain. Ever since 770 BC E, the Zhou kings had lost all political and military control. They only maintained ritual supremacy over their former subordinates, those rulers of independent city-states who ()light with each other, generation after generation, trying to extend their authority over their neighbors, and absorbing larger and larger tracts of land. These rulers were the chiefs of aristocratic patrilineages who intermarried with each other. Theoretically, they presented their special regional products to the Zhou king f()I' his use in the sacrifices to Heavell and to his ancestors, and they reported to the king important ritual events, such as the death of a ruler, the marriage of an heir apparent, a military victory, and so on. By these acts, they symbolized their participation in the religious system of the Zhou, and demollstrated their subordination. Needless to say, once the Zhou kings' practical power was seen to be less than effective in keeping their nominal subordinates in line, such ritual prestations and such reports were often conveniently ()rgotten (c. A. Cook 1997). In actual bct, it is quite unlikely that the Zhou kings or their predecessors, the Shang who had been supplanted in approximately 1045 BC E, ever exerted authority over the entire East Asian subcontinent, as was later believed. Rather, they had control of rather limited tracts of land located only in the Yellow River valley. However, they certainly did claim to be the sole mediators between Heaven above and Earth below: both dle Zhou and the Shang kings called themselves "the Onc Man" entitled to present offerings to the supreme deity. [t was this legendary overarching authority that the rulers of the independent citystates of the late Zhou dynasty were fighting to claim f()r themselves. The eventual establishment of the empire under the Qin was, theref()re, seen as a restoration of a previously existing order, rather than as a completely new political f()l'Jllation. As tar as western perceptions of the Chinese empire arc concerned, they f()cus on the economic rather than the ritual or the religious elements privileged by traditional Chinese. In the nineteenth century Kad Marx proposed a special category f()r Asian conditions, the Asiatic Mode of Production. This was refined f()r the Chinese case by his ()lIower Karl Wittfogel into "Oriental Despotism," a label which he in turn extended to many diftCrent politics in different ecological systems and historical circumstances (Wittf()gel 1957; P. Anderson 1974). The Asiatic Mode of Production was and is, however, a serious theoretical problem f()r Chinese Marxists, f()r acceptance of the concept's appropriate application to China implies that China had always stagnated, had always been a "nation without history" (cf. Wolf 1982; Brook 1989). This they have a hard

Cosmos 1111d cC1ltI'l1111I1tho)'ity in the mr/y Chinese empire time accepting as loyal Chinese. Rather, they presume that China had more or less passed through the same historical modes of production as the West: the slave, the feudal, the capitalist, and the socialist. The establishment of the empire by the Qin was, f()r them, evidence f()r the appearance of the tCudal mode of production, supplanting the previous slave mode (Guo Moruo 1972); this feudal mode lasted throughout the imperial period, with "capitalist sprouts" only appearing in the late Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century. 5 Reasoning along similar economic lines, other non-Marxist western scholars have claimed that the Chinese empire, and Chineseness, is coextensive with a particular tC)f'(ll of intensive Ileld agriculture: as environmental conditions changed in the northern intermediate borderlands, permitting the practice either of animal husbandry or of the growing of grain and vegetables, so Chinese control ebbed and flowed (Lattimore 1940; cf. Barfield, this volume; Waldron 1990). Although the Chinese evidently opposed violently the predatory attacks of the steppe nomads, both accepted the validity of the system of ritual prestations that operated internally within their respective cultural spheres and externally between their two peoples. Warfare was redistribution of resources in another guise, with force a partner of diplomacy. In China, this system of giH:giving continues to this day (M. M. Yang 1994). Yet other scholars have emphasized, to explain the millennial continuity of the Chinese sociopolitical order, the unif)'ing features of the Chinese writing system (sec below, p. 366); and others, such as the anthropologist lames vVatson ( 1992), have emphasized popular culture and customs. To be Chinese in his analysis is to /()lIow a particular set of fCll'IllS and procedures in funerary ritual (Watson 1992). Finally, modern Chinese scholars find it especially hard to conceive that there arc serious disjunctions between the past and the present. For them there were no Foucauldian ruptures. For them, Chinese culture and civilization emerged out of Palaeolithic (Peking, Lantian, and other Men) and Mesolithic beginnings; coalesced !I'om disparate Neolithic cultures especially based in the Yellow and Changjiang (Yangtse [Yangzi /) River valleys into a "Longshan interaction sphere" in the late second millennium BC E (Chang 1986); concentrated Illrther into regional systems with cultural variations during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1050-256 BC E) (cf. R. D. S. Yates 1997a); and met their natural destiny in unity under the Qin (221-206 BCE) and Han (206 BC E-220 CE) a unity that continues to this day (Zhu Ruikai 1993). It is on the basis of such notions of continuity that Chinese today deny the aspirations fCll' political independence of a number of minority peoples, claiming that all within the current borders of the People's Republic of China was - from time immemorial inalienable territory or the Chinese t;ltherland. The notion of such historical continuity must be challenged. For example, suzerainty and control over the vast expanses of Central Asia and Tibet were only achieved under the non-Chinese Manchu dynasty two hundred years ago, and the (Cll'IllS of the relations between the elites, religiolls leaders, and ordinary people of the steppe, desert, and mountain Clstnesses, between the outer regions (JPl1i) and the

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Rouin D. S. Yl1tes emperors in Reijing, were very different from those that held between the emperors and the officials, local elites, and subordinate masses within (llei) China proper (cf. Hevia 1995; Millward 1996). I would like to suggest, then, that the process during which the Chinese empire was established by the Qin, a state located on the northwestern margins of what had been traditionally known as the "Central States," eliminated the previous cultural plurality of the Warring States period. The Qin attempted to enfcJ)'ce cultural ullif(lI'Inity upon the peoples that they conquered, in the ten'itories where their armies marched, and where they set up their administrative hierarchy. In tact, the belief in the appropriateness and validity of the notion of cultural unit(mnity came to be embedded in the cultural memory of the Chinese people, proving to be much more long lasting than the specific sociopolitical system that the Qin attempted to set up by rigid rules and regulations. The reason t(lr the ultimate success of the Qin project in establishing the myth ofculturalunifcH'luity, of Chinese ness, was that they centered their claim to hegemony on a powerful cosmology and cosmography built into the structure of the political and social system, and inscribed on the bodies of their subjects. It is on this aspect that I will concentrate in the present chapter.

TRADITIONAL VIEWS ON THE QIN STATE AND EMPIRE The general process by which the Qin unifled their empire ovel'l'unning their competitors of the immediately preceding period, the Warring States (the latter part of the Zhou dynasty) has been known throughout Chinese history thanks to the relatively complete records preserved by Sima Qian, the Grand Historiographer of the Han Emperor Wlldi (Ssu-ma 1993; Nienhauser 1996). This brilliant stylist and chief astrologer composed his history of the world fi'om the beginnings of time, starting with the Yellow Emperor, down to his own day in the late second and first centuries BC F.e. However, Sima was severely handicapped in considering anything other than the Qin version of the establishment of the empire. As already mentioned, in 213 BC E the First Emperor ordered the destruction of all t he historical annals of'dekated states, as well as of all philosophical treatises not in accord with the "legalist" principles espoused by his prime minister, Li Si. Sima mentions the main events in his annals and in the biographies of the leading generals and political flgures. He was, however, not especially interested in the actual movements of Qin troops as they campaigned against one state alter another, and even less concel'l1ed with describing the actual battles themselves. But he does preserve a tripartite essay by Jia Yi, an early Ban Confucian scholar, called "On The Faults of Qin," in which the latter anaIyzes the reasons fClr Qin's success in conquering its rivals and fClr its ultimate bilure in preserving its hold on the imperial throne. Jia's analysis remained the ICllll1dation stone of all later traditional interpretations. Jia's first contention was that it was the geographical location of Qin that gave

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it a distinct advantage over the other states. It was situated on the northwestern periphery of the more civilized "central states," protected by high mountains and narrow passes. Its capital, Xianyang, was constructed on the northern bank of the Wei River which flows cast into the Yellow River just bdc)re it makes its right-angle turn through the gorges and debouehes on to the North China Plain (Fig. 14.1). Qin could attack its rivals with impunity, while they in turn had great difficulty in penetrating Qin ddcnses. The second major reason Ha gives t()1' Qin's triumph was the physical vigor of its rulers, a product of the region in which they lived. This line of reasoning seems to have derived ft'om earlier arguments among philosophers who, rather in the fashion of Montesquieu, correlated certain cultural, psychological, and physical traits of a populace with the physical conditions of their environments. The third reason Jia suggests was the lack of coordination among its opponents: they were only interested in their own individual advantage and t:liled to generate support among their own people and officers to resist Qin's advance. Jia places Qin's failure squarely at the door of their rulers. The First Emperor was ruthless, and multiplied the laws by which the populace was tClt'ced to abide. The entire population, male and fcmale, was tClrced to engage in huge construction projects, such as the Great Wall, the emperor's mausoleulll, a network of roads, a canal linking north and south China, and giant palaces in the capital area. Tens of thousands died in these endeavors; myriad others were enslaved and sold in pens like cattle. The emperor was smug, bscinated with his desire to achieve physical immortality by ingesting potent drugs, and he failed to listen to good advice delivered by loyal ministers. Critics were killed, leaving concealed the real conditions among the people; rampant disaf'fCetion was not reported to the throne. Finally, the chief eunuch was able to usurp the throne on the Second Emperor's demise. Jia's analysis, endorsed by Sima Qian, undoubtedly has a good measure of truth to it. But it is by no means the whole story. Since 1975, a wealth of new evidence has been discovered by archaeologists that provides not only original raw data with which to evaluate the conclusions of Jia Yi and Sima Qian, but also material concerning the actual administrative and legal system that existed in the years immediately preceding and succeeding the establishment of the empire. Among these are the discoveries of the worldf:1I110US pollery army guarding the First Emperor's mausoleum at Lishan, and of the chief palaces ofthe capital, Xianyang, across the Wei River to the northwest of the present city of Xian, as well as the excavations along the Great Wall and the Straight Road running north li'om Xianyang up to the Great Wall, both of which were created by the Qin general Meng Tian out of previous constructions 0(' the Warring States period (cL l-luang Linshu 1992; Zhongguo Changcheng xuehui 1995). J\tlore il11portant l(lr the historian, though less well known in the west, were the discoveries of large portions of the Qin law code and almanac texts discovernl at Shuihudi, Yunl11eng, [-luhei province, in 1975, and other similar finds, buried in the tombs of low-ranking Qin off1cials (Shuihudi Qinl11u zhujian

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Robin D. S. Yates zhengli xiaozu 1978; Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian bianxie zu 1980; McLeod and Yates 1981; Zhonghua shuju bianjibu 1981; Hulsewc 1985a; Kalinowski 1986; Loewe 1988; Xu 1993; Liu 1994 ).7 These documents provide evidence whereby it is now possible to determine the extent to which the recommendations of Lord Slung and Han Feizi, two legalist advisors to Qin rulers (see below, pp. 366-7), were actually put into effect in the state and empire of Qin (Hulsewc 1985b; Bmlde 1986). Unfortunately, there is not space here to review all this new evidence on the dynamics of the Qin's empire-building. Rather, I will concentrate on a few aspects which, I believe, arc crucial [eJ[' understanding how the Qin perceived their uni/)ring project: in my view they were aiming to recreate on this earth the unity and harmony that existed at the beginning of time. x Thus their intentions were essentially cosmologic and cosmographic in design. This is not to denigrate other f;lctors that may well have been of great importance to their ultimate success, but which wc canllot - at present - evaluate precisely. For example, beginning in 316 BeE, the Qin began to incorporate into its domain the vast region to its southwest across the Qinling mountains (now modern Sichuan) which was occupied by the culturally distinct peoples known as the Ba and Shu (Sage 1992). Eventually, at a point early in the third centlll'Y, the Qin incorporated this territory, which was rich in natural resources such as iron, coal, and salt, into its administrative system, and sent large numbers of convicts to occupy strategic sites and to exploit the agricultural potential of the Sichuan basin.') It can only be presumed that this permitted the Qin to accumulate greater agricultlll'al surpluses and to produce 1110re cast iron agricultural implements and weapons. It has not, however, been proven that the Qin's weapons technology was superior to that of its rivals. In i;lCt, states such as Han and Yan seem to have possessed more advanced iron manuf;lcturing capabilities (Wagner 1993). The Qin seem to have persisted in using bronze weapons, although the meter-long bronze swords excavated r"om the pottery warrior pits reveal that they had perfected the technology of treating the slll'f;lCes of the blades with chrome, permitting the blades to retain their sharpness and slll'r:lCe color over 20()() years (cr. Keightley 1976; Trousdale 1977; Barnard 1978-9).10

NOTIONS OJ:< IDENTITY PRIOR TO THE QIN EMPIRE I stated above that there was no concept of "Chinese ne ss" in the period leading up to the establishment of the empire. People seem to have identified themselves as belonging to the different states, such as Chu, Qi, Yan, Han, Wei, Zhao, and Qin. There were recognized diflerences between people {i'om these states, both in what wc would call psychological disposition and in physical traits." In the case of Chu, a very large state based in the middle Yangzi River valley (modern Hubci and Hunan provinces), much of the population spoke a

COS1ll0S alld ce7ltml allthori~)' ill the early Chinese empire different language fI'om the Central States in the north China Plain. This is also true of other peripheral peoples, such as the Ba and Shu groups in Sichuan, and the Hundred Yue tribes living in broad swaths of territory from the lower Yangzi valley all across the coastal and inland regions to modern-day Guangdong province and Vietnam. 12 Recent archaeological excavations hav~ also demonstrated that the various states had different traditions with respect to funeral customs and that the organization of space within and outside their capital cities was also diffCrent. For example, Qin graves in the region of the Yangzi valley, overrun by the Qin in the early third century BC E who conquered what had up to then been the Chu heartland, contain vessels of everyday use, such as onion-headed ewers; the tombs of original Chu residents are filled with objects associated more with their religious beliefs, such as apotropaic lacquered wooden statues of animals.'3 However, the ruling houses of the various states, as well as the locally powerful aristocratic lineages, were united in tracing their descent fI'om culture-heroes, historicized gods, and {
REFORMS IN QIN PRIOR TO THE UNIFICATION Needless to say, belief in the commensurability of sibling inheritance of the original charisma of a lineage's f
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Robin D. S. YateJ such a potentially dangerous situation that Lord Shang, in his reform of the Qin laws in the mid-tc)Urrh century, instituted a system whereby the state would only recognize status that was contCrred by the state itself. The system integrated all male members of the state into a vertical cosmic hierarchy of seventeen ranks culminating in the ruler and, above him, Heaven itself. 15 Rank was bestowed for military success and an objective and clear criterion was established t<)r its achievement: onc degree of rank was awarded for cutting off an enemy head and presenting it to the duly constituted military authorities. Two heads were rewarded with two degrees of rank. Officers, whose function it was to supervise the ordinary soldiers in battle, were not to cut off heads themselves; they were rewarded on the basis of the numbers of heads their subordinates took. This rank was a negotiable commodity and could be returned to the government in exchange for the manull1ission of relatives from slave status or in exchange t())' a low-level position in the government bureaucracy. Rank also entitled a holder to be allotted a plot of land whereby he could pay the obligatory taxes to the state, and to enjoy the help of government slaves in working that land. In addition, rank-holders were punished less severely than ordinary commoners, although they also seem to have been obliged to provide service to the state, such as overseeing convict gangs, when called upon to do so. In fact, it appears that the previous social system was not completely restructured: ordinary commoners could only reach rank eight, and the influence of bmily was still felt, tc)r it appears that a rank-holder could designate onc of his heirs to inherit his title. Nevertheless, quite evidently the Qin state arrogated to itself the right to manipulate and control the status of all members of the population, including members of the royal t~lIl1ily and its related aristocratic lineages, with no doubt - strongly disruptive effects on the previously existing system of social relations: rank-holders in a village would have been mllch more likely to be chosen as heads of {~lll1ilies and heads of villages (sce below, p. 363), and to have been given the positions of honOl' in village sacrifices and ceremonies. 16

SPATIAL TOPOGRAPHIES: THE DIVISION OF THE LAND AND THE EST'ABLlSHMENT OF SACRED SPACE In Warring States China, the Zhou ruler claimed to be the owner of all the land under a principle similar to "eminent domain"; ideally, territory was divided between agricultural fields on the onc hand, and {clrests, mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas on the other. The {cmBer was occupied by the peasants, who were organized into a (probably) idealistic system called the "well-field" (ji1J!ltilm) because the land was divided into equal squares like a tic-tac-toe board in the shape of the Chinese graph fClr a "well" (jilllT). Eight individual f~1I11ilies worked the outside squares fex their own subsistence needs, and worked the central square tClr their lord, the produce of which was submitted to him in tax. The size of the "acre" (WOJl) was lOO paces (ll/l), possibly 1 pace wide and 100 paces long; each

COJlltoJ and central a ItthoJ'i~y ill the early ChineJe empire square tilled by a family was 100 1/UJIt. However, in actual practice, the different states had evolved ditferent sizes of acres. What Lord Shang did with this first type of land, those fields exploited in intensive agriculture, was to break down the tc)!'(ner boundaries and increase the size of the "acre" to 240 paces. Pathways running north and south (or east and west, depending on the location of the property) divided this land, and small walls, called JeIW, separated the fields. These walls were miniature replicas of the walls that divided the contending states from each other and that established their separate identities. Later, in the Han dynasty, Confucian critics of the Qin rdC)l')l1 claimed that this initiated the practice of buying and selling land, such that poor peasants eventually were t()rced to hand over their patches to rich neighbors, becoming either slaves or tenants, or migrating to the cities. No indication in the newly discovered materials, however, suggests such buying and selling. And exactly how the new system operated is unclear, even though a law emending the land statutes was t(lUnd in a Qin grave in Sichuan, dated 309 B CB (K. Yang 1983). In tact, it would appear that the Qin state cultivated much land directly, some of which it leased to peasants, and some of which it forcibly assigned or bestowed on them (Gao 1979; Hulsewc 1985b). It required taxes to be paid in grain, hay, and straw, regardless of whether or not the farmer had actually opened up his allotment. The Qin wrote very detailed management procedures (c)r the land into their legal statutes, specif)'ing, (JI' example, the exact amount of seed that was to be sown per acre depending on the type of grain. Special bureaucrats in charge of the fields were required to report directly in writing to the central authorities the amount of acreage spoiled by floods, drought, 01' grasshoppers, and they were to ensure that the peasants did not sell alcohol. The state also loaned oxen (c)r plowing the fields to peasants. The girth of these oxen was subject to inspection every kw months, and the ox-tenders were bastinadoed ten strokes {clr every inch lost. In order to store the huge quantities of grain that were produced,17 the state developed a highly elaborate system of granaries with strict rules tClr disbl11'sement and enlTY; checking procedures attempted to determine precisely which officials were responsible {C))' loss, damage, or thell (R. D. S. Yates 1995). Qin needed this grain because it had to supply its huge armies, as well as its enormous gangs of corvce laborers (700,000 were said to have worked on the First Emperor's tomb alone), in addition to paying its officials in kind. This interest in micro-management, as specified in the statutes, was also extended to state-operated artisanal workshops and f(lllndries using convict labor. The state held all members of a work unit responsible Ic)r the quality of its products, and tined the entire unit if the quality was persistently poor. Surprisingly, the higher up the management hierarchy, the greater the punishment exacted. Bdclre the discovery of the new documents, it was thought that Qin despised mercantile activities: now it appears that they exploited and controlled them carefully. They ordered that every item on sale in a market priced at onc cash or more had to bear a price tag, and they exacted taxes on transactions.

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Robin D. S. Yates To return to the other type of territory: its produce was reckoned to be the exclusive property of the ruler, and the peasants had to receive permission to take its products. As a consequence, the rulers of the various states sometimes had enormous tracts ofland set aside as their private hunting parks. Often these were enclosed by walls. Their maintenance, at least in Qin, was the responsibility of the peasants living in proximity to them. In the Qin and the Han, the Shanglin ("Supreme Forest"), the main park near the capital situated south ofvVei River, was conceived as a kind of microcosm of the entire empire. Strange beasts and birds from all over the empire were brought to populate it and it was said that its climate reflected that of the entire empire: it was wanner to the south and colder to the north. ls In t:1(t, the entire area of the Qin original homeland was eventually restructured into a microcosm of the whole empire: as each of the rival states was conquered, the Qin built a replica of that state's palace along the banks of the Wei River and moved the female retinue of the t()I'Iner ruler to serve the Qin. In addition, different parts of the central domain were reserved for altars t(JI' sacrifices to different astral deities and to the spirits of the f()J'Jner Qin rulers (Loewe 1974b: ch. 5). It is more than likely that the Great Wall, in addition to its practical purpose of preventing northern nomads lI'om raiding the Qin heartland, was the last of the many walls that divided Qin space and civilized it. The innermost walls were those of the Qin palaces occupied by the emperor, and the walls that surrounded his mausoleum; then there were the city walls of the capital, the metropolitan centers, and the villages; inside the settlements, walls surrounded the markets; then there were the walls of the agricultll1'al fields and the hunting parks; and finally the Great Wall. All these walls were aimed at channeling and controlling the unseen spiritual forces of the world, as well as the movement of humans. They were intended to harmonize earthly space with the order of the cosmos, ()r Heaven was conceived as being round and Earth square, and all the walls that the Qin built, at least conceptually, were either square or rectangular to con()J'Il1 to the appropriate pattern of Earth. Indeed, as wc shall sce fllrther below (p. 367), Heaven, Earth, and Man were conceived as being mirrors of each other, and they affected and resonated with each other. Man's body reflected the shape of I-leaven and Earth as well as the organization of time, and Earth, too, resembled Man. This is why when General Meng Tian, the builder of the Great Wall, was f()rced to commit suicide, he exclaimed that his f:1lI1t had been that he had cut through the arteries of the Earth during his project. It is fc)r this reason that I said above that the Qin imperial design was cosmographic. A final element to this cosmography was the Qin development of a hierarchical administrative system of commanderies and counties (prefectures) above the village and district level, a normative network they spread out over the entire "field" of the empire based upon the previously existing regional city-state sites of occupation. It seems as l"llOugh the central administration appointed officials in this system down to the county level and established strict rules f()r regulating

COSlnOS

{md central authority in the early Chinese empire

their appointment, transfer, and dismissal (R. D. S. Yates 1995). This system for central control had been in development for many centuries in several of the competing states (Creel 1970), but was extended to the entire empire after the unification (Bodde 1986), thus eliminating more "feudal" forms of governance. This administrative system, together with the reformed land division, can still be seen from the air in north China to this day; it was certainly influential, at least on a conceptual level, in structuring the southern parts of China, when those territories were occupied and incorporated into the empire in later times (Leeming 1980; Clunas 1996).

CONTROL OF BODIES Starting in 375 BeE, the Qin government attempted to control and exploit their population by forcing them to register their names (Du Zhengsheng 1990). This seems to have been the first time that the non-elite were given surnames, previously a privilege of the aristocrats. Control was extended in 359 B C E when a system of "linked liability" (limtzllo) was enforced. Under this system, members of the ordinary population were linked into units of five families, each with a head, villages,19 with a village head, which were subordinate to districts, counties, and commanderies. They were held mutually responsible {ex each other's behavior and required to report to the authorities any crime committed in their area of jurisdiction. 20 If they f:liled to report such criminal action, they were considered to be equally culpable with the wrong-doer. In establishing this system of control, the Qin state penetrated right into the heart of the f:lInily structure, attempting to disrupt its solidarity against the state. The Qin also enforced a system of very severe punishments, consisting of terms of hard labor and mutilation of the body, to ensure conf(H'Inity to its rules. Thus the Qin marked, f()r the most part permanently, those who had refllsed to abide by its laws. In so doing, however, it also seems to have claimed the right to punish those who had offended against social and community norms, f()r example by executing or exiling those who failed to behave in a filial way toward their parents. 21 Yet the very severity of the punishments seems, in the long run, to have encouraged group solidarity CI;lTai1tst the state. 22 This same system seems to have been applied in the Qin's military organization. It too was based Oil units of five and ten men, and they were responsible f()r each other's safety. If onc man was lost, the rest of'the squad were executed if they (:liled to capture an enemy head to redeem his loss. Probably the f1ve men in a squad were taken/i'om each of the f1ve f:lI11ilies in the five-t:lI11ily unit of civilian administration. By the period immediately preceding the foundation of the empire, the rules of the system of linked responsibility had become highly complex, no doubt the result of experience in applying them in actual practice. for example, a distinction seems to have been drawn between the culpability of a man's feJl\I' neighbors (in his f1ve-family unit) and that of the village elders, the heads of the

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Robin D. S. Yates five-family units, and the village head. The tC)I'(ner were held culpable only if they were in the village when the crime was committed; the latter the elders and the village head, with more authority and responsibility and as representatives of the state within the community were held guilty regardless of whether they were at home or not (Hulsewc 1985a: 145-6, D81-D82; R. D. S. Yates 1987). In addition, the Qin state punished crimes committed by groups of five or more more severely than those committed by an individual or by a group of less than five (Hulsewc 1985a). It also distinguished the severity ofa theft on the basis of the value of the stolen goods, reckoned in multiples of eleven cash, because the state fixed the rate of exchange between a bolt of cloth used as currency and metal coinage as being 11 cash per bolt (Hulsewc 1985a: A43, A44: 52).23 The value had to be recorded both at the time of the theft and at the time of the thief's capture, because the value of goods seems to have fluctuated widely and the authorities wanted to make sure that the thiefwas condemned to the correct punishment. At this point, it is worth mentioning that the Qin monopolized the casting of bronze cash and punished counterfeiting, although it is not known how severely; other states in competition with Qin seem to have given the rights of such casting of cash to worthy wealthy private individuals and aristocrats. On the establishment of the empire, Qin withdrew from circulation the currency of the states it had defeated and only permitted Qin coins to be used. These round coins with square holes, symbolic ofl-leaven and Earth (sec below, p. 367), were to remain the standard t(Jl'Il1 of cash throughout the imperial period. As the Qin expanded their territorial control wider and wider over newly conquered territory, they required the people to make a 1(>I'Il1al deposition (zizhall) of the extent of their property and of their ages. 24 This enabled the state to determine when members of the populace were obliged to provide taxes (including head tax and labor tax in the t(H'll1 of corvce labor) and military service. Obviously, the inf(H'lnation in population registers was crucial till' the military and financial well-being, even the viability, of the government. 2S But it also seems that the Qin, by registering the population, were attempting to fix and settle down permanently a people previously used to a much more mobile existence: when there was a natmal disaster where they were living, they moved elsewhere. Many of the rulers of the Warring States had instituted policies to try to attract such migrants. To achieve the stabilization of the population, the Qin, and later the Han, elaborated a system of tallies and passports that had been invented by about 500 BeE to restrict movement, and they also established a network of toll booths and gate towers on the main arteries to verify travclers' credentials and to exact taxes on itinerant merchants. Although the Qin govel'l1ment had clear rules specit)ling that individuals had to be registere'd and that concealment of age resulted in the punishment of the village head (dian) and the elder of the five-man group (lao) with the fine of redeemable shaving (Hulsewc 1985a: 115, C20; R. D. S. Yates 1987: 218), f,'om the almanac texts it is quite obvious that the populace at large did not perf(ll'Il1 the ritual of capping and buckling on the sword (f(lr males) and marrying off

Cosmos and central authority in the early Chinese empire daughters (tor females) except on appropriately auspicious days or in auspicious seasons. 26 So the time of the Qin state could well have come into conflict with the time of the people. Even though these same almanac texts provide much information about the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of different days for the birth of children with concomitant effects upon the character and fate of the new arrivals (Kinney 1995: 24) - it does not appear as though the Qin state kept detailed records of dates of birth. The height of children was, however, recorded when they became involved in lawsuits, and it seems that there was at least a rough correlation made between age and height (R. D. S. Yates 1987). Perhaps this was because so many children died in infancy. Nevertheless this omission certainly enabled the people to manipulate the dates they registered their off:~pring with the authorities, thus enabling them to determine when they would submit themselves to the state and when they would seek financial advantages from it. In other words, the omission permitted people the opportunity to create a space for their own rhythms of life, separate from the demands of the state. Wc should also note that both the Qin and the Han states claimed to name their subjects. Name, village, degree of rank, and whether the subject had committed any previous crimes were the first matters recorded in the transcripts of official investigations of crimes {cllll1d at Shuihudi. These transcripts were apparently circulated (I'om the center to local officials as {cmns or examples fCH' them to f(lllow in writing up legal cases (McLeod and Yates 1981). In addition, state law required that those accused of a crime submit (fit) to the truth of the accusation. If it proved by interrogating the parties to the case that the accusation was false, then the accuser himself was guilty of a crime. And if an official failed to t(lllow proper procedure or made a mistake in his assessment, he too could be held guilty of various degrees of administrative errot'. Thus if a case was brought to the attention of the authorities, someone was held guilty of a crime. 27 Persons in Qin and Han times theref(lre only became named subjects when they became objects of the state's hegemonic vision and inscription. In onc or two of these cases, wc ilnd individuals attempting to turn the state's legal procedures to their own advantage. i:'or example, a group of twenty villagers sought to have a fellow villager deported into exile, as his maternal grandmother had been, on the grounds that he possessed "poisonous words," pl'Obably referring to the belief that in the hot southern districts the saliva ("mouths and tongues") of impetuous people become venomous. Over a lengthy period of time, the offending villageI' had f:liled to prevail upon his neighbOl's to share with him the drink and /(l()(i of village sacrifices, and they tried to use the state's legal procedures to rid themselves of an unwelcome member of their community. As Anagnost (1994: 258-9) questions in another, modern, context: "Can this unexpected presence of 'ofl1ciallanguage' signify only the extent to which the power of the state has become internalized within the speaking subjectr Can we not conceive of power as a more dialectical process that returns some agency to the 'masses' in shaping the meaningfulness of language(" To me it seems very likely.

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Robill D. S. Yates It is in this context that the long-term eHects of onc of the First Emperor's most famous rdtmns following the establishment of the empire bears scrutiny: he ordered that all the various fcmns of writing in the diHerent states should be unified, following the model of the Qin script used in official communications (the "clerkly script") (Barnard 1978). From that time to the present day, despite the very wide differences of articulating or pronouncing words represented by the graphs in the different regional spoken dialects, the actual meaning of the written graph remains the same. Individuals who arc mutually unintelligible when speaking can nonetheless write their thoughts down in graphs and, by reading and writing, can communicate with onc another. It appears that, within two generations or so of the empire's establishment, a linguistic revolution took place; great numbers of words were invented that had not previously existed and others dropped out of common usage - so much so that in many instances the graphs used in preimperial texts lost their currency. I n order to interpret the ritual and philosophic canons of the pre-Qin period, such as the Confucian canons that became the basis of the education system f"om the time ofHan vVudi (reigned 140-87 BC E and under whose auspices Confucianism became accepted as the state orthodoxy) down to the beginning of the twentieth century, commentators had to subject the graphs to much scholarly exegesis. Commentaries became, in fact, a site of cultural production. Unfc)rtunately, the precise dimensions of this linguistic and cultural revolution in the Qin and early Ban have not been the subject of much analysis, but the effects of this element of the Qin imperial project have had very major consequences fc)r the self~iden­ tity of Chinese people and fc)r the preservation of the unity of Chinese cultlll'e. 28 Finally, we should note the pervasiveness in the Qin and early Han legal cases of members of the population absconding (1JIIlllJJ), abandoning their homes, and fleeing their obligations to the state. Some obviously went absent without leave on a regular basis, even though this was a crime that was punished. Clearly, many members of the newly incorporated population sought ways to inhibit the encroachment of the state over their bodies. Interestingly enough, the term used by the Qin It)!' such "abscondence" is the same as that f(JI' "losing" something in a crime of robbery (dao), on which there is Illuch inf(H'lnation in both the legal and the almanac texts. Could it be that the state conceived of the people's running away as a kind of theft of its labor power and tax resourcesr

HARMONIZATION WITH THE COSMOS Further inlcH'lnation about the ideology of the Qin state, with its emphasis on cosmology, sllt'vives in the fC>l'l11 of three philosophically orientated works, one of whieh was contemporary with the J'irst Emperor, and in the texts of the inscriptions on several stelae that he e'reeted in diflerent parts of the country extolling his success in unification. 29 The first of the works, which has been alluded to a number of times already, is the llooll l!f'Lol'd ShmlJJ (ShallJl}lIu .I'hll), essays partly composed by Wei Yang (Gongsun Yang) - Lord Shang himself (died

Cosmos and cm t1'll1 authority ill the early Chinese 338 BCE) - and partly by his followers (cf. Duyvendak 1963). This work preserves the policy recommendations of the man who was chosen by Duke Xiao of Qin (I'. 361-338 BC E) to reorganize the state of Qin in the mid-fourth century BC E and whose "rdcmn of the laws" established the political, social, economic, and military structure tc)r subsequent Qin success just over a hundred years later. Lord Shang advocated that a rigid system of "rewards and punishments" should be introduced, that all aristocrats and commoners alike should be equal before the law, that the state should emphasize only agricultural production and ,var, that merchants should be discriminated against, and, finally, that ritual specialists, such as the Confucians, should be banned. Although he appears to advocate a strict version of rational "realpolitik" and has been likened to Machiavelli, his arguments and recommendations arc couched in a language cm bedded in a discourse of purity and pollution that suggests Lord Shang was couching his policy initiatives in a more cosmic li'amework than has previously been supposed (R. D. S. Yates 1997b). The second is the "Spring and Autumn Annals ofUi Buwei" (Liishi chll1lqi1t), a work which the First Emperor's chief minister, Ui Buwei, a fC)I'mer wealthy merchant, commissioned from a group of leading scholars. He attached these scholars to his household as "guests" and presented their work to his master while Zheng was still a young king in 239 BCE.3D It seems as though Ui intended this text as a blueprint tc)r the ideology of the unified country (Kalinowski 1980; 1982; cf. Levi 1989; Yates 1994a; 1994b; Sivin 1995). He structured it on the basis of a Yin Yang text called "The Monthly Ordinances" which specified in great detail exactly what sacrifices the emperor should perfcmll, what colors he should wear, what ((>od he should ingest, in what activities he should engage, and what orders he should promulgate: all throughout the course of the year in order to harmonize himselfwith the ehanging rhythms of the (cHlr seasons as manifCsted in the alternation of the Five Phases (Wu Xing) dynamic powers that were used to categorize and classify all things in the universe and with the ever-fluctuating flows of the cosmic powers, Yin and Yang. The emperor was Man pm' excellencc within the tripartite unity of Heaven, Earth, and Man which composed the cosmos. Irregularities in the ruler's behavior would immediately affect the harmony of the natural world, and it would manilCst aberrations, resonating in response, such as generating snowlill1s in summer. Thus the macrocosm and the mierocosm humans, the state, and the natural order were bound together into a single, complex, organic whole through the medium of the body of' the ruler. When the First Emperor finally achieved the conquest of his rivals, he assumed the elevated title of Hllt1llJJd i (August Celestial Deity, which we translate "Emperor"), putting himself' on a par with the Folll' Cosmic Deities of the Folll' Quarters, and adopting Water as his ruling Phase. This Phase was correlated with the color blaek, and so he changed the color of his vestments and all imperial symbols, such as flags, to black. Six was the correlated number, so he ordered that the gauge of all chariots in the empire should be 6 (eet, and the number of regional administrative commanderies be thirty-six.

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Robill D. S. Yates Thus he sought to harmonize the change in the nature of his polity with what he perceived to be current dominant Phase in nature. 31

CONCLUSION From what I have described above, the Qin imperial design was cosmographic and cosmologic. Huge amounts of labor and wealth resources were expended on bringing this vision to reality. However, as has been indicated, the Qin empire itself lasted only a few years beyond the death of the First Emperor, principally because the cornerstone of the entire structure was the emperor himself. When he was replaced with a weak, greedy, suspicious, lazy, incompetent younger son - the Second Emperor it took only a few years to subvert the dynasty. Nevertheless, the Qin had succeeded in inscribing their cosmic vision on the bodies of its people, in altering the language that they used, in subverting the structures of their families and their sense of time and of social practice, and in laying out over the landscape a normative hierarchy of administrative centers, flows ofcoml11unication, and a division of land. These practices then became the heart of the l11yth of the imperial unity of the Chinese people, a myth that has survived to this day and still infc>I'll1S the sense of self-identity of the Chinese people and the policies of their government.

PART V THE AFTERLIFE OF EMPIRES Susan E. Alcock

To poets, the end of empire has offered a metaphor through which to bewail the inevitable ending of all things - a compelling trope, expressed countless times, in ways that range fi'om the sublime to the ridiculous: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch 1;11' away. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, OZYlIIlIlIdillS) The jackals prowl, the serpents hiss In what was once Persepolis. Proud Bahylon is but a trace Upon the desert's dusty I:ICe ... And all the oligarchies, kings, And potentates th,1t ruled these things Are gone! But cheer up; dOIl't be sad; Think what a lovely time they had! (Arthlll' Guiterman, Elegy)

The death of empires seems to exert a lurid t:lscination, underlining, as it so pointedly does, the mutability and transience of human lite. Great men live, great deeds are done, great wealth is amassed, great power is wielded - but, in the end, it all comes to nothing. In this conception, empires are truly "written on water" (Subrahmanyam, this volume).

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Susan E. Alcock Ironically, one of the most striking, and certainly one of the most persistent, messages of this volume is that old empires never entirely die, and some strongly resist fading away. In other words, empires possess a potent afterlife, albeit one that is decidedly stronger in some cases than in others. Such an imperial afterlife can take on many forms, but two particularly dominant manifestations will be highlighted here. First is the interplay between imperial systems themselves. Processes of emulation and rejection, copying and capping, of the mores and memories of one empire by another appear and reappear throughout the volume. Second is the long-lived and often insidious t:lshion in which understandings of certain imperial f()l'Il1ations have shaped subsequent scholarly paradigms. Rome, f()l' example, emerges in several chapters as an archetypal f<Jrce in the debate over "what is an empire?" (from different perspectives, see Barfield, Subrahmanyam, and vVoolf). However one examines this particular system, it seems indubitably imperial that word reminding us how the very vocabulary f()J' sllch things (leading to such phrases as jlax Aztcca or pax Sntrtl'ahalla!) is in part derived from the world of Rome. The case of Rome offers a good springboard, then, f()r exploring aspects of the imperial afterlife. Despite its ultimate "decline and fall," subsequent western empires clearly had Rome "in their bones," or at least on their minds. Its legacy became fertile ground t()r the construction of new imperial ideologies, right lip to the twentieth centLll'y and indeed even extending into the futLll'istic world of science fiction, as the Stal' Wars saga makes clear. Such reworkings are touched on in more than one chapter (I()r example, see Deagan, Wool!'), but are discussed at greatest length in Moreland's chapter on the Carolingian empire. Rome rebom (Roma l'etJascem) was an integral element in Carolingian conceptions of their rule, offering a necessary tactic of legitimation f(x a new and, in some ways, usurping elite. The Carolingians played admirably upon the notion of themselves as worthy successors, reinvigorating the "glory that was Rome" and highlighting links not least through the use of art, and architectural and monumental 1(>1'1115 of display. Certainly, this sell~representation largely convinced later scholars, overriding the quieter claims of other contemporary groups who likewise attempted to summon "the shades of the Roman ancestors" (Moreland, this volume, p. 415). MOl'eland makes clear, however, that this cannot be left as too simple a picture. The governing imperial strategy of the Carolingians was lllore the goal of I'etJIIPntio I'clfni F1'allC01'llTfl the restitution of the Frankish realm than the recreation of the Roman empire. Other potentially "easy" connections arc also subverted; ()r example, the Carolingians may have called on Roman I()rms of display, but their intended audiences were quite diff{.'rent. If Roman authorities had rendered their visions of imperial success broadly accessible and visible, to reach elite and non-elite alike (sce Alcock, Woolf), the Carolingians aimed rather at a narrower, elite consumption of imperial symbols, an objective more in keeping with their modes of governance. Moreland thus offers a classic case in which emulation and "succession" may, at (irst blush, seem quite stTaight/()rward

Part V Thc aftcrlife ofempires - but which subsequent contextual study reveals as the complicated product of much manipulation and reinterpretation, as the Carolingians summoned their Roman ancestors but put them to work in their own ways, to their own ends. Imperial rhetorics of continuity should not blind us to such stratagems, here or in other cases where the legacy of onc empire is employed to legitimate another. Rome may offer, in this volume, the easiest place from which to observe such reformulations and recastings. Yet such "empires of nostalgia" (in Barfield's phrase) can be traced elsewhere and arc of growing interest, as scholars of empire shift their focus "'om more purely material conditions and contingencies. Sinopoli '$ chapter, ICH' example, introduces the image of a Mauryan "golden age," annexed by such diverse later empires as the Gupta and the British; Mauryan symbols appeal' on modern Indian currency and the dynasty's most renowned ruler, Asoka (a figure respected in antique classical culture), is still a name with which to conjure. Sinopoli's main concern, however, is with a successor empire that did not scramble to bask in that rosy afterglow; indeed the Satavahana appear to have largely bypassed the Mauryans as a reservoir of imperial legitimacy. Two more general and very cogent points arc made here. First, the Satavahana example insists upon the possibility of rejection of~ 01' indifference to, what might be considered "obvious" models to invoke: imperial emulation need follow no lineal', inevitable trajectory. Second, the study underlines how onc dynasty's dominance in cultural memory can overshadow, even warp, the study of others, thanks to over-ready assumptions t-hat later politics would naturally "1~111 heir" to the structures and I!'ameworks of their predecessors. Concentration on and admiration Icu' the Mauryans, Sinopoli argues, has long impacted, and impeded, interpretations of the Satavahana. This returns us to the second principal manifestation of the imperial "alterli/C" the manner in which the perception of onc empire can shape perceptions of another. Returning to Rome, the "Ur-empire" of MacCormack's chapter, her R01lJa flCtC1'1111 now plays the part of a more distant backdrop, or alternatively of a kind of navigational beacon. Her central subject is the encounter between the Peruvian Inka and the Spanish empire (which itselfhad been much influenced by the example of Rome), and Spanish attempts to explore and to comprehend these newly conquered peoples. What MacCormack reveals is how the Roman empire, as it was perceived in sixteenth-century Spain, served the Spanish as a kind of cognitive model against which they could map and measure the Inka, and with which they could understand the alien empire - in turn leal'lling "to do their own job better" (MacCormack, this volume, p. 419). Such recognition took various (>1'1115, ("om the material (the existence of a notable communications system, in which all roads might be thought to lead to Cuzco) to questions of moral and political order, be they positive (the lnka /Cd his people) or negative (Atahuallpa was a tyrant). Reading MacCormack's chapter, onc is left wondering what might have transpired if there had been "no Rome," no means by which the Spanish could begin to conceive of this imperial "other." By f()regrounding the historical lens adopted by the Spanish to scrutinize their conquered,

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Susan E. Alcocll MacCormack quietly makes the case for just how much the resulting perspective mattered to the course of what followed in Peru. That explicit recognition of cognitive models, of course, introduces issues of preconceptions and misperceptions into the study of imperial systems. And that leads, inevitably, to considering the historiography of empire. Just as different imperial paradigms have been held up as yardsticks against which to measure other cultures, so what has been thought important about empires has varied in emphasis over time and from discipline to discipline - from a focus on their heroic leaders, to their economic policies, to their military stratagems, to their ideological systems. The stories empires have been made to tell emerge tt'om the particular context of their production. This volume's own relative lack of interest in previously urgent imperial questions, notably discussions of coercive power and military fl)l'ce, serves very much as a sign of our times, coupled as it is with a distinct shift in emphasis to other issues - on the best use of sources; on empires in their wider "global" contexts; on the integration of non-elite and elite elements; on ideologies and memories. The chapter that lingers longest on questions of historiography is that of Liverani discussing the collapse of the Assyrian empire. He views that "cnd" fl'<)m various vantage points: from both core and periphery, and in both ancient and modern voices. Not surprisingly, he finds that central representations do not match those of subject peoples: the much rejoiced-in death of an oppressor in onc place passes as an almost unnoticed alteration in another. And, not surprisingly, he finds that ancient views inflect modern perceptions and explanations (or, in this case, non-explanations) of the Assyrian collapse. Liverani's chapter encapsulates certain of the more innovative aspects of this volume, some of the particular emphases it would stress fl)!' a late-twentiethcentl\l'y historiography of empire. first, it claims recognition for the multiplicity of perspectives involved in imperial representation and reception (sec especially Bmmfiel, MacCormack, Morrison, Woolf'). Second, the chapter is cautious, but never dismissive, of imperial rhetoric; while always searching fc)r material signs of transfc>t'll1ation, Liverani never allows an unhealthy division to emerge between notions of the "ideal" and the "real." As with other papers in this volume, what people thought and said about empire is believed to be as valid in its construction and operation as other, more tangible indicators of imperial activity (sce also Brumfiel, Deagan, Woolf~ Yates). Finally, the chapter overtly links ancient and modern interpretations of the collapse of the same empire, exploring the intricate relation between the two or, actually, among the many, since versions of collapse take numerous fClI'Il1S, from the objective to the mythic. The tangled nature of the scholarly tradition engaged with empires where explanations from the past invariably influence interpretations in the present, and where modern paradigms inevitably govern the reading of original soUl'ces - is more or less explicitly recognized throughout this volume. Through their material traces, their legacies and their memories, empires can and do, in the idiom of popular culture, "strike back": at subsequent imperial t(H'lnations that

Part V The afterlife of empires respond to them, at later scholars who analyze them. A single verb there, however, is not quite sufficient. The afterlife of empires can strike, influence, transtC>rIl1, or deceive; it can be used, abused, absorbed, or rewritten. All of these processes arc to be witnessed in this collection, and all require further analysis in future investigations of empire.

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Thefall of the ASJp'ian cmpire

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15 The fall of the Assyrian en1pire: ancient and n10dern interpretations Mario Liverani

THE FALL OF ASSYIUA: A KURDISH LEGEND

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The Assyrian empire reached its peak in the seventh century BC E. Under the great Ashurbanipal it dominated the entire Near East, including Egypt to the west and Elam to the east, even subduing the surrounding nomads the Arabs of the desert and the Medes of the highlands and demanding of them gifts and mercenaries (Figs. 15.1-15.4). The capital city, Nineveh, covering 750 hectares and with some 100,000 inhabitants, was the largest urban concentration ever seen in the world (sce most recently Stronach 1995). The Assyrian army was (or seemed) invincible, the royal treasury inexhaustible. Yet, just a dozen years after Ashurbanipal's death, the Assyrian empire collapsed, almost abruptly, under the attack of old rivals ddeated many times before: namely the Babylonians and Chaldeans ft'OI11 the marshes of lower Mesopotamia, and the Median mountaineers from the Zagros and the Iranian plateau. All Assyrian cities, including the capital, were completely destroyed; the court and state administration, the scribes and the army, disappeared f()rever. On the ruins of Nineveh, squatters established their precarious shelters, and when Xenophon crossed the region a couple of centuries later, he met only villagers and brigands (Dalley 1993). The sudden fall of Assyria was not unprecedented. It was merely the final instance in a long list of Near Eastern empires that collapsed shortly allTr reaching their peak of power and wealth. It came, therd()re, as a confirmation of long-lived meditations about ups-and-downs in the course of history: meditations by Mesopotamian scholars themselves, and later by western scholars rediscovering ancient empires and their f:ltes. But I want to start with a less f:lI11iliar and still problematic explanation of the f:l11 of the Assyrian empire, a popular explanation provided by the l(lUndation legend of the Kurdish people and celebrated every year in their NC)J!roz (New Year) festival (Minorsky 1986: 451, 479-80). As is well known, the modern Kurds claim to be descendants of the ancient Medes. The legend goes that there was once a despotic and "satanic" king, Zohak by name, who suffered from two tumors (in the shape of snakes) on his shoulders.

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These he llsed to treat by the daily application of the brains of two children. The vizier in charge of this af1:1ir took pity on the children and let them (or rather, onc of them each day) flee to the mountains, providing the king with a sheep brain instead. Free on the mountains, the children increased in number and became the progenitors of the Kurdish people. Down in the city, Zohak continued his tyrannical rule, until a smith (Kawa by name), whose nine sons had been slain by the king, refused to tolerate his behavior any longer and acted. Hoisting his working apron like a flag, he summoned the escaped children lI'om the mountains, and then all together they attacked and fired the royal palace, killing the tyrant in its ruins. 'T'his all happened on 21 March, the date of the Ncwl'oz, in 612 BeE: the date the Medes entered into history with their destruction of Nineveh. The historical value of such an explanation is highly problematic, of course, since the link between Medes and Kurds seems more a literate than a popular identification, and the precise dating of'the event to 612 BeE depends on the modern rediscovery of the Babylonian chronicle on the f:l11 of Nineveh (published by Gadd 1923). Moreover, the story is just a variant of a well-known chapter in the Persian national epic, as made f:1I1lOUS by Firdausi's Shah mm/ch,

15.1 'Ihe ASlyriml fTNjlil'c, c. 860 nCE. 'I7JC dashcd lille indiClltcs tlJt: extc1It oj' the 1l1lciCllt shol't:iinc oj'thc Persilln GIt((

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The fall of the AS5.I'J'iall empire

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15.2 71)( Ass)'rirttl emjlirc, c. 730 BeE. The drtshed litle indicrttes the extmt I!f' the tt1lciclIt shorelillc of thc Petsi rill G 11 (t:

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relating the despotic reign of the monster Zohak (Dahhak) and his defeat by Faridun (cf. Yarshater 1983: 426-9). Yet the story of Zohak and the liberated children had been connected with the origin of the Kurds at least ft'om the time of Masudi's historical work, written in 943. The most detailed treatment of the Kurds' "/c>LIndation legend" is then recorded in the Shm'(~f'111l111t:h, a Persian epic of the late sixteenth century (Charmoy 1868-70),1 long before any modem knowledge of the Median destruction of the Assyrian empire. 2 Above all, the Kurdish legend is able to evoke the secular struggle between city and highlands, between empire and mountain tribes. The legend speaks to the mountaineers' desire jc)r revolt and vengeance against unjust rule fl'om an imperial palace, and to the persistent dream of a spring when oppressed people will finally come down Il'om their refuges, punish the tyrant, and proclaim fi·eedom. Such might have been the kelings of the Median tribes when they descended from the mountains in order to I1ght against the empire of evil. On the other hand, it is not impossible that a decisive event such as the destruction of the Assyrian empire left some trace in the Iranian legendary corpus. In any case, the popular account sets the scene lix our problem, in terms that are those of/()Ik-tale and legend, but that could be easily translated into modem

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and sophisticated historical language. We can now leave the legend, and survey the various explanations provided by ancient scribes and modern historians fClr the f:,1I of Assyria, and the fi,1I of ancient Near Eastern empires in general.

THE FALL OF STATES IN TI-IE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Normali~y (~f' collapse

People in ancient Mesopotamia seem to have been well accustomed to cohabiting with collapse. The origin ofthis mental habit can be looked t(lr in their most common building material mud-brick. Mud-brick walls can endure tell' a kw decades (provided they arc replastered every year), but will sooner or later unavoidably f:,1I down: certainly as soon as a building is abandoned and upkeep is interrupted, not to mention when it is subjected to floods, heavy rains, occasional flres, earthquakes, military attacks, and other shocks. The t:,1I of a wall or even of an emire building is, however, nothing exceptional, but would immediately be f()lIowed by Ieveling and rebuilding on the same spot, with the same

15.3 'flJt: AS.I),rillll clII/,il't:, c. 70S BeE. nu' dmhcd !hle illtiimtcs thc extellt I!f' I/;c IIlIcimt shorelillc I!f't/;C Pcrsiall GI/(I:

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Tbc fall ofthc AS.lyrit111 empire The same principle applied in the political sphere: kingdoms, dynasties, even empires, do fall down after a while (usually after a short while), soon to be replaced by other kingdoms, other dynasties, or other empires. The very arrangement of the famous and authoritative "Sumerian King List" was such as to underscore the obvious and repetitive event ofa dynasty collapsing, only to have its place filled by another (J acobsen 1939; Michalowski 1965; Wileke 1989). The usual word f()l' dynasty (Sumerian bala, Akkadian /laM; cf. Glassner 1993: 25-6) refers to temporary ofl-ices, to terms or turns in public duties; the dynastic sequence is just a major instance of the same change seen in a sequence of off1cials. The f:l11 of the most prosperoLlS ofall Mesopotamian dynasties, Ur Ill, was explained in exactly these terms:

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The judgement of the assembly cannot be turned back, The word of' An and Enlil knows no overturning, Ur was indeed given kingship [but] it was not given an etel'llal reign. Prom time immemorial, since the land was fillll1ded, until the population multiplied,

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Who has ever seen a reign of' kingship that would take precedence 11()I'ever p The reign of'its kingship had been long indeed but had to exhaust itself. (Michalowski 1989: 59) 'Ouma

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cheap material. Stories of temples and palaces, so common in middle- and lateAssyrian l'Oyal inscriptions, arc stories of sllccessive blls and restorations, and arc told by the last restorer-king, drawing upon his predecessors' f(lllndation inscriptions: The great wall of'the New City ... which l'utzur-j\shur, my li)rcl~llher, a king who preceded mc, had previously built - to that wall Ashur-bel-nisheshu, 1who was I also my li)rcl~llher applied a l~lcing; it again became dilapidated and 1the wall I together with its gates and towers Eriba-Adad, vice-regent of'the god Ashur, 1who was I also my li)rcl~llher, a king who preceded me, reconstructed in some places and applied a liKing to others; he rebuilt the ruined wall I/'om top to bottom. That wall had become dilapidated I again I and was in ruin. I, Adadnerari, vice-regent of the god Ashur, restored and reconstructed the dilapidated and weakened Iwalll. I rebuilt the ruined Iwalllli'om top to bottom. I made I it Ithe thickness of'li)urtecn bricks 1which were made I in my large brick mold and deposited my steles. I deposited my lill'cI~\thers' stcies with mine. In the f'uture may a later prince, when the wall becomes old and dilapidated, restore it. May he restore my inscribed name, my steles, and my clay inscriptions to their places. IThen I the god Ashur will listen to his prayers.

(Grayson 1972: 434)

Reverting to the building metaphor as applied to a political body, this is something much more than a simple image. Public buildings and entire settlements did lie in ruins as a consequence of the waning or respective politics, and a landscape of ruins offCrs the physical image of' political collapse. In the f:lt110US (just quoted) "Lamentation" over the 1:111 of the Ur III empire and the destruction of its capital city, physical and institutional aspects of the colbpse arc described together. In a sense, the polity is represented as an agency in charge of'the upkeep of' temples and cities, of the abodes or gods and people. In such a view which is quite traditional in Mcsopotamian history collapse becomes so much a part of'the basic structure of events as to present a f<>I'Il1 of continuity, in a cyclical pattern of time that applies to its minute texture (days and nights, weeks and months, seasons and years), as well as to its more comprehensive fCaturcs (reigns and dynasties). Since collapse is just a shift in of/lce, there is nothing traumatic about it.

Om books of' history usually cnd the chapter on the ancient Near East with its conquest by Alexander the Great, an event obviously considered as epochmaking, even as marking a paramount change in civilization. Yet the Babylonian "astronomical diaries" report thc event without any emphasis, recording it together with the price of basic commodities, and on the same level as other features of daily life (Saehs and Hunger 19~~: l76-9; cC Wise man 1985: Il6-20). \Ve do not have the "diaries" f()r the year in which Babylon was conquered by Cyrus, or the year ofNineveh's 1:\11, but wc can be sure that their recording was quite similar. In f:1Cl wc have the Babylonian chronicles I<)r these years (Grayson 1975: 90-6 [f:lll of Nincveh], 104-11 [1:111 of Babylon J), and the wording in the

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Mario Liverani chronicles is quite similar to, and probably derived from, that of the "diaries." There these epoch-making events are recorded in routine terms, considered under the mark of continuity and not of collapse. It is true that in modern newspapers an event such as the fall of the Berlin wall (perceived as a metaphor for the Soviet empire) was reported together with the usual news about football matches and TV programs, local chronicles and weather forecasts. Yet the emphasis placed on the historical event in those contexts ,vas quite peculiar, finding no true parallel in the imperturbable style of the ancient Babylonian diaries and chronicles.

The moral judgment

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Another assessment of collapse runs in parallel and in apparent contradiction to the "structural" one, and that is a moral appraisal, conceived in terms of fault and punishment. Since nothing happens without divine consent or intervention, a collapsing dynasty or empire must have been guilty of some crime toward the gods or toward humankind. We could call to mind the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel: once again a building metaphor applied to politics. The unfinished ruins of the tower bore witness to the downfall of a political body guilty of trespassing the boundary between the human world and the divine heavens. Another example is provided by the so-called Weidner Chronicle, where a dynastic shift is explained by a dispossessed king's impious attitude toward the Babylonian god Marduk, contrasted with the respectful attitude of the newly enthroned ruler (Grayson 1975: 145-51; al-Rawi 1990). The repetitive, cyclical structure of events is thus kept, but a moral judgment is added in explanation. Such a moral or religious explanation is particularly evident for the collapse of the Akkad empire. In the most authoritative version, the fall ofAkkad was a consequence of Naram-Sin's destruction of the Ekur (the temple of Enlil, chief-god of the Sumerian pantheon) in the holy city of Nippur (Cooper 1983). Such an account is certainly biased since, far ft'om destroying the Ekur, Naram-Sin rebuilt it, and the temple was filled with monuments celebrating the Akkadian kings (most recently Liverani 1993: 56-9). Yet the negative moral judgment returned against the Akkad dynasty is easily explained by the aggressive and cruel policy of its kings, whose inscriptions celebrate the number of battles won, of cities destroyed, of enemies killed, and of people enslaved. The heroic hubris ofNaramSin reached its apogee with his self-divinization, which was presumably considered an impious novelty by most of his subjects, especially in the Sumerian south. Given all this, it is no wonder that the most powerful king of the subsequent Ur III dynasty, Shulgi, deliberately suggested an anti-heroic model for his kingship. In a clear reverse of the Akkadian model, he imagined erecting a stele with the unusual boast: "Cities, I did not destroy; walls, I did not pull down! I did not set countries a-trembling like reeds" (Castellino 1972: 62-3). In the eyes of the Sumerian scholars, the fall of Akkad was just punishment for excessive hubris,

The fall of the Assyrian empire while the fall of U I' marked the natural end of a fixed term (Cooper 1993). The poem quoted below on the "Fall of Akkad" ends by insisting on the complete destruction of the imperial capital, which was never to be inhabited again. By contrast, the "Lamentation on the Destruction ofUr" ends with the easy prophecy ex epentu about a quick recovery for the city after its destruction. Be it guilty like Akkad, or innocent like Ur, it must be stressed that the destruction of an imperial capital is consistently the work of barbarians, especially mountaineers. The destruction of Akkad is entrusted by Enlil to the Gutians: Enlil, because his beloved Ekur was destro}'ed, what should he destro}' [in revenge] for it? He looked toward the Gubin mountains, He scoured all of the broad mountain ranges Not classed among people, not reckoned as part of the land, Gutium, a people who knows no inhibitions, With human instincts, but canine intelligence and monke},s' features - Enlil brought them out of the mountains. Like hordes oflocusts the}' lie over the land, Their arms are stretched over the plain for him [Enlil J like a snare for animals, Nothing leaves their arms, No one escapes their arms. (Cooper 1983: 56-9)

Similarly, Ur will be destroyed by Elamites and Shimashkians summoned down ft'om the Iranian mountains, again by Enlil (Michalowski 1989: 40-1, lines 73-5; 46-7, line 166). The "dirty job" of destruction cannot be executed by people of the same culture, belonging to the same political world: it can only be the work of barbarians. But the barbarians' presence in the inner country cannot persist f(JI' too long. Once their job is accomplished they must leave the place free f()r a new (and "innocent") local dynasty, or perhaps for a new empire.

The modern vieJP: ruins and misgovernment Modern explanations arc, perhaps, not all that different. Even bcf(:>re the rediscovery (beginning in the mid-nineteenth century) of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, attentive travelers in the Near East had been impressed by the visible ruins of large cities and magnificent monuments placed within a deserted and decayed landscape. Meditations on ancient mins - their origin, their nature, their message - became an important factor in shaping philosophies of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of the travelers were content with adopting the ancient explanation purveyed by the Bible: namely that god's will had wrecked the ancient empires of As syria and Babylonia in vengeance for their oppression ofIsrael (Silberman 1991). The idea of a "structural" or "natural" sequence of empires - with each onc arising from the ruins of its predecessor - was also available in the book of Daniel or in its reworking by later classical historians (et: Machinist 1997: 187, n. 28).

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Mario Liverani But the most acute among the travelers, of whom Volney is the best known, made use of the old paradigm by applying it to modern reality as well. In their eyes, the present waste was the result of Ottoman misgovernment, in particular corruption and over-taxation (Volney 1792, 1959 [1787]). Thanks to the rational attitude of the Enlightenment philosophers, the old "moral" and "religious" reasons became political reasons, and indeed were soon to become socioeconomic reasons in the materialistic historiography of the late nineteenth century. Such a historiographic evolution is important. Yet it must also be perceived as partly an evolution in terminology, and certainly in the availability of the conceptual tools needed to express one and the same idea: namely tllat empires collapse because of tlleir inner functioning, not just because of outer attack, or because of natural catastrophes. The modern "systemic" approach, started in tile early 1970s by tile Club of Rome with its modeling of the limits of development (Meadows et al. 1972), is just tile most sophisticated - and now current - application of such a line of reasoning. Parallel to tllis "inner" explanation, any account based on the notion of an "outer" shock could be partly alternative and partly complementary. Barbarian invasions or migrations of peoples were obviously put to the fore by "romantic" and later by "nationalistic" ideologies (Bronson 1988). Yet a compromise solution runs through all modern historiography: that an outer shock is just the death blow to a polity already enfeebled by internal, deep-running causes. Jacob Burckhardt put it succinctly: In nature, ruin comes about for external causes only: geological or climatic catastrophes, overcoming of feeble species by more aggressive ones, of nobler species by more vile ones. In history, the cnd is always prepared by an inner decadence, by waning of life. An outer shock is then sufficient to put an cnd to everything. (Burckhardt 1929 [1870])

This short statement already contains the essence of modern theories, in the vein of the Armalesschool, that point to the cumulative effect of longue dude factors, of mid-range factors, and of eJlenememiel factors, to explain the collapse of an empire or of a social order. It also contains an evident polemic against "natural" explanations (in particular climatic causes), which were becoming popular around the beginning of the twentieth century, and which were applied to the collapse of ancient Oriental empires and civilizations. As to the exact nature of this "inner crisis," every culture has its own proposal. The theological misconduct adduced by the ancient Oriental scribes, the moral corruption adduced by the romantic historians, and the socioeconomic contradictions adduced by the Marxist theorists, are all different wordings of the same concept - namely that a state or empire cannot fall down unless it contains within itself the germs of its own ruin. An outer shock, if directed against a sound organism, will be repulsed or absorbed; against a weak organism the same shock will pull it down, with no hope for future recovery.

THE FALL OF ASSYRlA

The protagonists) views Taken in tllis sense, tile fall of Assyria is paradigmatic, since tile available data offer evidence for both an inner decadence and an outer shock. The problem is not why and how the Babylonians and Medes won some battles or stormed some cities; the problem is why Assyria did not recover from tllese defeats. Previously, other battles and sieges eitller marked a temporary crisis, or tlley had simply paved the way for a new dynasty. But after tile shock of 612 BC E tile empire collapsed completely, leaving the core of Assyria depopulated and deurbanized for centuries. What had once been the center of tlle world became a border area between conflicting empires; what had once been tlle most intensively cultivated countryside reverted to tribal pastoralism; what had once been the core ofinternational trade was bypassed as a dangerous crossing-point. Let us begin witll tile protagonists' own views, and the reactions oftlleir contempo~·aries (cf. most recently Machinist 1997). Not surprisingly, the Babylonian rec~rdl11g of tile gL~eat event belongs to the "normalizing" or "continual" point ofvLew. The chrolllcle of the crucial years 614-612 adds no comment beyond a ba~·e an? concise narrative of events, merely underscoring the quantity of casualties wLth a rather stereotyped expression (Grayson 1975: 92-5).3 The victorious king, Nabopolassar, does not celebrate his victory - at least in the inscriptions that have reached us. Is this just a matter of style, or even of chance? Probably n.ot. In subseql~ent years, Nabopolassar's and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns were a.lIned at ensunng that the new Babylonian kingdom possessed as much as posSible of former Assyrian territories, leaving to the Medes just the unproductive and ever-rebellious highlands, and excluding Egypt from the Levant. In their view, the new empire inherited the old one with no major break, apart from a change in capital city and ruling dynasty. ' Such a view probably also held true in the former Assyrian provinces. At Durkatlimmu, Assyrian scribes were still at work for some time (Kiihne 1993); at Harran, the mother of Nab on id us summarized her long life through a continuous line of Assyrian and Chaldean kings, not even marking the difference: Prom the 20th year of Ashurbanipal, king of As syria, when I was born, until the 4:nd year of Ashurbanipal, the 3rd year of his son Ashur·etil-ili, the 21st year ot Nabopolassar, the 43rd year of Nebuchadnezzar, the 2nd year of AwclMarduk, the 4th year of Neriglissar, during [all] these 95 years etc. (Oppenheim 1968: 561)

Interpretations by the other victorious people, the Medes, could of course have been quite different, provided that we can trust the (already mentioned) foundation legend of the Kurdish Nowruz. To Median eyes, the f.111 of Assyria was the end of a hateful, oppressive rule, an end that saw the granting offreedom to the mountain tribes.

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Although we can only speculate (for lack of positive data) about the Medes' view of the Assyrian collapse, the "hubris-nemesis" interpretation is in any case supported by the biblical recording of the event. In that context, the Hebrew prophets can be rightIy considered as representative of tIle general reaction to tIlis news among the oppressed people throughout tIle empire. Nahum's oracle on tIle fall of Nineveh (Machinist 1997: 181-6)4 is more insistent on Assyrian crimes than on Yahweh's vengeance, theology being largely overridden by the spontaneous expression of joy and relief, vengeance and hatred: Woe to the city soaked in blood, full of lies, stuffed with booty, whose plunderings know no end! There is no remedy for your wound, your injury is past healing. All who hear the news of you clap their hands at your downf.111. For who has not felt your unrelenting cruelty? (Nahum 3.1; 3.19)

It is understandable that any appreciation of the event by the Babylonian scribes, evaluating it as a routine change in dynasties, as natural and unavoidable as the course of the stars in the sky, and any appreciation by the dominated peoples, celebrating the end of oppression and of depredation, would be quite different, even opposed. Babylonian consciousness of this difference in political strategies and in historical interpretations seems demonstrated by their attempt to charge the Medes with all the destruction; I shall return to this point shortly. We do not have - and we badly miss - the Assyrian interpretation. Of course we do not have the Assyrian reaction following the collapse, but we do not even have many data from the last ten years of the empire. Whether such a scarcity of data is just a matter of archaeological chance, or else a symptom of the impending disaster, is a question to ponder. In order to look for the Assyrian attitude, we have to go back to the archives of the last great kings, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. At the very apex of Assyrian power and glory, in a state of unchallenged hegemony, the rulers of the world yet seem to have spent their days secluded in their palaces, in constant fear and alarm. From letters (Parpola 1993) and reports forwarded by astrologers to the king (Hunger 1992; cf. also Starr 1990), we learn that the danger was not expected from outside the empire, but from inside the palace. The kings were tremendously worried about their personal safety, and only secondarily concerned about the well-being of the state. In the recent past, palace conspiracies or succession wars had marked the enthronement of Tiglatll-pileser Ill, of Sargon Il, of Sennacherib, of Esarhaddon himself: all with little or no harm to the survival of the empire. Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal were therefore as much

The fall of the Assyrian empire

worried about a possible usurper as they were unconcerned about an unpredictable collapse. Nor were they helped by the cultural code in which danger and remedy were expressed, .namely the code of astrology and related disciplines. On tIle one hal~~, tIle tIme-honored lists of omens and tlleir meanings spoke of geopolitical entItIes tIlat ha.d become increasingly anachronistic as time passed, and were in ne~d of up-datIng. On the otller hand, tlle astI'ologers were afraid of communica~ng unf.1Vorable omens to the king, and tI'ied to decode tIlem in tlle most reassunng way: This eclipse wl~ch occurred in the month Tebet, afflicted Amurru [= the Westland]; the king of Amurru will die and his country decrease or else perish. P.erhaps tile scholars can tell some tiling about the [concept] "Amurru" to tile king, my lord. Amurru means tile Hatti [= Syria] and tile nomad land or else C1~aldea. S~meone of the kings of Hatti, Chaldea or Arabia will carry tills sign. Wltll tile king, my lord, all is well: tile king, my lord, will attain his desire, and the deeds of tile king, my lord, are acceptable to tile gods. (Parpola 1993: 287, no. 351)

When ~he omens were patently negative, recourse was made to magical and ritual remedies, the most extreme being the ritual killing of a "substitute king," used as a scapegoat for formal accomplishment of evil signs. Was such. a m.agical and ritual apparatus of forecasts and of remedies the only defel~se agall1st ll1ternal and external political dangers? Probably not, since more practlcalmeasures were taken as well. We can just mention here the traditional re~ourse to elll~uchs (who could not consolidate and transfer their power to hem) for the highest state offices or the later recourse to foreign bodyguards note~ ~e1ow (p'. 391). But such measures confirm that contemporary basic wornes ll1volved mternal and personal security and not the survival of the empire as sl~ch. C?mpared to the hundreds of extant letters sent or received by the king deal~ng wlth.personal and court aff.1irs, just a few deal with border defense and foreign relations, and not even one with tribute income or similar economic matters, or with the administrative arrangement of provinces. Ifwe c~n ela~ora~e a bi.t more upon these data, we get the impression that the I~st Assynan kmgs mhented from their predecessors (above all from Tiglathpllese.r III and Sargon I~) a c.omplex and efficient administrative and imperial ~l1~~I~ll1e, and t1~at they l111ag.ll1ed that such a machine could continue on by mC.I tla alone. It IS. symptomatIC that, while the earlier Assyrian kings had always pel~onally led their troops, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal preferred to remain in thclr palace, entrusting the responsibility for success, on the human level, to their officers, and in the ideological sphere, to the gods: Do not fear! - the goddess Ishtar is addressing to Ashurbanipal - Because of your hands which you have raised in prayer, and the eyes which were filled willi tears, I have had mercy upon you ... You shall remain here, where tile abode

385

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Mario LiJlerani of Nabu is. Eat food, drink wine, provide music, honor my divinity, until I go and carry out this work and cause you to attain unto your heart's desire. Your face shall not grow pale, )'our feet shall not be weary, your strength shall not f.1i1 in the midst of battle. (LuckenbilI1927: 860-1; cf. most recently Nissinen 1998: 44-5, 53-5)

Following divine counsel, the last Assyrian kings did not "fear" anything from beyond their borders, trusting in their army and their impressive city-walls. Both would prove ineffective on the critical day.

Modern interpretations We certainly could not expect the Assyrian kings (or their counselors) to offer us any clear analysis of the inner weakness of their empire; they would have even less to offer about the structural weakness of empires in general. We could expect, however, that such analyses would be in progress among contemporary scholars dealing with the fall of ancient Assyria. Yet this is not always the case. While the old theological and teleological pattern of empires following each other in linear sequence (still alive and kicking at the end of the nineteenth century! - see R.'1wlinson 1862) was finally dismissed by modern historiography of both the idealistic and positivistic schools, its successor is perhaps surprising. The easiest and most frequent solution to the problem is not to provide any explanation at all. The first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History has a paragraph on "The Fall of Assyria" by the late Sidney Smith (Smith 1925: 126-31); the latest edition of the same work has an entire chapter with the same title by Joan Oates (Oates 1991). Both treat the details of the event, but neither addresses the general problem it raises. The same holds true in the pages devoted to the f.'1ll of Assyria by the late Rene Labat in the Fischer Weltgeschichte (Labat 1967: 93-7), and in similar works. The best treatment is perhaps the one by Paul Garelli (Garelli and Nikiprowedzky 1974: 125-8,239-42), but this is extremely brief and thus cannot discuss the problem in all its complexity. The most recent monograph on the subject, The Fall of Assyria by Stefan Zawadzki (1988), is a lengthy discussion of Babylonian and Greek sources, and of the modern studies based upon them, but the theoretical issues involved are only briefly mentioned and not really confronted. The remark in passing ofGarelli, that the f.'1ll of Assyria remains a "historical scandal" (Garelli and Nikiprowetzky 1974: 125,240), remains valid. By comparison, two volumes have recently been devoted to the subject of "collapse," with special reference to ancient empires. One is the personal work of Joseph Tainter (1988), the other a collection of papers edited by Norman Yoffee and George Cowgill (1988). By pure chance both appeared in the same year, and not by chance both adopted a "systemic" approach, which Tainter develops more explicitly and analytically and which is left more in the background in the other volume. The fall of Assyria is not particularly analyzed in either book; while both include Assyria in their sample of historical cases, they

The fall of the Arsyrian empire devote to it only a short and rather vague treatment,S and one in which the proper "systemic" features of internal crisis are hardly mentioned. The most pertinent remark is Norman Yoffee's comment that the Assyrian collapse was total because "the state had systematically eradicated its own infrastructures" (1988: 67; see below, p. 389). Responsibility for such a situation does not rest on the authors or editors of tile se general and generalizing works. Ratller it rests on tile Assyriologists who failed to produce any valuable analysis on tile specific case of Assyria. It should, however, not be too difficult to set tlle old pattern of inner decline plus outer shock into modern terms. Far from being a "historical scandal," the fall of Assyria could and should become a classic, paradigmatic case. In comparison to the two most frequently considered cases of ancient collapse, the Roman empire and the lowland Maya, Assyria even has some advantages. First, it was much more sudden and total than the end of the Roman empire, and second, it is better documented (through both textual and archaeological data) than the vanishing of May a civilization. As to tile inner crisis, a proposal of Tainter's can be utilized, one suggesting that collapse be viewed through tile (mostly economic) issue of decreasing returns on complexity. In more practical terms, the most important factor to be dealt Witll, in a complex but fundamentally agrarian state like Assyria, is the quantitative relationship between producers (basically peasants) and non-producers (chiefly palace officials, bureaucrats, priests, and full-time soldiers). General trends in the evolution of the Assyrian empire seem evident: the growth of the palace apparatus was less and less sustained by parallel growth in revenues from internal production, provincial taxation, and war booty. The very same process of building and maintaining the empire simultaneously brought about an excessive exploitation of the conquered periphery, more and more depleted of its human and economic resources. The demographic, agricultural, and even cultural crises of the conquered (and formerly highly developed) territories of Syria, Palestine, and southeast Anatolia are well known.

The inner decline: looking for (%ard)) evidence But such general statements remain unconvincing unless they are supported by "hard" evidence. The most obvious parameter to be considered, of course namely the percentage of the Assyrian GNP devoted to maintaining the palace and its bureaucracy - is not available as such in the extant data. Nor is it possible to calculate tlle number of officials and soldiers in order to compare their size with that of the rural population. Yet some otller parameters or indices are indeed available, from texts and from archaeological data, which could provide a clearer idea of declining resources and increasing exploitation. The detailed collection and analysis of the relevant data have not yet been done, and could not be accomplished for this chapter given tile montlls and months of work necessary. I will limit myself, therefore, to tracing in general outline the possible analytical tools that we could use to study the collapse of Assyria.

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The first obvious parameter is the empire's territorial growth. If put on a graph, it would certainly fit the characteristic outline reproduced by Tainter for the Roman and Ottoman empires (1988: 125), with tile later part of Ashurbanipal's reign already in tile descending parabola and soon to be followed by a vertical collapse. In Tainter's terms, the annexation of outer territories, which temporarily provided increasing resources for tile increasing costs of tile imperial machine, became more expensive as conquest pushed into more remote lands. This led inexorably to a groWtll of military expenditures well above tile economic returns of tile war activity, and to a groWtll of provincial administrative expenditures well above tile economic returns of tribute gathering. A second quantitative parameter tllat could be roughly calculated, at least in contrasting tile data of tile eightll century to tllOse of tile seventh century, is the groWtll of tile Assyrian capital in comparison to the decline of settlement in the provinces. Tony Wilkinson (1995: 148, fig. 7) has recently attempted such a calculation in a few sample areas of western Jezira. It is quite evident that the groWtll of tile Assyrian capital city (from 320 hectares at Dur-Sharrukin to 750 hectares at Nineveh), far fi'OJl1 being part and parcel of a general trend in neoAssyrian settlement, was ratller its reverse; the evidence suggests instead tllat tile countryside was becoming more and more depopulated. Of course tile capital city was inhabited primarily by non-producers (state officials of various kinds), while food-producers dwelled in the increasingly depopulated provinces. Anotller calculation could be made regarding the influx of deportees and booty from conquered lands to Assyria (Oded 1979: 20). In the empire's expansive phase (nintll and eighth centuries), such an influx compensated for the costs and casualties of conquest; while in its declining phase (seventh century) the influx came to an almost complete stop, while the costs remained as high as before. We could also easily put on a graph either the average, or the maximum, distance between military activities and either the Assyrian capital, or the border of the empire in successive periods. Quite clearly the maximum distance of the army from the core of Assyria was achieved with the campaigns of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal to Egypt, to Arabian Bazu, and to Elam. This underwent a sudden contraction, however, with most battles in the final two decades before the empire's end taking place within its borders. A quite different but interesting indicator, also accessible through extant data, would be the amount of work done in public building (e.g., temples, palaces, armories, city-walls), tile most conspicuous investment of human and economic resources in ancient Oriental empires. The measurement could be based simply on square (or possibly cubic) meters of masonry, or else converted into the more significant standard of man-days of work. It is easy to predict that any graph of such data would roughly reproduce that of the territorial extent of the empire, Witll an accentuated rise-and-fall parabola. Apart from being a symptom of the availability of public resources, such "conspicuous consumption" (to use Veblen's term) is in itself a possible cause for the eventual decline.

The fall of the Assyrian empire

Finally, we could, without too much trouble, place the empire's growth on a set of maps in chronological sequence, in order to underscore one very interesting feature. The expansion took place basically in the lowlands, to the west and SOUtll, while tile nortllern and eastern borders of the empire remained almost stable or were extended only at very high costs and with very unstable results. The reason is quite obvious: the mountains were not easily conquered, nor were they easily exploited and controlled. But the consequence of such asymmetrical growth is also evident, leaving as it did the dangers of highland tribes only a couple days distant from tile Assyrian cities and the royal palace. This situation endured until tile very end of tile empire. The long-lasting fight - between the cities in tile plain and the tribes on the mountains - was, of course, unequal. The military, economic, technological, and demographic balance was all in favor of the lowland states. The mountaineers possessed, however, the advantages of tlleir geographical and socioeconomic mobility and elusiveness. In military conflicts, tile Assyrians did win dozens, hundreds of times, without being able to eliminate the problem; the mountaineers won just once - but that was enough to destroy the Assyrian empire.

The outer shock - coming from two opposed sides So we arrive at the problem of the outer shock, tile blow that led to the fall of a declining empire. The war between Assyria and a coalition of Medes and Babylonians has attracted the almost exclusive attention of Assyriologists, not least because it is explicitly recorded in the Babylonian chronicle (cf. Gadd 1923: 1-26). In current interpretations (as recently exemplified by Zawadzki 1988), military defeat is explained by the enfeeblement of Assyria during the succession war between Ashur-etil-ilani and Sin-shar-ishkun, following the death of Ashurbanipal. Such a diagnosis is certainly valuable. The rise of Nabopolassar took place in the framework of this succession war, with the internal Assyrian dispute offering a f.worable occasion for the Chaldean chief to free Babylonia and eventually to attack Assyria itself. Ashur-etil-ilani, already enfeebled by the long contest with his rival, proved unable to resist the new opponent and was defeated. In this way, not only is the final shock, but also the previous decline, reduced to short-term events; no place is left to longue duree or middle-range explanations. But a crisis connected to a war of succession was by no means new to Assyria, and in the past it had always been followed with the state's reorganization by the winning party. This recurring, almost structural, kind of crisis could not explain - by itself - a total collapse. That total collapse is basically to be explained by the previous long-term decline along the lines summarized above (pp. 387-8; Yoffee 1988).6 But I would add that the quite peculiar circumstance of a double outer shock, occurring at the same time from two directions, from both the Medes and the Babylonians, should also be considered. In fact the role played by the Babylonians was not too different from that of another contending party within

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Assyria itself. The victory ofNabopolassar alone would have resulted in his assimilation of Assyria within the Babylonian kingdom, in his inheritance of the empire, and therefore in his reorganization - not his destruction - of it. Unfortunately for Assyria, the intervention of the Medes dramatically altered that scenario. The Medes had no interest in inheriting the empire; they did not possess the necessary cultural traditions and administrative competency to run an empire. They belonged to a quite different cultural tradition - that ofmountaineers lacking urban centers, centralized states, bureaucratic statecraft, or literacy. Well able to destroy, they were less able to reconstruct. The different, even opposed, strategies of the Babylonians and the Medes toward Assyria are clearly demonstrated by the former's subsequent attempt to blame all the destruction on the latter: (Marduk) provided him [= Nabopolassar] with helpers, made him acquire a friend and caused the king of the Manda-hordes who has no rival, to bow to his orders in submission and to come to his assistance. [And] he [= the king of the Manda-hordes] swept on like a flood storm, above and below, right and left, avenging Babylon in retaliation. The king ofthe Manda-hordes, without [religious] fear, demolished the sanctuaries of all the gods of Subartu [ = Assyria]. He also demolished the towns within the [present] territory of Akkad [ = Babylonia] which [at that time] had been hostile against the king of Akkad and had not come to his assistance [in his fight against Subartu]. None of their cult [ -centers] he omitted, laying waste their [sacred Jtowns worse than a flood storm. The king of BabyIon, however, for whom this sacrilegious action ofMarduk was horrible, did not raise his hand against the cult [ -places] of any of the great gods, but let his hair unkept and slept on the floor [to express his pious desperation]. (Oppenheim 1955: 309)

History repeats itself, with the role of the aggressive and oppressive empire, once typical of Akkad, now resting on Assyria. The role of the barbarians, summoned down from their mountains to punish hubris and pull down the empire, once placed on the Gutians, now rested on the Medes. And the role of the restorers of order and civilization (expressing scandal for the "dirty job" of destruction, but profiting from it) rested once on Ur, and now on Babylon. To revert to the traditional explanations of collapse of the peoples involved, the Babylonian version would be that of the "normal" fall of a dynasty, to be followed by another dynasty and another empire. This is clearly paralleled in actual Babylonian policy, which was aimed at inheriting the empire and continuing to run it along preexisting lines. On the other hand, the Median version, one of vengeance against oppressive exploitation, is well reflected in enraged and implacable forms of destruction. Seemingly underscoring this point is the fact that the tablets containing the text of treaties linking the Medes to the Assyrian king have been found purposefully crushed in small fragments (Mallowan 1958: i). And Carl Nylander (in an unpublished lecture; cf. Nylander 1980) has noticed in the sculptured reliefs of Nineveh the intentional mutilation of those personages involved in the Assyrian victory over Elam and other Iranian peoples.

The fall of the Assyrian empire

I have to add one new, but important, detail to the received scenario. Attentive analysis of the well-known treaty between Esarhaddon and the Medes reveals that Medes had been recruited to serve as a corps of palace guards, and in particular as the personal bodyguard of the crown-prince at the end ofEsarhaddon's reign (c. 675 BCE; Liverani 1995: 57-62). They continued to serve in this fashion under Ashurbanipal, probably until c. 650 when the Median tribes in the highlands decided to form a kind of confederation and to remove themselves from Assyrian overlordship. This detail- the existence of a Median guard corps in the Assyrian royal palace - is important, because it could have been a factor both in the modernization of the Median army, and in their acquaintance with the internal functioning of the Assyrian defense system. The sons or grandsons of those Medians who had served inside the Assyrian capital cities were the men who stormed the walls of Nineveh and destroyed the royal palace. Later historical interpretation by Greek and Roman authors conferred a different role on the Medes. Working within the framework of a preconceived sequence of empires, for them Media had to find a place after Assyria and before Persia, and to be placed on the same footing as its predecessors and successors. The existence of a "Median empire," long maintained by modern scholarship, has only recently been put in doubt by Helene Sancisi-Weerdenburg (1988: 201-3). Reality, in fact, could have been quite different from tile traditional view. The Median intervention produced a real break in political tradition, changes articulated under the banner offreedom, ethnicity, and a chiefdom level of polity. This is not the place to reconsider the true nature of Median hegemony in the highlands, but to me it clearly seems quite different from tile imperial tradition inherited by Babylonia. I think that we can evaluate the Median hegemony over the highlands - the fifty years from tile fall of Nineveh to tile fall of Hecbatana - as an interlude of anti-imperialistic f1avor, dominated not by the aggressive and exploitative attitude of the lowland states, but by the highlanders' rules of hospitality and gift-exchange, inter-marriage and alliance, chivalry and bravery. It was an evil f.1te for Assyria that the very boundary between Babylonian and Median territories, established after the destruction ofNineveh, passed through the core lands of Assyria. Thus, the area that had formerly been the center of the empire and of the world became a borderland between two different political orders and customs: the urbanized and bureaucratic polity of tile plains, and the tribal and pastoralist polities of the mountains. Continuity and total collapse are not alternative (contrasting) issues. In our case they were the different results in the two halves of Assyria, assigned to victors coming from two opposed political environments and traditions.

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The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn?

16 The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn? John Moreland

King Charles [the Bald], hearing of his brother Louis's illness, invaded the kingdom of Lothar and disposed of it as he wished ... Furthermore, taking the advice of evil men, he had a crown set on his head in the city of Metz by the bishop of that city [Adventius] and ordered that he should be called emperor arid augustus as Olle ",ho ",as to possess two killgdoms. (The Atmals of FlIlda [869 CE]; cited in Reuter 1992: 61, emphasis added)

..il

INTRODUCTION

"

392

Charles the Bald's opportunistic seizure of his brother's kingdom was a particular event in the late history of the Carolingian empire and of the civil wars that characterize it (see Table 16.1; Nelson 1992). Charles' order that he should be called emperor because he "was to possess two kingdoms" nevertheless provides an insight not only into the Carolingian concept of empire, but into the idea of empire more generally. It is clear from this, and from earlier Carolingian history, that these early medieval rulers of Europe differentiated between kingdom and empire, and that they saw the latter as the product of the incorporation of several of the former under a single ruler. Although the immediate basis of Charles' claim to imperial status was the addition of his brother's kingdom to his own, we should bear in mind that his grandfather was Charlemagne - the greatest of the Carolingian emperors - and that his father, Louis the Pious, had been emperor of the whole Carolingian realm. Charles became king of a portion of that empire following Louis' division of it, in 839, between his two sons (Nelson 1992: 99-100). The desire to be called "emperor and augustus" can thus be seen as a desire to recreate the past. As we shall see, these factors - the incorporation of other kingdoms and emulation of the past - played a fundamental part in the construction of the Carolingian empire. The largest and most complex polity in western Europe since the fall of the Roman empire, at its height in the late eighth and early ninth centuries CE the Carolingian empire covered some 1,200,000 sq. km and stretched from Denmark to northern Spain, from northeastern Germany to Rome, and eastwards beyond the Danube (Einhard 1969: 15; James 1988: 230; Leyser 1994:

393

Table 16.1. Principal rulers mentioned in the text) with their period of rule and {(ethnic affiliation»j all dates AD Ruler

Affiliation

Dates

Constantine

Roman emperor

312-37

Theodosius

Roman emperor

379-95

Childeric

Merovingian king of the Franks

died 481

Clovis I

Merovingian king of the Franks

Charles (Carolus) Marte!

Carolingian mayor ofthe palace

481-511 714-41

Childeric III

Merovingian king of the Franks, deposed by Pippin Ill, mayor of the palace

743-51

Pippin Ill, son of Charles Marte!

Carolingian mayor of the palace king of the Franks

741-51 751-68

Charles (Charlemagne), son of Pippin III

Carolingian king of the Franks emperor

Louis (the Pious), son of Charlemagne

Carolingian emperor

768-814 800-14 814-40

Lothar, son of Louis the Pious

Carolingian co-emperor

817-55

Louis II, son of Lothar

Carolingian king ofItaly co-emperor

Charles Il (the Bald), son of Louis the Pious

Carolingian king emperor

840 850-75 840-77 875-7

7; see Fig. 16.1). It was created by the expansion of the Arnulfings, a major Frankish lineage whose heartland lay in the Rhine, Moselle, and Meuse region and who became known as the Carolingians after one of their most successful members Charles (Carolus) Martel. In the seventh century, they had held senior offices (as the major domus, or mayor of the palace) at the court of the sacred kings of the Franks, the Merovingians; by the early eighth century the Carolingians ran the Merovingian kingdom, and shortly afterwards took the throne in a "palace coup." Carolingian expansion initially involved the subjection of other Frankish groups, then other Germanic peoples or gentes (singular gens). The result was a heterogeneous empire: a mosaic of peoples and power. Many of these peoples tile Burgundians, Alemans, Bavarians, and Saxons - maintained their political, cultural, economic, and linguistic distinctiveness (McKitterick 1983: 18); some kept their own laws (Nelson 1995: 412). Non-Christian religious practices persisted, especially in tile eastern part of the empire (Reuter 1991: 51-69; Wood 1994: 319). Several factors (some common to all imperial systems, others more or less unique to this group of Franks) tllreatened Carolingian dominance. First, there was tile problem of succession. This refers not only to attempts to avoid the crises which seem often to accompany the transition from one ruler to

394

John MOI'eland

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Rome reborn?

another (see MacCormack, this volume, p. 433), but also to the particular t:1Ct that the Carolingians had usurped power from a legitimate line of kings. Second, they had to confront the tact of the ethnic (and religious) diversity of the empire they had constructed. Such heterogeneity was not peculiar to the empire of the Carolingians, of course; in f:lct it may be said to be constitutive of empires, and the Carolingians certainly used it as an argument fi)l' their imperial status: "he should be called emperor and attIJltstus as one who was to possess two kingdoms" (see below, p. 415). Third, they had to deal with the fact that although they claimed imjlcrill11l over the peoples of the empire, their power was mediated through sub-kings (often their own sons) and nobles. These people held instrumental power and had to be bound to the imperial cause. The Carolingians were no doubt only too aware that they had emerged ft'om the nobility (Werner 1979: 147), and what they had done, others could do. The Carolingians (with varying degrees of intentionality ) implemented a series of strategies to cope with these problems, outlined in the tiJllowing section under three broad headings: administration, warf:ll'e, and the economy. Next I will argue that the Carolingian Renaissance, a major florescence in the arts, architecture, and learning, can be seen as another potentially integrative strategy. Two principal themes of this Renaissance - the rebirth of Rome (Roma re1lascens), and the Franks as the Chosen People of God (jlOjlllittJ Dei) - were embodied in material culture (defined to include texts), and the latter was designed to spread an imperial message abroad (cf. Moreland and van de Noort 1992; see a\so DeMarrais et al. 1996). This Renaissance can be seen as "art f(H' art's sake," but to present it solely in these terms is to impose modern notions of the neutrality of art 011 to the past. Here I contextualize the material culture of the Carolingian Renaissance and emphasize that it was designed to play an active role in the reproduction of the Carolingian empire (see Zanker 1988 fix similar ideas about the Roman empire; and Brumfiel, this volume, ()r the Aztecs). The strategies implemented by the Carolingians could be said to represent the ideal structuring of society and the world, intended to overcome the real divisions of people and power which were inherent aspects of empire. Prom time to time I will point to Ihat reality and to the weaknesses of the strategies of integration. J. Smith has recently argued that we can clarit)! our image of the Carolingian core by f()cusing on its peripheries (J. Smith 1995: 169). In the later sections of the chapter, I explore how the Carolingian ideal was played out in the midst of the reality of disputed claims to territory and lordship on the empire's southern borders in Italy. Notions of the rebirth of Rome might have possessed a greater resonance so close to the heart of the old empire. In conclusion, a detailed study of the art and architecture of the region suggests that earlier assertions of the efficacy of Carolingian ideology (I-lodges et al. 1985) not only overestimated its power, but also simplified the complex relationships which existed between the ninth-century present and the Roman past. The Carolingians were not the only people to reach across the ages to find legitimacy in the "glory that was Rome."

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John More/and

The Cal'o/ingiall empire: Rome reborn?

397

CONSTRUCTING THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE

Administration The Carolingian empire was focused on a series of palaces which the emperors visited as part of their peripatetic routine (Fehring 1991: 126-32; Reuter 1991: 24). Those at Aachen, Paderborn, and Ingelheim (Figs. 16.2 and 16.5) were favored although, by the latter part of Charlemagne's reign, royal government was increasingly based at Aachen (Nelson 1995: 386; Innes 1997: 845). Frequently, it was at or near such palaces that the royal host was raised and assemblies met (McCormick 1986: 367; see below), and by contemporary standards these were truly impressive structures (see, for example, the poet Ermold's early-ninth-century description of Ingelheim, eited in Dutton 1993: 265). Equally impressive were the numerous monasteries and churches either constructed or enlarged (Einhard 1969: 17; Heitz 1980). It is clear that, along with the palaces, they constituted a major investment in the architectural aggrandizement of the empire. To paraphrase McConnick on the role of Roman architecture (1986: 25), we might see the palaces and monasteries as "Carolingianising the architectural landscape of the territories and relaying the message of imperial unity." Resident in the palace, or en route from one to another, the emperor stood at the heart of a system of patronage which to some extent tied the elites to him and which, on occasion, brought this nobility bct()re him. It was at the palace, and in front of the emperor, that the noble assembly was held. Assemblies could be called only by the emperor (Rosenthal 1964: 30, 39); the main reasons f()l' issuing such a call were "to gather the Frankish host ... to discuss political or ecclesiastical matters ... and to act as an assembly at which judgements were made" (McKitterick 1983: 97). Rosenthal (1964) stresses the essentially "passive" role of these assemblies and suggests that, rather than being a decisionmaking f()rum, they were occasions on which the emperor announced his own judgments (but see Innes and McKitterick 1994: 214). On the other hand, Nelson suggests that they constituted a "shared experience that surely reinforced participants' sense of themselves as a group" (Nelson 1995: 417-18; see also McCormick 1986: 367; T. Noble 1990b: 344), a cohesiveness perhaps encouraged by proximity to the emperor. It was at sllch "public" occasions that, through gesture, pronouncement, and speech, Carolingian emperors directly proclaimed their links with the imperial Roman past (lImes and McKitterick 1994: 214). In addition, the venue - the palace - provided visual reminders of glory and the exercise of power. The walls of the palatial hall at Ingelheim were decorated with scenes oLFrankish victories won under the Carolingians (Nelson 1995: 419; described in Dutton 1993: 265). Even if we accept Rosenthal's passive image of the Carolingian assemblies, it does not negate their potential importance for imperial integration; they could

still be f~1Ctors in creating a sense of belonging which transcended the level of the lJens. Indeed it has been suggested that gatherings, such as assemblies "at which a political collectivity was !(mlled ... Iwere Inot only a central agent in the creation of 'national identities', but also the context in which the germs of 'national history' can be detected" (Innes and McKitterick 1994: 214). However, we must always bear in mind the very "personalized," l~lCe-to-l~lCe nature of power relations. Just as the emperor stood at the center of an imperial system of patronage and power and attracted people to him, so sub-kings and nobles OCCllpied similar positions at the regional and local levels, and we can envisage similar centripetal tendencies operating to enhance their power and to threaten that of the imperial core. Even within imperial assemblies the potential f(l" disintegration was present. Some accounts of their structure suggest that those who attended did so as Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Alemans, etc. (Reuter 1991: 91), and that when the host was summoned, ethnic groups maintained their separate identities within it (Nelson 1995: 4(7). vVhether or not the emperor announced his decisions at the assembly, or whether he consulted the assembled elites, in essence much of the Carolingian administrative system was in the hands of people, such as counts, who exercised effective power at the local and regional levels (McKitterick 1983: 87-97). Counts were meant to act in three governmental capacities: to keep order in their localities; to look after the royal estates; and to Sllmmon men to the king's host

16.2 Rcc(J1lstmctilJ1l (if/he palacc at lt1llc/bcim.

398

John Moreland (Nelson 1995: 411). Although theoretically official representatives, the counts held instrumental local power and "may not always have distinguished clearly between their 'official' and their personal power" (McKitterick 1983: 87-91; Reuter 1991: 27-8). Potential abuses were meant to be controlled by the missi dominici (royal agents) who were sent out to communicate information to the counts and to check that orders were being carried out. As we shall see, the Carolingians were perfectly aware of tlle potential for fission provided by tlle nobility, and Charlemagne used some of tllem to his own ends as missi (McKitterick 1983: 93). However, like the counts, tlle missi were "aristocrats first, royal agents second" (Nelson 1995: 412). Moving from the agents to the instruments of administration, we must consider the importance of capitularies, or administrative decrees divided into chapters (capitula). These were among tlle written instructions tllat tlle missi carried tlU"oughout the empire (McKitterick 1983: 61-9; 1989: 32-5). Yet tlle capacity of this "capitulary legislation" to tell us about the cohesiveness of the polity is limited. What they tell us is "what should have happened. Ifwe take it to describe what did happen ... we can construct a picture of a very elaborate state" (Reuter 1991: 27; origillal emphasis). The point is tllat tlle counts could, and did, choose to ignore these imperial instructions: Neverth~less, it is noteworthy that from the late eightll century tllere was a vast increase in the use oftlle written word (McKitterick 1989: 33; Reuter 1991: 27; Wickham 1995a: 511). Even if the ideal frequently departed from the real, texts such as the capitularies demonstrate the Carolingian desire for order and control, and tlleir appreciation of the use of writing in achieving that end (Giddens 1981: 95; Goody 1986). The Carolingian infatuation with writing, and its connection with order and control, is exemplified in their obsession with lists: "lists of peasant labourers, lists of those for whom to pray, lists of estates, lists of possessions, lists of books, lists of the dead" (Innes and McKitterick 1994: 200; see Goody 1977: 74-111). The strength, and the weakness, of the Carolingian administrative system was that it was mediated through the aristocracy. The empire would last as long as the benefits of "belonging" outweighed those of operating outside the system. The problem for the Carolingians, as for many imperial peoples, was the need perpetually to renew these benefits.

Warfare At its zenith, the Carolingian empire comprised a reasonably coherent entity, with well-defined and defended borders (Reuter 1990: 393-4; J. Smith 1995: 177). At its core were tlle lands oftlle Franks; tllese were surrounded by a ring of conquered non-Frankish regna (kingdoms) such as those of Alemannia, Aquitaine, Bavaria, and Thuringia (Fig. 16.1). On the periphery lay tlle lands of peoples intermittently subject to the core (T. Noble 1990b: 335; J. Smith 1995: 171). It is significant that the empire did not expand further. Considering tlle

The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn? process of expansion, the reasons for its cessation, and the consequences of consolidation provides insight into Carolingian imperial strategy. While the warfare waged by tlle early Carolingians was on a scale not previ0usly seen in tlle early middle ages (Reuter 1985: 89), it remains the case that the expansion of tlle Frankish regnum, and tlle creation of Carolingian imperium, was tlle work not of a standing army, bu t of war bands composed largely of an elite whose peripatetic existence was dominated by fighting, feasting, and conspicuous consumption (Reuter 1985: 91). AltllOugh it is clear that the integration oftlle Carolingian empire could not have depended on tlle military alone (Nitz 1983a: 173), tlle same is true of many otller imperial systems. As in the administrative sphere, the Carolingians were well aware of the potential for fission from local or etlmic powers and took steps to prevent tllis happening. In tlle territory oftlle Frisians tlley confiscated Roman fortifications which were still in use (Heidinga 1990: 27) while in other areas (Aquitaine, Saxony) fortified sites predating tlle Carolingian conquest were eitller not rebuilt or destroyed (McKitterick 1983: 51). Expansionist warfare contributed to the reproduction of tlle empire in other ways. Apart from constituting another venue for tlle kind of collective action seen in the assemblies, and adding to the glory of the Frankish people tlll"ough the submission of otller gentes, warfare produced plunder, which could be given as gifts to the Frankish nobility, and land, with which the high aristocracy could be rewarded (Reuter 1985: 80-1, 88). Both served (at least in theory) to bind the elites to tlle imperial core (Nelson 1995: 387). The extraction of tribute from subject peoples could be used to the same ends. In 795 and 796 Frankish forces attacked the heart of the Avar khaganate (tlle so-called "Avar ring"), seized the vast treasure stored there, and redistributed it to Frankish churches and nobles (Fig. 16.1; Fouracre 1995: 104). It has been noted that this was "the last really large aggressive military operation conducted by the Carolingians" (Reuter 1990: 391). In the years after 800, despite occasional warfare along the imperial peripheries (T. Noble 1990b: 339-40; J. Smith 1995: 172-5), the sources suggest a new emphasis on consolidation and defense (Reuter 1990: 393). This had profound implications for imperial integration and the nobility's sense of "belonging," not least because consolidation meant tllat there were no longer quantities of treasure and land with which to reward the elites. In these circumstances, the only way elite demand could be satisfied was by "internal expansion ... by increasing one's share of political power and tlle rewards which went with it" (Reuter 1990: 405). One of the consequences was increased exploitation of the pauperes (the poor), who "were on the defensive ... against aggressions by all kinds of power nIl people ... even (or especially) counts, the nominal guardians of the weak" (Wickham 1995a: 534). The threat to Carolingian integration posed by their inability to reward the elite would have been nlrtller exacerbated by the increased oppression of tlle peasantry, leading to tlle removal of any sense of "belonging" which either may have felt for the imperial system.

399

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b U

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John More/and

The economy Nelson has commented that plunder and tribute constitute a very fragile basis for social reproduction (1995: 393) and, if we accept Reuter's arguments that the end of empire can be linked to the non-availability of plunder and tribute (1985; 1990), she is certainly right. Here, however, I want briefly to describe some developments in the economy that might be seen as enhancing the integration of the Carolingian polity. Recent archaeological research shows that long-distance trade complemented plunder as a source of gifts for elite distribution. This trade was mediated through coastal sites such as Dorestad in Holland (Besteman 1990: 107-10; Hodges and Whitehouse 1983; Lebecq 1997). These emporia frequently had tlleir origins in tile Merovingian period (Wood 1994: 293-9), but archaeology reveals substantive changes in tile late eightll and early nintll centuries, demonstt·ating tllat tlley were centers for craft production as well as exchange (Hodges 1989; van Es 1990: 173-5). The importance of control over both the production and tile exchange of gifts for tile construction of elite power has recently been highlighted (Gosden 1989). Charlemagne may have attempted to impose standardization and anotller mode of economic integration through his coin reforms of 793/4, which imposed rigorous controls on minting (Grierson and Blackburn 1986: 206-10). This need not, of course, mean that the Carolingian empire was integrated through tile operation of a monetary economy. The importance of gifts, suggested equally by tile emporia and by the plundering of the Avar ring, means that tile reformed coinage operated within an economy still structured on "traditional" principles (see Mm-eland 1999). The practice of establishing a loyal elite in conquered areas seems to have been a strategy widely used in imperial systems and the Carolingians were no different_ Steuer (1989: 101) notes that with the conquest ofItaly in 774, 360 Franks, 160 Alemans, 15 Bavarians, and two Burgundians were appointed to important posts within the Italian kingdom (also Delogu 1995: 306). But we should be careful not to overestimate the extent to which the Carolingians rewarded members of their own people in this way. Another familiar imperial strategy is the incorporation of native e1ites (Woolf, this volume), and in this context we should note that, in areas conquered by the Carolingians, Werner (1979) has been able to demonstrate a continuity in positions of power of both Merovingian and the descendants of Gallo- Roman elites. Given the close link between church and state (see below, p. 402), and the previous importance of Christian missionaries in the eastern part of the empire (Wood 1994: 304-21), it is not surprising that the church was also involved in the process of colonization tile re (McKitterick 1983: 60). After the conquest of Saxony and Bavaria, the monasteries of Lorsch, Fulda, and Amorbach were granted lands. As well as providing a Carolingian "presence" in disputed territory

The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn?

- just as the Spanish missions provided botll a religious and political presence on the frontiers oftlleir American empire (see Deagan, this volume, pp. 188-9) - tile monasteries developed sophisticated patterns ofland use and settlement allowing increased exploitation of tile se areas (Nitz 1983b). It is noteworthy that surveying was one of tile "minor arts" studied by the monks at Fulda, providing a rather direct example of tile link between learning, the creation of order, and an intensification of production (Contreni 1995: 745). Transformations in tile rural productive system can be seen in otller regions. In tile Veluwe (in centt·al Holland), Carolingian-period expansion into formerly unoccupied areas was probably connected to the massive iron resources of the region (Heidinga 1988), forming part of a more general pattern of eighth- and early-nintll-century movement into formerly marginal zones such as peat bogs and salt marshes (see, for example, Besteman 1990: 106). It is difficult to tell to what extent this expansion was centrally directed or was tile result oflocal initiative, but tile overall trend was toward economic expansion. We should not underestimate the significance of writing in generating and monitoring this expansion (Verhulst 1995: 490). The managers of royal estates were required to present accounts to the king three times a year and "if they were not numerate tllemselves, they would need to find help" (Nelson 1995: 410; for examples of such accounts, see Dutton 1993: 75-6). The resources thus generated, along with those which flowed from the long-distance trade system, no doubt funded parallel changes in the fabric of what we might call the "superstructure" of Carolingian society.

REWRITING THE PAST AND THE PRESENT Although de facto rulers of the Frankish realm, an impediment to the legitimacy ofCarolingian power lay in their having broken the natural line of succession (G. Brown 1994: 45). To overcome the comparative "shallowness" of their claims to power, they initiated a series of short- and long-term strategies to embed themselves more firmly as legitimate rulers. These strategies essentially involved (re )constructing the past, reworking the relationship between the past and the present, and seeking divine sanction for their rule. In 750 Pippin Ill, "with the consent of the Franks," sent messengers to Rome to seek Pope Zacharias' approval for his replacement of the sacred kingship of the Merovingians (Nelson 1994: 54). Zacharias was being asked to "provide the divine authority which could overrule human tradition" (Fouracre 1995: 96). The pope gave his consent and, at Soissons in 751 - "by the election of all the Franks ... by the consecration of bishops and by the acknowledgement of lay magnates, by the Queen Bertrada as the rules of ancient tradition require" Pippin was "elevated to the kingdom" (cited in Nelson 1995: 424). The Carolingian dynasty had been inaugurated; the pope's consent and the anointing of Pippin by the Frankish bishops signaled the creation of a pact between the

401

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The Cal'o/i1lgiall empire: Romc rcborn?

Morc/and Franks and the church. This connection was reint()l'ced in 754 when Pope Stephen anointed Pippin's t~lIl1ily (Fouracre 1995: 98). The "spiritual brotherhood" thus created between the papacy and the Carolingians prot()Undly influenced the latter's perceptions of kingship and society, and meant that they could be called upon to protect papal interests. The culmination of this Franco/papal relationship was reached on Christmas Day 800, when the Frankish king Charles (Charlemagne) was crowned emperor by Pope Leo II I in Rome. Apart from Carolingian power, the church was the only institution that transcended the ethnic divisions of the empire. As such the link with the church was to be of great significance in Carolingian attempts at "ideological incorporation." With its heart in Rome, and as the inheritor of many of the traditions of Roman antiquity, the church provided the Carolingians with a connection to that f(ml1er great imperial system in Europe. In addition, the church provided models of unity and leadership with its belief in the commll1titas Jidelitttrl (the community of the f~lithful), which transcended the sense of belonging provided by thegcns, and with its understanding of the proper ordering of society. Finally, through its presence on the ground, its organizational structure, and its control of the written word, the church provided the Carolingians with logistical support in the dissemination of their message. Wc sec aspects of this message proclaimed in the products of what has been called the "Carolingian Renaissance." The term Carolingian Renaissance was probably first used in 1838 (McKitterick 1977: xvi), and since then there has been debate about its relationship with the Merovingian past (Nelson 1977). Some sce it as a radical departure, mirroring the rupture created by the Carolingian seizure of power (Ullll1ann 1969: 27-8; G. Brown 1994: 4); others root it firmly in the Merovingian era, considering it the culmination of centuries of cultural development (R. Sullivan 1989; Wood 1994: 322-4). Yet perhaps these polar extremes miss the point. In common with many societies, the Carolingians engaged with the past chiefly in the interests of their present (sce Alcock, this volume; Smyth 1998). This is seen most graphically in their political rewriting of Merovingian history: in their construction of narratives that emphasized their significance in world history, and in the recounting of fictional genealogies that linked them not only to the Mel'Ovingians and Romans, but to the Trojans as well (Fouracre 1984; Asher 1993; Innes and McKitterick 1994; McKitterick 1995b; Wasno 1997: 44-50; E. Brown 1998). Just as they constructed an appropriate history f1'om li'agments existing in their present, so in terms of'material cultlll'e - it can only be expected that their reading of past texts and artif:lCts would result in the creation of' new l(ll'Il1s and concepts. As Chartier has argued: cultural or intellcctual "consumption" [must 1 itself' be taken as a t()['In of' production which, to be sure, manut:\cturcs no objcct [though it may contribute to such I, but which constitutes representations which are never identical to those that the producers (the authors or artists) have introduced into their work.

(1988: 40)

403

16.3 T7JC llatC/JOll.l'c (Torhalle) (It L01'SCh.

Just as the translation of the "relics of a Roman saint could acquire a wholly new meaning in a new cultural and historical setting in Carolingian Francia" (Innes and McKitterick 1994: 216), so the Carolingian appropriation (or consumption) of the material cultlll'e of the Roman and Merovingian past resulted in the creation (or production) of /(>1'111$ which owed much to the past but which were fundamentally the product of the present. The Carolingian reading of the Arch of Cons tanti ne, which resulted in the creation of'the gatehouse to the monastery at I,orsch (Fig. 16.3), 1:11' fi'om being a direct copy Ij'om late antiquity (sce Krautheimer 1971 ), was an active creation of'the early middle ages in which the l(ll'Il1 of the Roman monument was evoked and rc-created. As we shall sce, the "feeling" of late Antiquity, particularly connections with the emperor Constantine, was of'special significance in the creation of Carolingian art and architectlll'e. In their appropriation and reworking of the material world of the Romans and Mel'Ovingians, the Carolingians were both rooting themselves in those pasts and creating a new world. As in the eastern Roman empire, they were "not so much concerned to preserve the past as to redeploy it even reconstruct it to negotiate present contingencies" (Alcock, this volume, pp. 343-4). Exercising an intellectual hegemony which transcended the limits of their political power, the Carolingians attracted some of the greatest thinkers in Europe to their COlll't (Ullmann 1969: 3; G. Brown 1994: 28-31; Nelson 1995: 423). Working with a common purpose in the palaces, cathedrals, and monasteries, men like Alcuin of' York and Theodulf of Orleans constructed Carolingian political philosophy, and patronized and produced art and architecture

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Romc rcborn?

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(McKitterick 1983: 145). The concepts of wholly disinterested learning and of the neutrality of art would have been alien to Alcuin or Theodulf. In fact Theodulf was almost certainly the main author of the Libri Cl11"Olilli, a late-eighth-century treatise on the role of images (Freeman 1957, 1965), in which it was argued that they enhanced beauty and served a didactic purpose as "books for the illiterate" (Contreni 1995: 818). Theodulf argued that education and learning provided the "soldiers of Christ" with weapons which, "along with inward devotion would enable the clergy to penetrate the mysteries of Scripture and lead God's people to paradise" (cited in Contreni 1995: 756). Learning and scholarship were integrally connected with the "construction of society. "Two themes the rebirth of the Prankish nation as the people of God, and the rebirth of the Roman empire permeate the first and were to lead to the realization of the second.

PoputttS Dei Founded on the writings of early Christian thinkers, Carolingian scholars produced a fundamentally Christian political philosophy (Krauthcimer 1971: 231 ). The church was to unite the different ethnic, linguistic, and social groups of the empire into the jiO/llltllS Dci (Ullmann 1969: 21 ); the Franks were to replace the Jews as the chosen "people of God." The apse mosaic of Theodulf of Orleans' church at Germigny-des- Prt's portrays the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Solomon, the symbol of salvation promised to the Jews, surrounded by f()llr cherubim (Fig. 16.4). The two smaller cherubim represent the Jews; the larger ones the extension of that salvation to the Gentiles and, by implication, the Franks (Freeman 1957, 1965; Vicillard-TroYckourolr 1962). The theme of the mosaic in the dOl1le of the Aachen palace chapel was the Apocalypse: "with the Elders gathered about the throne of God in adoration, representing the chosen people of God, with whom the Franks identified" (Nees 1995: 837). The depiction of this image, in the room which contained the Frankish royal scat, relayed a message which would not have been lost on those who gathered around the throne of Charlemagne (sce also Illl1eS and McKitterick 1994: 215). The church and the state were to be essent ially onc ('/'. Noble 1976). The king had secular jlo/JIcr; the clergy had divine n II!/Joril)' (Krautheimer 1980: 115-16). The anointed kings were now linked directly with the Divine and "rebellion against their authorit y ... became rebellion against God" (G. Brown 1994: 45). The king's power came li'om God and no longer fi'om his people. As in Pippin's coronation, blood and tradition had been supplanted by divine legitimization. The earthly order was to rdlect that in heaven (G. Brown 1994: 24-5) a notion which would have naturalized and fixed the hierarchy of the fl>rIl1er.

Rornft renascens A revival of classical antiquity permeated all aspects of lill- at the Carolingian court, the monasteries, and the royal estates. Classical authors were read, COI11mented upon, and copied (Bullough 1977; I nnes and Mc Kitterick 1994). I t has

even been suggested that in its decoration the Utrecht Psalter (produced between 820 and 830) "resembles the stateliest surviving late Antique copies of the Aeneid" (G. Hendcrson 1994: 264). The Carolingian appropriation of Roman rhetoric in art and literature can be seen as an attempt to ground their new-f(HlIld imperial status in the general past glories of' Rome. Onc particular set of' late antique symbols - those connected with the emperors Constantine and Theodosius - were more specifically appropriated, however. These rulers, who first linked Christianity with authority over the Roman world, were the two "good" emperors portrayed in the fi'escoes at Ingelheim (Krautheimer 1971: 237). In 788 Pope l-Iadrian 1 acclaimed (:harlemagne as the new (:onstantine (Herrin 1987: 386); (:harlemagne 's image on his coinage of 805 echocs depictions of that same emperor (Mc Kitterick 1988: 31). The illscription accompanyillg an illustration of Charles the Bald likens him to "Josiah and Theodosius: /osiah the holy king, I'dl)rmer of Judah, Theodosius the imperiallawmakcr" (Porcher 1970: l43; Mc Kitterick 1988: 32; Nelson 1989; 1992: l7). The Carolingian palace at Aachen (Fig. 16.5) - Charlemagne's NOI'I1 ROIIltT shows parallel developments ill architecture (Krauthcimcr 1971: 236). Krautheimer lists connections bctween the palace in the north and Constantine's

16.4 '/l)e apse lIIosaic I1t GITlllilllly-nes-Prls.

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construction at the Lateran in Rome: the Aachen palace was often called "the Lateran"; a bronze figure of a she-wolf stood in the vestibule of the Aachen chapel, matching the Roman !tt/m at the Lateran; an equestrian statue was installed at Aachen parallelling the Lateran statue of Marcus Aurelius. As Krautheimer concludes: "the palace at Aix [Aachen] attempted to emulate not just any Roman monument, but a monument of Christian antiquity in Rome" (1971: 235). The same can be said «)t' many of dle churches of the Carolingian empire modeled on churches specifically associated with Constantine: St. John's Lateran, St. Peter's and SI. Paul's in Rome (though sce Nces 1995: 824). Within a general consumption of classicism, the Carolingians appropriated particular symbols to produce specific messages: of Romanlless, of power on a grand scale, of Christian illljlcri1tlll. Thc Carolingian present was being grounded in the past of the Constantinian empire, providing existing power structures and social relations with a Christian imperial ancestry. The questions remain: How was the message disseminaledr \"'ho was intended to consume itr How did it relate to the reality of Carolingian illljlcrilllllr

']}ansrnittinq the dominant ideO/OilY '-

L.

A certain "court culture" can be postulated as onc means of instilling the desired ethos and disscminating it abroad. Like the other major courts of Europe, the Carolingian palaces were populated by sons of the nobility sent there to acquire the appropriate social and political skills (Nelson 1995: 4(4). While some of this "education" may have been 1<>I'Inalized in the palace school (Contreni 1995: 713), lessons could also be read from the /<>1'111 of the palace and churches and from the images with which they were decorated. The Arl1/umitio C;cIICl'I1tis of 789 decreed that schools were to be set up 1<)1' boys of all orders (Mc Kitterick

1983: 146), and we have evidence «)t. about seventy such institutions in the ninth century (Contreni 1995: 721). T. Noble has argued that the promotion of schools under the emperor Louis the Pious was designed to encourage the spread of Carolingian imperial culture (1990b: 346), while Contreni sees them as "at once the training ground f<)r the educated elite and the arena in which the new Christian cultlll'e was hammered out" (1995: 712). The church was to play an equal, if not greater, role in providing "the apparatus of transmission" f(Jr ideology (Abercrombie et al. 1980: 157). A series of church councils held between 794 and 829 were designed to result in "intensification of Church practice; greater unife:1rI11ity; and preservation of the purity of the church" (Reuter 1991: 38), Emphasis was placed on the competence of the priests who were to instruct the masses (G. Brown 1994: 18-19; Contreni 1995: 710). Priests were to study the writings of the Church Fathers and the Latin classics so that, through sermons and preaching, they could explain the Bible to the laity (Ullmann 1969: 36; Reuter 1991: 39). Stress was laid on their correct use of Latin. It was the language pleasing to God and it unlocked "I<)r them the mysteries of the scriptlll'es in the Latin Bible": The correct Latinity of the Carolingian clergy was important f()!· another reason. Their prayers were considered to be vital fllr the prosperity of'the rcgll /lilt both in war and peace. If intercession were to be efficacious, both the Latinity of the participants and the texts that they used had to be correct, principally because of'thc notion that the Church straddled both heavcn and c,trth, and that angels and mcn participated in a single liturgy at thc same time. (G. Brown 1994: 20-1)

Hopkins has recently argued that literate culture was a significant f:lctor in the constitution of elite identity in the Roman empire (1991: 142), while Brum(iel (this volume, pp. 300-1) has pointed out that aristocratic use of Aztec architectlll'al space was fundamental in binding the younger sons of noble l:lIl1ilies to the imperial cause. The parallels with the Carolingian case arc striking and wc can suggest that the sense of exclusivity that would have flowed from access to the royal palace, or li'om the use of correct r,atin, would have contributed to the creation of an imperial elite identity. However, I-lopkins argues that Roman literate cultlll'e was also differentiating: "it provided a single set of criteria by which people's per/(ll'IllanCeS, and therd<)re their membership in different social strata, could be judged" (1991: 143). The same can be argued 1<)1' Carolingian court and ecclesiastical culture. To what extent then were exclusivilY and dillerentiation transcended by communication of the imperial ideal beyond the eliter Contreni has, in bct, argued that the theological emphasis on "correct Latinity" had prol<>Llnd consequences (1995: 725). It was all very well «H' the clergy to be trained in the "language of the angels," but the efficacy of the movement to rdc.H·m society must have been severely hampered by the use of a language unf:lI11iliar to the majority of the population (Banniard 1995). Contreni suggests that the advocates of Latin "ran the risk of distancing the clergy lI'om

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The CaJ'olillgiall empirc: Rome reborn?

the Carolingian people" (1995: 725); Duby puts it more graphically in his image of peasants "held back" at the door of the church, from where "they saw only snatches of the priest's gestures and dimly heard songs chanted in Latin of which they understood not a single word" (1981: 46). As with all "dominant ideologies," the material culture of the Carolingian Renaissance, and its theory of order, unity, and legitimacy, presented what should have happened; it was the ideal. But such ideals have to cope with the reality of existing structures of local and regional power. In a heterogeneous empire such confrontation between ideal and real must have been frequent. Examination of onc such region illustrates the kinds of tensions which resulted (sce also Deagan, this volume; cf. DeMarrais et al. 1996).

409

e Spoleto

Adriatic Sea

eBenevento

A MONASTIC CONQUEST In 773/4, Charlemagne invaded Italy. Although he was responding to a papal request for support against Lombard aggression, Charlemagne also took the opportunity to eliminate the threat which the Lombards posed to Frankish hegemony over west European society (Delogu 1995: 30 I). The Lombard kingdom became a sub-kingdom of the Frankish empire (Wickham 1981: 46-8; T. Noble 1984: 128-32). The administrative system was rationalized through the office of the count, and the Lombards were allowed to retain their law - if only "in so t~lI' as it did not conflict with the perspectives of the new sovereignty" (Nelson 1992: 163; Delogu 1995: 307-9). The Carolingians held defheto political power over much of the Italian peninsula, although the papacy controlled its own lands (the term sal/cti Petri), while Benevento and the southern Byzantine possessions of Naples, Amalf1, and parts of Apulia and Calabria also remained outside their political orbit (Fig. 16.6; Wickham 1981: 49). [t has been argued, however, that a different Frankish conquest of Italy predated Charlemagne's campaign. This "monastic conquest" was achieved by a subtle intrusion of Frankish influence into the monasteries of Farf~', Nonantula, San Vincenzo, and Monte Cassino (Figs. 16.1 and 16.6; T. Noble 1984: 159). After 774 this influence escalated, and these monasteries have been seen as beacons of Carolingian ideology in the Italian peninsula (!-lodges et 111. 1985). By the late eighth century Far!:\ and San Vincenl'.o were large establishments whose prosperity was based largely on the patronage of local I.ombard elites, fi'om Spoleto and Benevento respectively. Frankish monks were increasingly prevalent, and it can be argued that Carolingian involvement became serious with Charlemagne's grants of immunity to Fad:, and San Vincenzo in 775 and 787 Noble 1984: 157; Wickham 1985: 14-23; 1995b: 144-6; McClendon 1987: 6-7). Such immunity removed the monasteries ti'om local jurisdiction, placing them instead under that of the king (J. Smith 1995: 186; sce also Drew 1963). The result was to tic the monasteries more closely to the ruler, a bctor that contributed to the development of what Schl11itz has called the Carolingian state church (1990: 429). A consideration of the situation of San Vincenzo and

cr.

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Farf~\ within the complex political geography of late-eighth-century Italy helps us to understand why the Carolingians were eager to incorporate them within the structure of this church.

San Vincenzo lay in the territory of the Lombard Duchy of Benevento (Fig. 16.6); Carolingian interest in it stemmed fi'om their ambivalent relationship with the Duchy. The Beneventans had resisted incorporation into the Carolingian state, and in 774 Arichis II had declared himself an independent prince. Despite an attack by Charlemagne in 787, the Franks never managed to subdue BenevenlO and San Vincenzo remained just be}Tond the Carolingian fl'ontier (Wickham 1995b: 138). Farf~\ 's location, on the border between the Duchy of Spoleto and the papal lands (the term .wn/eti Petri), was every bit as sensitive. The Carolingian conquest resulted in the restoration to the papacy of some lands that they had lost to the Lombards, with the significant exception of Farb (T. Noble 1984: 156). Further, the Carolingian grant ofiml11unity meant that Fad;, was efkctively independent of papal influence. Fad:, theret{)re "[ al constituc en Italic centrale au IXe siccle une sorte de mt>le contre lequel sont venues buter les tentatives d'expansion pontificales" (Toubert 1973: 985), and thus worked against the disl11emberment of the newly acquired Kingdom of Italy. Carolingian involvement in these two border monasteries is apparent in the

16.6 Central find c. 750

Jllllt/;Cl'lI italy,

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The Cal'olingial1 empire: Rome reborn? fit perfectly within the newly developed Carolingian tradition of architecture (Nees 1995: 824-5; but see below, p. 414). This is only one of many connections that apparently link San Vincenzo with the essentials ofCarolingian thought. The axial corridors not only connected the new heart of the monastery with the old, rooting Joshua's construction in the monastery's own past, but also appear "to imitate the great corridors connecting Charlemagne's palace at Aachen to his cathedral" (Hodges 1997: 81). As at Aachen, the emphasis appears to be on linking the twin pillars of society - the church and the secular elite (Hodges 1995: 169; see Figs. 16.5 and 16.7). Roman spolia, often displayed in prominent positions, were reused throughout the monastery (Mitchell 1994: 909). Tradition holds that the Roman columns and capitals used in the basilica were part of a temple givcn to Abbot Joshua by the future emperor, Louis the Pious (Hodges 1997: 77,85-7). This reuse of Roman material culture is a direct appropriation of the Roman past which again appears very much in line with Carolingian Renaissance thought. The same is true for many of the painted decorative schemes, some of which imitate the marble veneers oflate Antique buildings (J. Mitchell 1985: 126-32; 1994: 943). Finally, the monastic chronicle, the Clmmicotl VlIltumese, records that a great inscription was set on the ti'ont of Joshua's basilica (Federici 1925-38). The inscription reads:

-----, motors

Quaeque vides ospes pcndencia eelsa vel ima, Vir Domini Iosue struxit cum fl'atibus una. (C/JI'IlIIicoll VlIltul'IICSC 1.226-8).

16.7 Abbot /oJhua)s «monastic city>' rr t San Villcenzo al Voltlln/o.

archaeology, and seemed so prevalent at San Vincenzo that Hodges was tempted to think of it as "a Pompeii of the Carolingian Renaissance a place trapped, archaeologically speaking, in a moment in time" (1995: 153). Excavations have shown that the monastery was expanded from its modest eighth-century core to become a "monastic city" covering between 6 and 10 hectares, housing a population of between 500 and 1000 (Hodges 1995: 168; 1997: 1/6). The impetus behind the construction came tt'om Abbot Joshua (792-817), reputedly a h'ank of royal blood, and the project was completed under Abbots Talaricus (817-23) and Epyphanius (824-42; see I-lodges 1997: 31-3,118-43). The new monastery was leJCused on two north/south axial corridors, around which the other elements of the monastery were constructed: rdl:ctorics lex monks and gucsts; an asscmbly room; a series of workshops; cloister and dormitory ranges (I-lodges 1995: 168; 1997; Fig. 16.7). At the northern cnd of the organizational axis, the cighth-century mother church was rcmodelcd to become the palacc le)r distinguished guests (I-lodges 1997: 10 l); to the south, one of the largest churches in early medieval Italy was constructed (Hodges 1997: 19). San Vincenzo Maggiore was more than 100 111 long, and consisted of a triple-apsed basilica with an annular crypt, an atrium, and easlwork (I-lodges and Mitchell 1996: 33). At first sight, its tripartite structure and annular crypt would seem to have been inspired by Old St. Peter's in Rome, thus appearing to

vVhatevcr lofty structures you sec here, traveller, extending II'om low on high, were built by the scrvant of the Lord, Joshua, and his brother monks. (scc Hodges 1997: 83)

Fragments of this inscription were t(llInd in the excavations, and they show that it had been fell'll1ed of bronze letters set into marble and held in place with rivets. This kind of inscription was rare in the early middle ages, and it was initially proposed that, since its closest parallels lay in the lriumphal arches and temples of the Roman period, it should be seen as a clear attempt to revive an antique practice (Mitchelll984; 1990: 212). In its scale, its layout, its decoration, and its "intatuation with writing" (Mitchell 1990: 2(5), San Vincenzo can be seen as a beacon of Carolingian ideology on the edge of empire (I-lodges et at. 1985; Moreland 1988: 258-62). The immediate eviclence te)r the impact of the Carolingian "ideological model" is not so prevalent at Farfa, but it must be remembered that excavations there have been on a more limited scale. Nevertheless, there arc suggestions that here too the monastic f;lbric was imbued with the concept of l'etloMtio. The epitaph of Abbot lngoaldus (815-30) consisted of bronze letters set into marble, while that of Sichardus, his predecessor, was executed in perkctly Itll'll1ed Roman letters. McClendon has argued that this is "an expression of the full flowering of the revival of classical epigraphy that characterised the Carolingian Renaissance" (1987:8).

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John Moreland Perhaps the most convincing case for the impact of Carolingian concepts at Farfa, however, comes from the form and decoration of the church. The nave contained an opus sectile pavement made from material taken from Roman floors on the site. Together with several examples in Rome, the Farfa pavement forms part of a ninth-century revival of a flooring technique last used in early Christian antiquity (McClendon 1980). The semicircular apse and crypt find their most immediate parallels across the Alps at Fulda and Saint-Denis, and at old St. Peter's in Rome (Krautheimer 1971, 1980; McClendon 1987: 57-62; Nees 1995: 825). The evidence seems clear. The historical context in Spoleto, Benevento, and Rome, taken with the historical and archaeological record from Farf.1 and San Vincenzo, suggests that the florescence of these "border monasteries" was predicated upon the implementation of the politico-religious philosophy of the Carolingian Renaissance. As with Carolingian ideology in general, however, we have to ask: at whom was this message aimed? In terms of communication, the monastery of San Vincenzo can be analyzed on a number of levels, from the mass of the complex itself, to the form of particular buildings, right down to the symbols and groups of symbols embodied in particular texts and works of art. To understand who would have been affected by the messages, issues of Imow/edge and access must be considered. Who, for example, would have seen and appreciated the late antique references in the painted decoration? To whom would the letters on the facade ofJoshua's church have had any meaning?

UNDERMINING THE RHETORIC

J ~I

i

I,

! .

At San Vincenzo the most specific messages were displayed in the most private areas of the monastery: that is, in places to which only monks, and some noble guests, would have had access. As with the "angelic Latin" ofCarolingian theory, these messages were not designed to speak to the peasantry of the region. As rhetoric, the images and texts were intended instead to create group identity within the monastery. The symbols contributed to the construction of the community that constructed them, though other discourses also played their part. Excavations located the remains of a pulpit in the southwest corner of the refectory (Hodges et at. 1995: 69-72), and we must imagine the reading of wellchosen texts as the monks ate their food. As T. Noble (1990a: 106) has suggested for the papal community in Rome, "words and movements bound a whole community together in a profound and shared experience." At San Vincenzo, however, it is clear that not all the community enjoyed the "experience." Despite the presence of Frankish monks, San Vincenzo was in Benevento; most gifts ofland came from local Lombardic elites (Wickham 1995b), and it is likely that many of the monks were Lombards. Signs of ethnic division within the monastery are revealed by the deposition of Abbot Poto by Charlemagne. Poto was a Lombard who had become abbot by deposing Ambrosius Autpert, a

The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn? Frank. In 783 Poto was accused by a Frankish monk of failing to join the community in the singing of a psalm for the health and safety of the Frankish king. After the Carolingian conquest prayers for the emperor could be a "litmus-test of loyalty" (Nelson 1995: 391). It would appear that Po to failed this test. Nor was he alone in doing so, since Pope Hadrian had informed Charlemagne about the "monks' bitter division in their attitude to the Franks" (Hodges 1997: 30). Poto was reinstated by the Papal Court in Rome, but died on the journey back to San Vincenzo: "was he the victim of his successor, abbot Paul, a Frank?" (Hodges 1997: 209, emphasis added). The case of Poto's deposition highlights the existence both of a deep split within this most Christian communitas fidelium, and of opposition and resistance to empire. It points to the persistence of ethnic and regional difference that might in turn illustrate the necessity for a permanent rhetoric of unity. It should also alert us to the possibility that we have been misreading the signs from the monastery. First, however, we must consider what "the masses" read from the monastery. Although San Vincenzo held property as far north as Piacenza (Wickham 1995b: Fig. 11.2), the resources for the Carolingian "monastic city" must have come from much closer at hand, from its Beneventan estates (Hodges 1991: 84) . Labor would have been mobilized in the context of established power structures, and involvement in the act of construction would have served to reinforce those relations of power and domination. In building the monastery, with all its supernatural associations, people would have been reminded of their place in the world. The "dull compulsion of economic relations" and the operation of naked force had more relevance here than the ideology of populus Dei and Roma renascens. In the landscape around Farfa we have evidence for a restructuring of settlement in the late eighth and early ninth centuries with the insertion of several points of administrative control (MOl'eland 1988, 1992, 1993). It may have been through such sites that demands for increased peasant labor were mediated. Here we are witnessing the tightening of relations of power and domination, with no sign that tenets of Carolingian thought were penetrating the countryside. For the ordinary peasant around Farfa and San Vincenzo the Carolingian Renaissance did not mean entry into a community of faith or a people of God, but more work. The apparatus for the widespread transmission of these Carolingian ideals seems singularly lacking. Although there was a scriptorium, we have no evidence for schools at San Vincenzo (see Contreni 1995: 724), and it is impossible to know what was preached in churches in this part ofItaly (though we should keep in mind Duby's potent image; see above, p. 408). In terms of material culture, despite the abundant evidence for production from monastic workshops, we cannot parallel the Roman situation where the message of imperial victory was displayed in every medium across the empire (Zanker 1988; Bartman 1990: 277).

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John More/and In Italy, and throughout the rest of the Carolingian empire, the material message of unity, legitimacy, and order was intended primarily for elite consumption and did not penetrate the social hierarchy. The exclusivity we have already seen in literate and court culture finds parallels in socially restricted access to the richly decorated apses and vaults of the churches and to the knowledge required to read their detailed message. The ideology of the Carolingian Renaissance can be seen as a classic example of a "dominant ideology" - one designed to construct elite identity, not that of society in general (Abercrombie et al. 1980). As I have already argued, however, such an ideology would only continue to function as such as long as there were tangible benefits to "belonging." The cessation of Carolingian expansion removed those benefits and destroyed whatever cohesive force this dominant ideology once possessed. It can further be suggested that the twentieth century has endowed this ideology with a power it never wielded in the ninth century. In focusing on the ideals of the Carolingian court we have neglected the reality of the world outside. In the ideal world the sense of belonging traditionally supplied by the gens was to be transcended by ecclesia (church) and imperium. The ethnic split over imperium within the ecclesia of San Vincenzo reveals the reality. In 841, the Saxons rejected Carolingian written law, wishing to retain their own customs. As McKitterick argues: "the Saxons' apparent suspicion of what was written and preference for their own custom, held within their collective memory, act as a warning not to ollerestimate the Sttccess of the Frarl/ls in superimposing their cultural presuppositions and methods on another people" (1995a: 16, emphasis added). This is a warning which I and others, in our emphasis on the Carolingian aspects of the monasteries of Far fa and San Vincenzo, have not heeded (Hodges et al. 1985; MOl'e1and 1988; Hodges 1997). The triple-apsed basilica at San Vincenzo does have parallels in the Carolingian world (Nees 1995: 824), but equally there is a more immediate, Lombardic context in "the triple-apsed form of King Desiderius' mid-eighth-century abbey-church of San Salvatore at Brescia, and the eighth-century royal church of San Salvatore at Spoleto" (Hodges and Mitchell1996: 57). A set of sword-belt mounts, apparently made in the monastic workshop, were inlaid with silver ornament "in typical Lombard design" (Hodges and Mitchell1996: 53), while the decoration of the crypt of San Vincenzo Maggiore "may reflect the arts promoted at the courts of Duke Arichis 11 and his successor Prince Grimoald, at Benevento and Salerno in the latter half of the eighth century" (Hodges and Mitchell 1996: 113). Finally, it is now clear that there are not only late antique parallels for Joshua's inscription. Recent excavations at the palace of Arichis 11 in Salerno produced fragments of just such an inscription (J. Mitchell 1994: 895-8). The Carolingian connection still exists at San Vincenzo, but we are becoming more aware of the reality of its Beneventan context. The Carolingian and Lombardic elements in the monastic complex may be a further expression of the ethnic division which undermined imperial rhetoric. It is also increasingly clear that the Beneventans too sought legitimacy in the Roman past. In Benevento and

The Carolingian empire: Rome reborn? Salerno "associations ofImperial dignity and authority [of] the Roman material heritage offered a ready source of models and ideas for those who were charged with creating a new courtly art" (Hodges and Mitchell 1996: 116). In this part ofItaly, the Carolingians had no monopoly on Roma renascens. The Carolingians, the Beneventans, and the papacy all summoned the shades of the Roman ancestors (see Krautheimer 1980: 111-13). Recent scholarship has been captivated by the stridency ofCarolingian claims. In the ninth century, however, their voice was not so clear, or so unequivocal; nor were their claims so uncontested.

THE "GRAND STRATEGY" OF THE CAROLINGlAN EMPIRE? When compared with some of the other empires represented in this volume, aspects of Carolingian infrastructure appear rudimentary and undeveloped. Its focus on the palace and the comparative lack of urban development; the parttime structure of its army and the rather primitive network of communications; the highly personalized nature of power relationships, the basic nature of its fiscal system, the rather elementary bureaucracy, and the divisions caused by its polyethnicity: all would seem to suggest that the polity created by the Carolingians cannot be understood within the same category as, for example, the Roman or Spanish empires. Nonetheless, the Carolingians believed that they were an imperial people, and that they ruled an empire. They delimited frontiers and issued coinage for the whole realm. They constructed monumental architecture and instituted large-scale public works, such as the 3 kilometer canal built in an attempt to link the rivers Rednitz and Altmlihl (Fouracre 1995: 103). They differentiated between kingdoms and empires. They implemented a series of integrative strategies, some of which - for example, the transplantation ofloyal elites, the incorporation of native e1ites, the construction of a legitimizing past - seem common to many ancient imperial systems, as several chapters in this volume attest. For what it is worth, we might note that in terms of size the Carolingian empire was up to six times larger than that of the Aztecs. An imperial strategy may even be detected in their actions. The quotation with which I opened this chapter refers to a period of civil war. However, note again Charles the Bald's claim that "he should be called emperor and augustusas one who was to possess two kingdoms," for this entails a concept of empire which was by then embedded in Carolingian thought. Documents of 849 and 856 similarly link the imperial title with rule over more than one people, while I-lincmar of Rheims' references to Louis 11 in 864 as the "so-called emperor of Italy" have been seen as "challenging the application of the title to one who ruled only a single realm" (Nelson 1989: 196; 1991: 112). In the seventh century an emperor was defined as a ruler over kings, and for Alcuin of York in the late eighth century imperium could mean overlordship over a number of difterent gemes "divided by language and separated by race" (cited in Nelson 1994: 69). Here the polyethnicity identified as a potential wen/mess of

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John Moreland empire instead becomes definitive of empire. The Roman empire too had been composed of different kingdoms, but it is clear that the Carolingian empire owed more to the actual process of Frankish expansion than to the appropriation of a Roman concept. This leads us to consider the "strategy" which lay behind the creation of empire. Emulation of Rome played an important part in the ideology of the Carolingian political project. Yet although they took great pride in the f.'lct that their empire included regions which had eluded Roman control, physical recreation of the Roman empire was not what drove Carolingian expansion. If the Carolingians had an imperial strategy, their actions make it clear that it was the renoMtio regni Francorum (the restitution of the Frankish realm), the realm created by early Merovingian kings like Childeric I and Clovis. Before their demise in the middle of the seventh century, the Merovingians had extended Frankish power over vast areas of Europe, and it has been noted that Carolingian campaigns "were in almost every case efforts to recover lands that had been lost to the Merovingians in the years after about 650" (T. Noble 1990b: 338; J. Smith 1995: 170). Reuter (1990: 402) points out that by 814 the Carolingians had incorporated virtually everything that had been subject, directly or indirectly, to the Merovingians: "but did not go beyond this to any significant extent." He further argues that "the end of expansion was evidently a conscious decision" (Reuter 1990: 402). This implies an equally conscious vision of what should and should not be incorporated within the ninth-century Frankish realm. Might it not be the case that this vision was determined by a Carolingian need to be seen rc-creating the realm of the kings they had usurped, and that the frontiers of the empire were defined by the borders of the regna they conquered to achieve this aim (T. Noble 1990b: 340)? The cnd of expansion, the process of consolidation, and imperial collapse, as we have already seen, were inextricably linked. Liverani (this volume, p. 388) notes a similar connection in the Assyrian empire where "the annexation of outer territories ... became more expensive as conquest pushed into more remote lands. This led inexorably to a growth of military expenditures well above the economic returns of the war activity ... " The parallel is not exact, however, since the ideological vision of what constituted the regtl1l'l'l'l FrancOl'um prevented the Carolingians from reaching this particular point of diminishing returns. At first sight the incorporation of most of Italy into the Carolingian empire does not fit with this rationale for imperial expansion. Reuter (1990: 402) argues that while it was true that Lombard Italy paid tribute on and off to the Merovingians, "the incorporation of the Lombard kingdom ... had nothing to do with such ancient history." This may be true, and it may be the case that the conquest of Italy had more to do with the recent history of Franco/papal relations than with the "ancient history" of Merovingian dominance. However, it may be worth recalling that sixty years ago Pirenne saw the annexation of Italy as the Carolingian realization of a Merovingian aspiration "to install itself securely on the shores of the Mediterranean" (1992: 189,228). In this case the

The Caroli1'lgian empire: Rome reborn? incorporation ofItaly had everything to do with ancient history in tile sense that not only did the Carolingians restore the regnum Francorum, tlley also realized a dream unfilled by their supplanted predecessors. In this context it is perhaps significant that in 869 Hincmar of Rheims (wrongly) claimed Clovis as tile ancestor of Charles tile Bald, and that Charlemagne named two of his sons Clovis and Clotllar (son ofClovis; Nelson 1995: 429,403). These observations have an importance beyond tllat of detecting fictional genealogies. In Frankish tradition the name of the founding ancestor of a dynasty was especially important, and so too was tile use of names in claims over property; later generations used tile names of tile original property holder to indicate tlleir claim to it (Werner 1979: 151-2). Thus Charles tile Bald's claimed ancestral link Witll Clovis and tile names of Charlemagne's son bOtll take us back to tile Carolingian "imperial strategy" - tile renoMtio regni Francorum. The specifically Frankish nature of tile Carolingian project can be seen too in the coronation of Pippin Ill. Although Pippin clearly needed the sanction which the pope provided, the details of his accession make it clear tllat he came to the throne through election by Franllish nobles, by "the rules of a'l'lcient tradition," and that he was anointed by Frankish bishops (see above, p. 401). Anointing by the pope came three years later; what is seen here is tile "coincidence of Frankish clerical interests with lay aristocratic interests and of both those with the interests of the papacy" (Nelson 1994: 55). Papal sanction was important, but more so was Frankish tradition. How does the ideology of the Carolingian Renaissance relate to this Frankish imperium? Given the links with the papacy, the potential integrative value of the notion of populus Dei to a Frankish imperial project is to some extent apparent. But why claim that the renoJlatio regni Francorum was in f.'lct Roma renascens? While difficult to answer, it should be remembered that early Merovingian kings like Childeric and Clovis not only physically lived in the remains of the Roman world, but also behaved in many ways as Romans and appropriated the trappings of "Roman ne ss" (James 1988). While the restoration of the Frankish realm may have provided the driving force behind Carolingian expansion, the Roman empire provided a series of models - of grandeur, of power, and especially of Christian imperial rulership - which proved too attractive an ideological force to ignore (see Nelson 1989). Whatever the answer, it would seem clear that the notion of Romrt renascenswas simply an ideological gloss on an ideological vision of the rctlo)latio rcgtli Francorum. The problems for the Carolingians really arose when they had achieved their aim. With the cessation of expansion, many of the attractions that had bound the nobility to the Carolingian cause dissipated. Any sense of "belonging" created by the ideology and material culture of the Carolingian Renaissance evaporated when imperial benefits, such as plunder and land, were removed. The Carolingian empire effectively died in the territorial divisions and subdivisions which were the product of the succession crises of the mid-ninth century, but the Frankish concept of empire persisted (Nelson 1994). Later imperial traditions, particularly

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Johrt More/artd those of Spain in the Americas, claimed legitimacy for their expansion by linking themselves, via Charlemagne, with the Roman empire (Pagden 1995: 40-1; MacCormack, this volume). Pedro de Mexia (1500-52) argued that Rome, in "longevity, size and power" was the greatest of all empires, because it had begun "a little less than 2300 years ago and it is still alive today" (cited in Pagden 1995: 41-2). The "ideological" nature of these claims is fully exposed when we understand that what Charlemagne had really created was a "Frankish empire," only partially legitimized through the Romartitas expressed in tlle Carolingian Renaissance.

17 Cuzco, another Rome? Sabine MacCormack

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to dedicate this article to my brother Peter ("Pemo") who died tlle day after it was finished. I would like to thank the organizers of the Mijas conference, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for providing me with the opportunity to present the ideas contained in the spoken version, and the intellectual climate which allowed those to be transformed into this chapter. The Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites (Paris) provided the photograph of, and permission to publish, the mosaic at Germigny-des-Pres; Richard Hodges provided permission to reproduce the plan of San Vincenzo al Volturno; Prue Chiles drew the reconstruction of the palace at Ingelheim. Finally, I must thank Professor Chris Wickham (University of Birmingham) and Dr. Matthew Innes (University of York) for their help in tracking down some crucial references on the Carolingian concept of empire; and Karen Godden for help in obtaining permissions for photographic reproduction.

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On tlle evening ofl4 November 1532, Francisco Pizarro and his band of adventurers caught tlleir first real glimpse of the Inca empire. l They were riding down the mountain pass that led to tlle Inca provincial capital of Cajamarca, and were able to study, spread out in the valley, the city's fine buildings, its public spaces, temple of the Sun, water supply, and roads. It was a daunting sight (Estete 1924 [1532-3]: 25; Xerez 1985 [1532-3]: 103-4). Yet, before long, these invaders had captured and killed tlle Inca ruler Atahuallpa, had reached and begun to loot tlle imperial capital of Cuzco, and were launched on their course of conquering the far-flung lands that the Incas had governed. The invaders spared little time during those first years to inquire how tlle Inca empire had functioned, and even less to inquire what that empire had stood for in the minds of its rulers and subjects. But the material culture of the Incas, their roads, buildings, and artifacts were, on the surf.1ce at least, more accessible to sixteenth-centUl'Y beholders than the principles of political and social order that held the empire togetller. Francisco Pizarro's secretary Pedro Sancho (1969 [1534]), for example, although primarily interested in justifYing his master's doings to the wider world, wrote repeatedly about Inca economic and architectural achievements. Comprehending the empire's inner workings took much longer. As late as the 1560s and beyond, therefore, after much information had already been accumulated, lawyers like Francisco Falc6n, Hernando Santil){ll1, and Polo de Ondegardo were still investigating the procedures by which the Inca empire had been run, because, so they felt, the Spaniards might learn from these procedUl'es to do their own job better. Also, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historians like Juan de Betanzos, Pedro Cieza de Le6n, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, Bernabe Cobo, and others wrote about the Inca empire as worthy of attention in its own right. Contemporary study of the Incas continues where these men left off. Much has changed in our understanding of the Incas in recent decades, in large part because archaeology has clarified certain aspects of the functioning of the Inca empire in greater depth and detail than it is possible for any historical text or archival document to record. In addition, archaeology is clarifYing the process oflnca state formation, while also providing a series of visions oftlle Inca empire

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Sabine MacCormack as perceived from the provinces, and not just from the capital of Cuzco (e.g., Morris and Thompson 1985; Hyslop 1990; D'Altroy 1992; Malpass 1993). This is also true for archival research. Spanish government inspections of the sixteenth century that have been published during the last forty years or so, and others still waiting to be published, describe material and political life in different parts of the empire in extraordinary detail (e.g., Diez de San Miguel1964 [1567]; Ortiz de Zuniga 1967 [1562]; Landazuri 1990; Murra 1991; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco and Remy 1992). All tlus has made it possible to understand tile Inca empire as an Andean empire, a state tllat was characterized by certain features that are not common, or are not found at all, elsewhere. There seem to be few if any parallels of tile Inca calendrical system, which was at the same time a method of mapping kinship and geography, tllereby integrating time, geography, and kinslup throughout tile lands controlled by the Inca with ideas emanating from Cuzco (Zi6lkowski and Sadowski 1989; Zuidema 1990; Bauer 1998). In more material, economic terms, tile Inca ruler stood at the center of an Andean-wide system of exchange and distribution of goods that functioned very successfully Witllout a currency and maximized tile advantages to be derived from tile empire's ecological diversity. This system not only endowed the Inca ruler and those who served him with far-reaching economic influence and power, it also articulated the Inca's unique political and religious status (Rowe 1946, 1985a; Murra 1980 [1956]; Masuda et al. 1985; Murra 1986; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988; Var6n Gabai and Florez Espinoza 1997; Julien 1998; Niles 1999). While, over time, there have thus been considerable changes in our understanding of the Incas, going far beyond what is outlined here, one thing has not changed. This is tile universal agreement, beginning with almost the very first news of the Incas to reach the world beyond the Andes, that the polity that Francisco Pizarro and his men had invaded was indeed an empire. For Europeans of the sixteenth century, the empire par excellence was that of Rome, and Rome was therefore the yardstick that came to mind when trying to describe and comprehend the achievement of the Incas. The task undertaken here is to outline some aspects of the extent and the limitations of the understanding of the Incas that was reached in the process. I attempt to integrate some of these early modern perceptions of Rome and the Incas with what might be made of such a comparison by way of enhancing our own contemporary understanding of the Incas.

THE INCA EMPIRE The Incas themselves described their land as Tahuantinsuyo, the "four interdependent regions." Like Andean societies in general, so Tahuantinsuyo was organized into upper and lower moieties designated as anan and urin. Chinchasuyo to the north was thus paired with Collasuyo to the south, and Antisuyo, the Amazonian region, was paired with Condesuyo on the Pacific coast. The capital

Cuzco, another Rome? city of Cuzco likewise was divided into moieties, and here as elsewhere, anan and urin referred both to a geographical area and to a group of people. Throughout the empire, lands set aside for tile uses of the Inca and the state religion produced crops to be accumulated in state storehouses, cottcas, wluch surrounded provincial capitals tlll"oughout the lengtll and breadth of the Andes. The cottcas also contained clothing and weaponry for the Inca's soldiers, as well as ceremonial textiles and other luxury goods for the Inca to distribute to subjects, fi'iends, and allies. In short, the Inca ruler stood at the apex of an empire-wide network of giftgiving and redistribution in which all his subjects participated in some capacity, and tllanks to which, as the invading Spaniards were astOIushed to observe, scarcity and hunger were practically unknown in the Andes. Discontent, however, was far from unknown. The Spaniards therefore found willing allies among Inca subjects, such as the Canari in southern Ecuador, who had recently rebelled, or like tile Guancas, who would have liked to have done so. In addition, there were profound rivalries and rifts among tile Inca royal lineages, some members of which aligned tllemselves witll the invaders, only to realize, when it was too late, that tllese invaders had no intention of taking away their loot and returning to Spain. To be an Inca ruler amounted, inter alia, to founding a lineage. Such a lineage consisted of all a ruler's children, other than his successor, along Witll tlleir descendants; the successor would found a lineage of his own. A deceased Inca ruler's lineage, beginning with that of Manco Capac, the legendary founder of the empire, and ending with those of Viracocha, Pachacuti, Tupa Inca Yupanqui, and Guayna Capac,2 inherited their ancestor's property, which they administered, as it were, on his behalf. With the proceeds, they supervised the cult of their ancestor's mummified body and of its guauque or brother, and preserved the memory of his deeds, which were recited by poets and quipucamayocs, remembrancers, during festivals (Salol11on 1994: 315-52; van de Guchte 1996: 256-68}.3 Through their lineages, accordingly, the dead Incas continued to influence the affairs of the living. Seated on throne stools in the main square of Cuzco, their mummified bodies received regular offerings of food and drink, along with the homage of their descendants. These descendants, meanwhile, employed tlleir ancestor's name, along with his palaces, landed estates, and retainers, to pursue their own interests in imperial politics. This is what the Spaniards discovered upon capturing the Inca Atahuallpa. Not long before, Atahuallpa had defeated his brother and rival Guascar in a bitter civil war. Widely differing accounts were given of the nature of the enmity between the two brothers. According to one of these, Atahuallpa's mother was a member of Capac Ayllu, the lineage of his great grandf.1ther the Inca Pachacuti, which belonged to Anan Cuzco. Guascar, on the other hand, had espoused the interests ofUrin Cuzco, in part because his mother belonged to a lineage tj'om there (Rowe 1985a: 35-73; Betanzos 1987: 1,46, pp. 193b ff.}.4 The Spaniards thus arrived at a moment of profound inner

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crisis in the empire, which they were able to exploit to the utmost, given that the followers of Guascar were initially willing to welcome them as saviors.

SPANISH PERSPECTIVES: ROME AND THE INCAS Europe offered no parallels of any kind to a social and geographical structure such as Tahuantinsuyo. Even the figure of Atahuallpa, with whom the Spaniards had conversed during the long months of his captivity, was hard to fathom. Pizarro's secretary Francisco de Xerez (1985: 91), for example, viewed Atahuallpa as a proud and overbearing chieftain of barbarians. 5 The humanist historian Francisco Lapez de Gomara, for whom the Americas were merely raw material for Spanish empire building, thought similarly. On the other hand, the peace, order, and abundance prevailing in the lands controlled by the Incas led some observers to adduce the Roman empire as a comparison that could shed light on "how the Incas governed." Rome was on people's minds for a variety of reasons. In Spain, for the Catholic Kings, and more so for Charles V, the Roman past provided precedents and models for imperial expansion in Europe and overseas. There were thus reasons both practical and scholarly for investigating not only Roman history, but also Roman legislation, city planning, architecture, attire, and public ritual. 6 At issue was a sense of continuity with the Roman past, and the possibility of reactivating aspects ofit in the present. The Incas, on the other hand, were obviously not continuous with Rome. What mattered was that Roman antecedents were perceived as helpful in understanding certain aspects ofInca administration, urbanization, and religion, because the Roman past exemplified an ideal of political life, and could therefore be used to articulate observations about other civilizations, including the Incas. Several Spaniards, impressed by Inca city planning, public order, and material culture, turned to Rome for comparisons. These aspects of Inca culture and political culture were especially important in the early years after the invasion because they could be appreciated with no or only minimal recourse to language. The cbinparisons mattered in cognitive terms because they enabled historians to recogllize Tahuantinsuyo as an empire, and the Incas as its legitimate rulers, senores naturales. 7 Furthermore, comparing Incas and Romans opened up a descriptive and analytical vocabulary that made it possible to introduce a certain order into the multifarious facts about the Incas that were being collected in the Andes. Even the historian Juan de Betanzos, who had married the former consort of Atahuallpa, spoke Quechua, and was immersed in the Inca past, thought of Rome when describing the Inca capital, and thus wrote that Cuzco was "the most distinguished city in the land, which all the other towns had to serve and to revere, in the same way as happened with our Rome in antiquity" (Betanzos 1987: I, 16, p. 79b). Cuzco stood at the center ofa network of roads that reached out to the four parts of the empire, so that it was possible for Inca

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postal runners to cover the distance from there to Quito in eight days or less (Betanzos 1987: 1,22). Here also Roman comparisons came to mind: the provinces of the empire of the Incas seemed comparable to Roman provinces, and their road system appeared to match that of the Romans (for more details, see MacCormack 1999). Elsewhere, historians likened Inca social and religious organization to Roman counterparts. An anonymous Jesuit author, followed later by Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a noble Inca lady and a conquistador, compared Inca and Roman decimal organization (Garcilaso de la Vega 1963 [1609]: chs. 11, 14, 38; Jesuita ananimo 1968: 168a). Juan de Betanzos thought that nobly born Inca ladies were comparable to Roman matrons, and his contemporary Pedro Cieza de Lean, like many others after him, thought that the Inca chosen women of the Sun resembled Roman Vestal Virgins (Betanzos 1987: I, 21, p. 109a; Cieza de Lean 1986: 124; also Jesuita ananimo 1968: 158a). Elsewhere, Inca ritual specialists reminded historians of Roman priests, while the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, which housed deities from conquered provinces, was compared to the Pantheon of Rome which antiquarians described as being "sacred to all the gods."8 Andean creation stories, involving a major cataclysm such as a flood, seemed to resemble the flood story recounted by the Roman poet Ovid (Cieza de Lean 1986: ch. 3, p. 4),9 while Inca deities seemed to be generally reminiscent of the deities of the ancient Mediterranean world and of Roman domestic worship.1O In a more political context, the severity ofInca laws, and their rigorous enforcement by Inca nobles, struck Cieza as analogous to the virtuous severity of Roman republican statesmen. At century's end, Garcilaso de la Vega compared the city of Cuzco to the city of Rome, and discovered Roman antecedents for Inca imperial power and for the manner in which it was wielded (Pailler and Pailler 1992). Comparisons between Incas and Romans ranged from the more practical side of life, such as roads and buildings, to the more intangible, such as religious and governmental practices. Along with the expanding range of what was taken in about the Incas, the concepts of empire that were perceived as present in Inca Peru became more sophisticated and more penetrating. Comparing Inca and Roman roads and buildings amounted to recognizing the existence of a certain political coherence in the lands that the Incas controlled. But when, on the other hand, Cieza perceived a common element between the chosen women of the Sun of the Incas and Roman Vestal Virgins, or when the Anonymous Jesuit compared Inca and Roman decimal organization, what was being recognized was the existence of an Inca moral, social, and political order that had completely escaped earlier observers. This issue acquired some political significance when in the 1570s the Viceroy Toledo shaped the governance of colonial Peru into its definitive contours. At this point, it became fashionable, by way of solidifYing Spanish claims of sovereignty in the Andes, to describe the Incas as tyrants. As the historian Pedro

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Sabine MacCormack Sarmiento de Gamboa (1965 [1572]: ch. 70, p. 274b), having reviewed the wars and inner conflicts that punctuated the history of the Incas, expressed it so graphically in 1571: [The Incas 1were not content to act as evil tyrants against the people of these lands, but they also acted thus towards their own sons, brothers, kinsfolk and blood relatives, and in contravention of their own laws and statutes they took pride in behaving as the worst and most pertinaciolls, treaty- breaking tyrants. 11

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In short, while the Incas might have to their credit a series of sweeping conquests, Sarmiento was not prepared to view the polity that they had forged as a political or civilized society, and least of all as an imperial one. For what was lacking, in Sarmiento's view, was any form of personal freedom, and therefore the rule of law. Such interpretations of Inca history were designed to justify Spanish imperial claims by endowing the Spanish presence in the Andes with precisely those civilizing features that allegedly the Incas had lacked. But not everyone agreed. Garcilaso de la Vega, who appears to have known of or read Sarmiento's history, responded to his charges by highlighting the benevolence of Inca rulers: their ability to keep all their subjects fed, housed, and clothed; their solicitude for the poor; their restraint in war, and their strict adherence to the rule of law. His Incas, beginning with the legendary founder Manco Capac, had fulfilled to perfection the mandate that had been imposed on them by "their father the Sun," which was to teach and nourish the subjects that the Sun had entrusted to them. However, while this divine mandate enjoined that the Inca be Huacchacuyac, the "lover and benef.1ctor of the poor" (Garcilaso de la Vega 1963: 1,24, p. 37b), it also endowed the Inca with the authority to use overwhelming force, to demand unconditional obedience, and to tolerate no equal. Of necessity, therefore, Inca governance entailed loss of freedom, much as had been the case regarding the governance of Rome. Roman warfare against enemies and rebels had been relentless, while allies, as according to Vergil's famous dictum (Ameid VI.853) to spare the humble and beat down tlle proud,12 had been treated with moderation. The Incas, so Garcilaso was not alone in suggesting, were no different. It was thus possible for Garcilaso to liken the Inca founder Manco Capac to Caesar Augustus, the founder, as it were, of the empire of Rome. Earlier Spanish historians of the Incas liked to comment, with a certain puzzlement, on the elaborate ritual and the superhuman honors that sll1'rounded the Inca ruler who was so f.1r exalted over the rest of humankind that no one dared so much as to look at his face or to appear before him without carrying a gift.13 Garcilaso's Romanization of Inca rulers spelled out that what the invaders had witnessed was in no sense the savage splendor of a barbarian chieftain,14 but the majesty of a legitimate ruler carrying out the divinely sanctioned imperial mandate of expanding his realm, and of caring for and preserving his people. These were precisely the virtues which Spanish political theorists, amidst frequent appeals to Roman precedent, were

Cuzco, another Rome? advocating for the consideration of the rulers of the Spanish empire. 15 When, in 1639, Antoruo de la Calancha, the Augustinian chronicler of Peru and of tlle Incas, described the benevolence of Inca rulers toward their subjects as an example to be imitated by the kings of Spain, the argument begun by Sarmiento and his school had come full circle.

INCA PERSPECTIVES: COMPLEMENTARITY AND ORDER All these early modern endeavors to describe the Inca empire shared one featll1'e: tllls was that the Inca empire was viewed from the outside, and as a state tllat had fallen prey to external attack. The Incas, on the other hand, looked at Tahuantinsuyo ft'om within, as a self-contained and complete religious, social, and political universe. To explain the rise and f.1ll of their empire in light of causes external to that empire as Europeans were prone to do would thus have made little sense to them. Furthermore, the tensions and conflicts among the Inca lineages of Upper and Lower Cuzco that Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa found so reprehensible did not appear in such a light to the Incas themselves, because they perceived both nature and human society in the light of tensions, conflicts, and complementarities. The pll1'pose of Tahuantinsuyo was not to eliminate these, but to activate them in some meaningful f.1shion. An Andean myth of origins that was recorded in many versions in the COll\'se of the sixteenth centll\'y described a first creation that was in some absolute respect flawed. There had been no light of sun, moon, and stars. Or there had been no food. Or the cataclysm that so much interested the Spanish because of its supposed resemblance to Noah's Flood or some similar event in gentile history had brought the first Andean world order to an end. Next, the myth recounted how two companions or sons of the Creator Contiti Viracocha, who had the epithet Pachayachachic "Maker of the World," traveled up and down the Andes calling forth the people whom the Maker had formed, or painted in clay, from the lakes and caves, mountains and springs, where they had been placed to await their entry into life. Juan de Betanzos was told that, standing with his back to the rising sun, the Maker sent one of his companions to his left to Condesuyo, and the other to his right to Andesuyo. Then the Maker himself, "going on the royal road which traverses the highlands towards Cajamarca,"16 walked toward Cuzco, calling forth the people (Betanzos 1987: I, 2, p. 13b). Crist6bal de Molina, who served as parish priest for Indians in Cuzco from 1564, heard a slightly different version of this story. The Maker TitiJ'iracocha "Incomprehensible God" Pachayachachic had two sons. Having painted and made the different nations, each with its own characteristics, attire, and language, and having sent them underground to where they were to emerge, the Maker travel cd "on the road of the highlands" to call them forth. But finding that some of them had rebelled, he tUl'l1ed these into stone. Later, he sent his older son Ymaymana Viracochan "on the road of the Andes and the mountains

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Sabine MaeCormaclz of the entire land" to give names to the trees, flowers, and fruits the people were to have. The other son Tocapu Viracochan "Maker in whom all things are included" was sent "on the road of the lowlands" to give names to rivers and trees, and to give to the people their fruits and flowersY All this happened in some remote age when there was as yet no Tahuantinsuyo. But that is not the whole story. For the Maker traveled on the "royal road" that went via Cuzco to Cajamarca, and his sons or helpers traveled on the roads that traversed the Andean highlands and the coastal lowlands from south to north. These were the very same roads that the Incas had constructed and that joined together the four parts of the empire. Nonetheless, the versions of the Andean myth of origins that were recorded in Cuzco recount that the roads already existed at the time when the Incas themselves were being called forth by the Maker from their cave at Pacariqtambo. 18 The Maker thus created the very world which the Incas, in shaping their empire, created over again. Inca rulers, moreover, were endowed with some of the same powers that distinguished the Maker. The Maker's creation, as we have seen, was preceded by an initial world order, and took place in two stages. First the Maker "painted" the nations that were to come into existence, and then his companions or sons called them forth from the land where they were to dwell. This pattern of creation was replicated exactly when Inca Pachacuti founded Cuzco, or, more precisely, refounded it. According to Inca traditions, the Incas had come to Cuzco as newcomers and had lived there alongside the original population. This coexistence came to an end when the neigh boring Chanca invaded and, having ousted the Inca ruler Viracocha, were defeated by Viracocha's son Pachacuti. By way of inaugurating a new epoch, Inca Pachacuti removed the original population ofCuzco to the nearby village ofCayocache (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1965: ch. 30; Betanzos 1987: I, 16, p. 79b, cf. 11, p. 49a). Next, having surveyed the land for quarries and materials for construction, he "outlined the city and had it made of clay models exactly as he thought of making and building it." Once the original houses had been torn down and the ground leveled, the Inca with his own hands, along with the rest of the lords of the city, had a cord brought; he indicated and measured with the cord the lots and houses that were to be made and their foundations and structures. With all of this prepared, the foundations were dug and work proceeded from there l9 until, finally, the Inca assigned the houses that had been built to their residents. In this way, he transtormed Cuzco into the imperial city that belonged to the Incas alone. On a subsequent and parallel occasion, the Inca nobles sought out Pachacuti in order formally to name him as their ruler. They found the Inca "painting and sketching certain bridges and the way in which they were to be and how they were to be constructed, and in the same way he sketched certain roads that went forth from a settlement and led to those bridges and rivers" (Betanzos 1987: I, 17, p. 81 b). Once inaugurated as Inca, Pachacuti launched a military campaign, in the course of which the roads and bridges that he had "painted" were built along the route that his army took, precisely as he had planned them.20

Cuzeo, another Rome? In short, tile refounding of Cuzco inaugurated a new epoch in the same way that Contiti Viracocha's creation did so. More specifically, where Contiti Viracocha painted tile people who were to populate the land, and tllen his helpers called tllem forth to life, Inca Pachacuti made models of the Cuzco that his followers were to build, in tile same way that he "painted" the roads and bridges tllat his army later brought into existence. This painting and modeling by tile Inca of things that were to be created became, it is possible to say, something of a principle ofInca governance. When thus Pachacuti's successor Tupa Inca Yupanqui planned his estate ofChinchero, he himself first made a design of it, and then tllis design was measured out with cords by "geometers and master builders," much as had happened in tile planning and building of Cuzco. Sacsayhuaman, the fortress above Cuzco, was built once Tupa Inca Yupanqui had "modeled and made it in his imagination." Years later, the identical procedure was followed when Atahuallpa's plans for his imperial estate of Carangue were executed (Betanzos 1987: I, 38, p. 173ab, I1, 5, p. 215ab). The accounts we have of creation in the Andes and ofInca planning and construction are in Spanish,21 but they can be supplemented to a certain extent by early colonial Quechua lexicography. The Andean creator was frequently described as Paehayaehaehie "god, maker of the world," or Paehaeamae, "giver of being to the world," where paeha is world. 22 The verb yaehay comprises not only the meaning "to make," but also knowing and teaching: the Maker taught and instructed his helpers to bring forth the people whom he had "painted," and the Inca with his painting and modeling taught those who built Cuzco and tile roads and bridges ofTahuantinsuyo. Ca1'flay, translated in the Creator's epithet as "to give being," comprises the meanings of creating anew, commanding, and accomplishing something. In addition, cognates refer to having ability or talent, and to filling an office or accomplishing a task such as the task of governing. Camaehieoe thus is a governor, while eamaehisea is a law or precept (see Santo Tomas 1991: 114r, 139v-140r; Gonzalez Holguin 1954: 46a-48b, 360b-362a). Here also, the activities of the Maker and the Inca converge. Juan de Betanzos (1987: I, chs. 21-2), like several other historians, wrote down a series of laws attributed to the Inca Pachacuti, introducing each law with the phrase "he ordained and commanded," which could be translated with ea may (see also Murlla 1986; Guaman Poma de Ayala 1987: 182-92). Subsequently the Inca taught his laws to his vassals (Betanzos 1987: 1,23, p. 119a), and this could be translated as yaehay. In sum, the generating and creative work of the Andean Maker, who by his mere word wrought and taught great things (Cieza de Le6n 1986: ch. 5, pp. 8-9), was matched by the activity of the Inca, and these divine and imperial activities appear to have been covered by the same vocabulary. The Andean Creator who appears in the sixteenth-century myths of origins was described as a unique and "incomprehensible god" (CristobaI de Molina 1943: 53).23 Similarly, the Inca was a unique figure, and this was expressed in the title ~apa Inca, which the sources translate as "unique lord," or "king of this land. "24 Another title expressing the singular and unique stature of the Inca was

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Capac (Betanzos 1987: 1,27, p. 132 ab). The Creator and the Inca both had helpers, companions, and sons, but their staUls was a lesser one. Unique lordship was not unheard of in the Andes before the Incas became powerful: for example, the lord of Collasuyo was titled 9apana, but once the Inca rulers were launched on their imperial course, from the time of Pachacuti, such alternative unique lords could not be tolerated. As the qttipttcamayocswho in 1542 gave evidence before Vac a de Castt·o succinctly noted, what the Inca wanted was that otller potentates "should recognize him as the universal lord of the entire land" (Collapifla, Supno, y otros Quipucamayos, Vega 1974: 35-6 ).25 In the same vein Cieza and others repeatedly observed that the Incas were willing to accept a rival potentate's peaceful submission, the point being that Inca expansion was not driven by a warrior ideal but by a concept of universal sovereignty. It was in defense ofthis concept that resistance and rebellion were countered with all possible force and peaceful surrender was met with reward (Betanzos 1987: Il, 5-9; 1,19, p. 96a; Cieza de Lean 1986: ch. 17). When, accordingly, Pachacuti had been crowned by his father with the imperial headband, he decided to subjugate certain towns and provinces beneath tlle sway of Cuzco and "to remove the title of Capac, that was held by everyone of those little lords of those towns and provinces. There was to be only one Capac and he was that one" (Betanzos 1987: I, 18, p. 87a). Similarly, the conquest of Collasuyo was undertaken because Pachacuti had heard of its ruler Ruqui <;:apana who described himselfas "King and unique lord, son of the Sun," these being the very titles that Pachacuti claimed exclusively for himself. The point was driven home once more in Pachacuti's laws. These reminded conquered potentates that they were now vassals of the Inca and that they were no longer lords of those provinces, but the Inca - who was the only lord - was and was to give them their wives with his own hand, and distribute their lands. Furthermore, lords subject to the Inca were not to be carried about in litters unless these had been bestowed by the Inca. Nor were they to wear fine textiles or personal adornments other than those that had been given by the Inca because "there ought to be no equality, and they should be known as vassals, and should not want to be the equals of the lords ofCuzco" (Betanzos 1987: 1,20, p. 100a).26 In relation to his subjects, the Inca thus stood in a position of unconditional preeminence, just as Cuzco was "the ruling city,"27 where the roads f.·om the four parts of the empire converged. In a symbolic and also in a practical sense, Cuzco contained Tahuantinsuyo. The sand that covered the central square, for example, had been transported up tt·om the Pacific coast (Polo de Ondegardo 1940 [1561]: 171) and the band of gold that lined the outer walls of the Temple of the Sun had been brought as booty from Antisuyo (Betanzos 1987: 1,28, p. 136ab). State settlers from conquered regions lived in the vicinity of Cuzco and raised crops that were native to their former homelands (Betanzos 1987: 1,24, p. 125b, 26, p. 128a).28 Lords from all parts ofTahuantinsuyo resided in Cuzco, and their deities were kept in the Temple of the Sun. Such ceremonial representations of the Inca and his capital went hand in hand with political and economic reality.

CttzcoJ another Rome?

The presence of subject lords and deities in Cuzco served as surety for tlle good conduct of tlleir people. Like provincial capitals, so Cuzco was surrounded by collcasin which goods and foodstuffs offered to tlle Inca as gifts, or be it as tt"ibute, were stored. These commodities, rigorously accounted for, were used by the Inca to supply his armies and reward his retainers and subjects in a vast network of ceremonial gift-exchange (Betanzos 1987: I, 13, p. 60a, p. 75a).

INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS: NEGOTIATION AND CONFLICT AMONG CUZCO'S INCA LINEAGES Resembling the Creator, conversing with his "f.1ther the Sun," and bestowing gifts, dignity, and status on lesser lords, the Inca's preeminence over all human beings was presented to the subjects of the empire as absolutely unquestionable. Witllin the city ofCuzco, on the other hand, and in the company of his kinsfolk, the Inca's position was, not infrequently, subject to negotiations that were carefully articulated in ceremony and, on occasion, in ritualized conflict. In short, outside Cuzco, and in relation to everyone who was not a member of an Inca lineage, the Inca claimed exclusive control of violence. But within Cuzco, and among the Inca lineages, this claim was a problematic one. Take the ceremony in which the Inca triumphed over his enemies. Inca generals, like generals in the Roman empire, won victories not in their own right but on behalf of the ruler. In the triumph, therefore, victorious generals, members of the Inca royal lineages, brought their prisoners and spoils before the Inca ruler, who trampled underfoot the garments and insignia of the lords who had been defeated in his name (triumph over Soras on battlefield: Betanzos 1987: I, 19, p. 93ab; combined triumph: I, 25, p. 126ab). This trampling underfoot at the same time betokened the Inca's acceptance of the service that had been performed for him, and that therefore required reward. When thus Inca Pachacuti's sons Yamque Yupanqui and Tupa Inca Yupanqui returned from a victorious campaign in Chinchasuyo, Yamque Yupanqui, who was the older, requested the aged Pachacuti to trample underfoot the enemy insignia. In accepting to do so, Pachacuti rewarded Yamque Yupanqui by placing his own imperial headband on his son's head, thereby designating him as his successor. Then the old Inca entered Cuzco enthroned on a litter between both his sons (Betanzos 1987: I, 25, p. 126b). Here was a successfully orchestrated triumphal ceremony: or, at any rate, that is how the historical tradition that was preserved by Pachacuti's lineage described it. 29 On an earlier occasion, however, this same ceremony had not worked out so harmoniously. According to traditions preserved by the lineage of Inca Pachacuti, and perhaps by some other lineages, the youthful Pachacuti, Inca Viracocha's younger son, saved Cuzco from an invading army of the neigh boring Chancas, while his father and older brother Urco took flight. In the battle, Pachacuti was helped by supernatural warriors who had been promised to him in a vision that

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Sabine MacCormack he saw of the Creator, or of the Sun, the ancestral deity of the Incas. Returning from battle victorious, Pachacuti requested his father to trample on tlle insignia of the enemy he had defeated. But Viracocha refused, because he wanted tllis act to be performed by his older son and designated successor. In due course, the Inca nobles constrained Viracocha to disown Urco and to crown Pachacuti. Once endowed witll tlle imperial headband, Pachacuti exacted vengeance for his earlier humiliation and ordered his fatller to drink chicha out of a soiled cup, tllereby profaning his own sacred majesty: Viracocha, seeing what the new lord commanded him to do took the cup and without saying one word drank the chicha and having drunk it he abased himself and bowed before him, and asked his pardon, to which the new lord said he had no reason to forgive him . . . During all of this, Viracocha Inca was on the ground bowing his head before him and responding from time to time to what the new lord was saying, Hochaimi, which is to say, It is my f.1Ult and I know my sin. (Betanzos 1987: I, 17, pp. 83b fr.)

The potential conflicts surrounding tlle Inca succession were manifold. There was, as revealed by tlle two ceremonies of triumph we have reviewed, conflict among siblings, as well as tlle generational conflict between sons and fatllers. These conflicts were sharpened by competition among tlle Inca lineages, who did not necessarily agree as to who should succeed, and this in turn encouraged subject nations to rebel (see D'Altroy, this volume). Such, at any rate, were the threats to continuity and stability that Inca Pachacuti foresaw in making arrangements for his own death and obsequies. When he died, so the aged Pachacuti decreed, the lords of the city should be called to the palace in secret without letting the people know of his death, and when all were gathered there, then at that time they should choose as Inca and lord in his place the onc whom he had named, and that his eldest son Yamque Yupanqui should name him once more, or should become Inca himselfifhe so wished. Then the new lord should go forth to the square with the majesty pertaining to the Inca and they should publish the election of the new lord. This done, they should also publish his own death, so that the people knowing that there was a new lord would not rebel. (Betanzos 1987: 1,30, p. 141a)

In the event, while Pachacuti was still alive Yamque Yupanqui yielded his place to his younger brother Tupa Inca Yupanqui, but not without a noteworthy injunction. According to Betanzos (1987: 1,27, p. 131b), having placed his own imperial headband on Tupa Inca's head, Yamque Yupanqui told him that "although he was now Inca, he must swear according to the use and custom that they had, that he would obey the Sun and that he would not impose subjection on the lords of Cuzco." A year after the ruler's death, a month-long ceremony, the Purucaya, was to take place in Cuzco. This included a ritual battle "representing the wars which the deceased lord had fought during his life time." At the same time, however, this battle, in which Anan Cuzco was expected to defeat Urin Cuzco, was

Cuzco, another Rome? designed to ratifY the existing social order, given that tlle ruling Inca was a member of Anan Cuzco, while tlle lineages ofUrin Cuzco, both in ritual terms and in terms of material power, acted as his "younger brotllers" and assistants. 3o The existing social order, however, was precisely what came under tllreat when, shortly before the Spaniards invaded, tlle brotllers Atahuallpa and Guascar confronted each other. Their father Guayna Capac appears to have been undecided as to who should succeed him, with tlle result tllat Atahuallpa became Inca in Quito and Guascar became Inca in Cuzco. As his enemies reported matters, Guascar was intent on creating a new, dominant lineage of Urin Cuzco and to confiscate tlle landed estates and otller wealth of Anan Cuzco for his own use , thereby reversing the entire established order. Atahuallpa, meanwhile, established "a new Cuzco in Quito," and aligned himselfwith his mother's lineage of Capac Ayllu, the descendants ofPachacuti. All this likewise entailed a reversal of the established order, if of a very different kind. Two paramount issues of imperial ideology were at stake in these upheavals. The first concerns the understanding of history and the self-perception of the imperial lineages of Cuzco. Accounts of the Inca past that go back to sources favorable to Atahuallpa attribute the founding moment of the Inca empire, when the Chancas were defeated and Cuzco became an imperial city, to Inca Pachacuti. It was Inca Pachacuti who had a divine vision, received supernatural aid in battle, rebuilt Cuzco, and formulated the laws by which the Incas were to govern. Some accounts going back to a source f.'lVorable to Guascar, on the other hand, attribute the laws, some kind of vision, and the building of an imperial Cuzco to the Inca Viracocha. 31 This divergence in perceptions of the past by followers of Atahuallpa and ofGuascar indicates that the ~apa Inca's power was manifest not only in religious and ritual, military and economic terms, but also in the interpretation of the past and in its relevance to the present. Second, Inca Pachacuti had transformed the Inca state: indeed, he had brought it into existence, and this is what his name, which translates as "turning about of the time," indicated (Betanzos 1987: I, 17, p. 83b; cf. Gonz~Hez Holguin 1952: p. 270b). Atahuallpa, who was planning to transplant the population ofCuzco to Quito in order to create a new Cuzco was, potentially at least, another Pachacuti, and this is what his imperial names indicated. According to Betanzos, his followers called him Caccha Pachac1tti Inca Yupanqui Inca. Caccha was the name of the talisman that Pachacuti Inca had created to accompany him and his successors into battle (Betanzos 1987: I, 18, p. 88a; 1,46, p. 195a; 11, 6, p. 221a), while Inca Yupanqui had been Pachacuti's name before he was crowned with the imperial headband. The quipucamayocsofVaca de Castl·o saw Atahuallpa's turning about of the time in relation to the activity of the Andean Creator. For they thought that his imperial name had been Ticcicapac Inca, and tied, meaning "origin, beginning, foundation or cause"32 (Gonzalez Holguin 1952: 340b), was a component of the title of the creator Viracocha. The upheaval envisioned by Guascar, on the other hand, looked back not to Pachacuti Inca, but to the state of aff.1irs that obtained before his time, which is

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perhaps why some sources favorable to him highlight the deeds of Inca Viracocha, whom Inca Pachacuti displaced by forcing him to drink chicha from a soiled cup. The conflict between Guascar and Atahuallpa was thus not simply a conflict between brothers about who was to wield power. Rather, what was being battled out between them and among tlle Inca lineages was what the empire stood for and, indeed, its very nature. It was a time of creation wrapped up in destruction tllat in Andean minds perhaps resembled tlle destruction of tlle original world order that had preceded Viracocha's second creation, the bringing into existence oftlle sun, moon, and stars and also of human beings (see W. Sullivan 1996). The Incas of Cuzco and the inhabitants ofTahuantinsuyo participated in this upheaval in very different terms because tlle past as seen from Cuzco differed profoundly from the past as seen from Tahuantinsuyo at large. This was so not merely in the obvious sense that, in Tahuantinsuyo at large, the Incas were newcomers and conquerors, whereas Cuzco was their home and capital city. The point was that the status of the <;::apa Inca as seen by the Incas of Cuzco and as seen by all otllers was not the same. Outside Cuzco, the Inca's will was law, enforceable by warfare. Within Cuzco, on the other hand, the Inca's will was law only to tlle extent that he could persuade the royal lineages to accept it as such, and the same was true of his view of past and future. Witllin Cuzco, acceptable means of enforcement, so far as the available information goes, seem not to have gone much beyond ceremonial ones. In this sense, the outbreak of warfare between Guascar and Atahuallpa appears to have been a novelty. It was certainly a novelty in ceremonial terms, given that Guascar ordered his followers to trample on the gifts that Atahuallpa had sent him by way of recognizing his status of <;::apa Inca; the act of trampling defined the object being trampled on as pertaining to an enemy (see Betanzos 1987: Il, 2, p. 210a). As a result of that war, once the Spaniards had arrived, the Incas of Cuzco, the followers of Atahuallpa, and the different ethnic groups in Tahuantinsuyo all chose sides differently, and for their own distinct reasons. During that period of cataclysm, Cuzco and Tahuantinsuyo drew apart. This was because, so I have tried to explain, the ideals and realities that the <;::apa Inca represented had very different meanings for the Incas of Cuzco and for all the rest. At the same time, without the <;::apa Inca, there was no Tahuantinsuyo, which is one reason why the Spaniards found it so easy to divide and rule.

ROME AND THE INCAS: CONTEMPORARY COMPAlUSONS The areas in which sixteenth-century historians compared Incas and Romans can serve as a summary of what in their minds the expression of an imperial ideology amounted to. With regard to material life broadly conceived, historians thought of imperial building projects such as roads, temples, and the creation of a capital city. With regard to the order of society, some ofthese historians were interested

Cuzco, another Rome?

in the creation of religious specialists, be tlley Inca priests and Roman pontifices, or women chosen for the service of ilie Sun and Vestal Virgins. Finally, iliere was the ordering of society at large, and tlle projection of moral and legal precepts toward subject populations. In my discussion of Inca imperial ideology, on ilie otller hand, I have departed from tllese sixteentll-century tllemes in order to focus on imperial tlleology and ceremony, my reason being iliat, Witll regard to Roman imperial ideology, tllese are tlle areas of enquiry iliat have proved most illuminating in recent decades (Alfcildi 1970; see also Weinstock 1971: ch. V; MacCormack 1981; Price 1984). Sixteenth-century scholars were interested in ceremony too, their aim being to describe Roman ceremonial actions, modes of dress, and calendars. The performative aspect of ceremonial activities on tlle otller hand, tlle manner in which a ceremony can spell out political and religious realities, appears to have interested tllem less or not at all. It is tllis latter field, however, that contemporary enquiry has elucidated most successfully, and tllat I have explored Witll regard to tlle Incas. It remains to sketch, however briefly, a pair ofcomparisons between Incas and Romans in tllis more contemporary idiom. In Rome, as among tlle Incas, tlle imperial succession was problematic in at least two respects. In tile first place, more often than not, tlle question as to who should succeed, and for what reason, had more than one answer. During tlle earlier second century, tlle period tllat Edward Gibbon so eloquently described as being graced by "the fair prospect of universal peace," an emperor was able to solve this problem by nominating a successor during his life time, and adopting him into the imperial family (Gibbon 1896: ch. 1, p. 8; Beranger 1973: 137-52). The Incas, notably the Inca Pachacuti, employed a similar strategy. However, perhaps events after the death of Guayna Capac, the father of Guascar and Atahuallpa, were more characteristic of Inca successions, even tllOugh, as we have seen, this particular succession was marked by its own unique aspirations and conflicts. In Rome, similarly, bloodshed and even civil war not infrequently accompanied changes of emperor. This was why, secondly, in Rome as in the Andes, measures were taken to try to keep the death of an emperor secret until arrangements for the accession of his successor were complete. Indeed, the ceremony of consecratio, imperial divinization, consisted of an interlocking series of steps whereby the deceased emperor receded from terrestrial affairs by degrees, while meanwhile his successor moved into place. Similarly, Inca Pachacuti enjoined that the first mourning for his death should be entirely private to allow his successor to assume his position undisturbed. Indeed, Inca funerary procedures lasted for a nlll year, at the end of which the deceased Inca was invoked as residing with his Father the Sun. The final act of the n1l1erary drama consisted of the ritual battle in which Anan Cuzco combated Urin Cuzco in the capital city's main square, the expectation being that Anan would win, thereby perpetuating the existing social and political order. In short, in Rome as among the Incas, tile ceremony ofimperial n1l1eral and accession projected the idea of continuity and stability at precisely the time when matters were most discontinuous and unstable. 33

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Both the Roman and the Inca empires came to an end, albeit in very different ways. The decline and fall of Rome extended over generations, and if we include Byzantium, as Gibbon did, the process can be said to have extended over centuries. The Inca empire, on the other hand, outiasted the Spanish invasion by only thirty-eight years. To examine tilis contrast would take anotiler essay, and so I would like to conclude witil the afterlife of Rome and tile Incas. The authority of imperial Rome by far outiasted its military and administrative power. In Italy, Gaul, and Spain, Roman legal principles and notarial procedures remained operative under Germanic kings, and tile history of imperial Rome persisted in some people's memories as an indispensable point of reference (F. Sclmeider 1926; Mazzarino 1966; Wes 1967; see also Moreland, tilis volume). Throughout Europe, Roman time reckoning remained authoritative for generations after tile fall of tile city, while in Spain, an "era" generally considered to refer to tile Romans was in use until tile fourteentil century (GinzelI914: 175-8). This happened because literate Latin speakers retained control of tile pen. In tile Andes, by contrast, tile oral traditions of Inca poets and tile knot records of tile histories of tile Inca lineages tilat were preserved by tile quipucamayocs were replaced by records in written Spanish within a generation. This contrast highlights some fundamental differences between Incas and Romans. The Inca empire was more short lived than tile Roman. More crucial perhaps is tile fact that becoming c;apa Inca remained the prerogative of members of the Inca lineages, whereas in Rome, after the Julio-Claudian family died out, men not from Rome, and indeed not from Italy, became emperors. This was because in Rome, by the late first century CE, a military and administrative career structure had come into existence that was open to provincials and tilat could lead to the top. Such was not the case among the Incas. When Atahuallpa had been captured by the Spaniards, and the Inca lineages were divided against each other, no one was in a position to assume the authority of the c;apa Inca in a convincing manner. In a sense, tile projection ofCuzco all over Tahuantinsuyo, and the manner in which Cuzco contained Tahuantinsuyo, had been all too successful, not insufficiently successful: for the authority of the c;apa Inca was accepted as the unique thing the Incas had claimed it was, and no one stepped into the Inca ruler's shoes. 34 On the other hand, the Incas were, and still are, remembered among Andean people, and this is not, or not primarily, because their doings entered into the written records of the invaders. Indeed, these memories are emblematic, ratller than, in some strict sense, historical. Throughout Peru and Bolivia, the Incas are thought to have brought water to different communities, and to have organized its distribution by means of irrigation canals. They are also remembered for having introduced the cultivation of certain crops, in particular maize, even though irrigation canals and tile cultivation of maize in the Andes predate the Incas by millennia. But the point is, the definitive social and political order that people like to look back to is that of the Inca. That they were the creators of such an order is precisely what the Incas in tlleir day endeavored to communicate to

Cuzco, another Rome?

their subjects. By way of accounting for how things actually are in this present, some towns and villages in the Andes produce a play every year that represents the death of the Inca Atahuallpa at the hands of the Spaniards, text and action being adjusted periodically to respond to concerns of tlle time. In addition, stories are told that the Inca is not entirely dead, but is hidden, and will one day return to restore Tahuantinsuyo (Lara 1957; Ossio 1973; MacCormack 1988; Itier 1995; Escalante and Valderrama 1997). In the early years after tile invasion the Spaniards were told, not infrequentiy, about Inca atrocities. But by tile beginning of the seventeenth century, such memories had been supplanted by tileir exact opposite. From tilat time onward, what regional lords chose to remember was how, in those better days of the past, they had been included within tile Inca courtiy hierarchy and how they had represented the Inca in various capacities. The Andean historians Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Sakamaygua tims both recalled how the Inca had honored tileir noble forebears who had been sent by him as ambassadors to greet tile Spaniards. Similar recollections were cherished by the Andean lord Don Fernando Ayra de Arriutu in a document of 1638, in which he requested from the Spanish crown the right to display a coat of arms. This would be a fitting complement, so Don Fernando suggested in his document, to honors received by his ancestors from tile Incas (Guaman Poma de Ayala 1987: 375-6; Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamque Sakamaygua 1993: fol. lr-v).35 Such memories, irrespective of their truth or fictionality, speak volumes about a renewed respect in Spanish Peru for Inca imperial achievements. A ntrther and telling example of Andean incorporation into the Inca world after the destruction ofTahuantinsuyo comes from Quito. For it was in Quito that in the earlier seventeenth century the Jesuit Anello Oliva learned of a myth which recounted that Manco Capac, the founder of the first Inca lineage, was himself descended from a lord who had been at home not in Cuzco but in those northern parts (Anello Oliva 1998: 41-59).36 In this sense also, the projection of Cuzco on to Tahuantinsuyo had been very successntl indeed, but now in a positive sense. As with the idea of Eternal Rome, which lived on during the European middle ages and beyond, when the imperial power of the Romans was long gone, so with the Incas. They are alive to this day in the minds of Andean people.

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Notes

Part I Sources, approaches, definitions 1 Certainly tlus understanding of an intemal state boundary versus an extemal imperial boundary implies a notion of tile "natural" boundaries of states that is deeply imbricated in tile concept of tile nation-state, witll all its attendant difficulties. Here tile discussion ofT. Mitchell (1991), among others, seems germane. 1 The shadoJII empires 1 Foreign dynasties tllat conquered north China such as the Toba Wei, Khitan Liao, Jurchen ]in, Mongol Yuan, and tile Manchu Qing (all of tribal origin themselves) had no such compunctions about continually interfering in steppe politics. By using "divide and rule" policies that included coopting nearby frontier tribes, maintaining open trade policies, and by mounting frequent steppe campaigns against tribes that appeared on the verge of uniting Mongolia, they were generally successful in inhibiting or disrupting empire-building by the steppe nomad tribes. This was due in part to their systems of political organization which left military and frontier aff.1.irs in the hands of men skilled at tribal politics with few of the ideological inhibitions of Confucian bureaucrats that hamstrung frontier policies in native Chinese dynasties such as the Han, Tang, Sung, and Ming (cf. Barfield 1989). 2 Han measurements translate into modern equivalents as follows: Length: 1 pi c 9.24 meters Capacity: I/m or shih ~ 19.9861iters Weight: 1 jill = 244 grams Ajitl of gold was officially valued at 10,000 cash (Loewe 1967: I, 161)

3 The Wari empire of Middle Horizon Peru 1 The Inka, although they had a sophisticated system of keeping records on knotted string khipu (see D'Altroy, this volume, p. 203), had no writing system that can be read by modern historians. Apparently the earlier Wari empire also used flhiplI for record keeping (Conklin 1982). 2 El Nino Southern Oscillation, often referred to in the popular press as El Nino.

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4 The Achaemmid Persian empire 1 Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1987c; Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Kuhrt 1987, 1990, 1991; Kuhrt and Sancisi-Weerdenburg 1988; Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Drijvers 1990, 1991; Sancisi-Weerdenburg et al. 1994. 2 Egypt is the exception although their number have been exaggerated, cf. Briant 1988.

3 Almough me historical problems of mese texts loom large, wim some denying me historicity of me figure of Ezra entirely: cf. Grabbe 1992, 1994; Garbini 1988. 4 The one possible exception is a statue of Darius I, found at Susa, wim a short Old Persian inscription, which may have been originally set up in Egypt. Yet it is not known when tile inscription was placed on me statue, or whetller it was tills statue or a replica which was erected in Egypt; Muscarella 1993/4. 5 For me implications of tills location and tile coherence of me archive as part of tile larger bureaucratic system at Persepolis, see Root 1996: 49 and note 8. 6 Such as tile sealed Aramaic papyri from Samaria (Cross 1963; Gropp 1986; Leitll 1997), tile bullae witll seal impressions from Daskyleion (Akurgal 1956; KaptanBaybartluoglu 1990; Kaptan 1996a, 1996b), forty Egyptian demotic ostraca illustrating rural life at me small site of Manawir, near Douch in Kharga oasis (Chauveau 1996, 1998), and a large collection of Aramaic ostraca, probably from Idumaea (Eph'a1 and Naveh 1996; Lemaire 1996; Lozachemeur and Lemaire 1996). 7 Transeuphratclle: Etudes sur la Syrie-Palestine et Chypre IJEpoque perse 1-, 1989-. Gabalda, Paris 8 For tile new and, at present, unique evidence for state taxation of commercial slupping, see Yardelul994; Briant and Descat 1999. 9 Ceramic vessels indicate more widespread change in social behavior, see Dusinberre 1999. 10 Also relevant in this connection is tile Persian-style tlll"one found at Samaria: Tadmor 1974.

a

5 The Aztec empire alld the Mesoamericall JIIorld system 1 I follow Doyle's definition of empire for conveluence: "Empire, tllen, is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society" (Doyle 1986: 45). For discussion of some of the complexities of defining empire, see tile chapters by Barfield and Moreland. 2 There are problems correlating tile relatively detailed Aztec chronology with less refined chronologies in other parts of Mesoamerica, particularly for the Middle Postclassic period. The extensive coastal exchange networks of the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic Mesoamerican world system largely bypassed central Mexico (Smith and Heath-Smith 1980), and this situation may have continued into the Middle Postclassic period. 3 The historical accuracy or validity of Aztec native history declines as one moves back in time from the Spanish conquest (Davies 1973, 1980). The expansion of the Aztec empire occurred during the final pre-Spanish century, and most scholars agree tllat the basic narrative of which king conquered which area is probably t:1.irly reliable, although doubt can be expressed about issues such as tile relative importance of the three "imperial capitals" (Gillespie 1998). 6 On the edge of empire 1 "A hundred and fifty thousand people were deported, a hundred thousand were killed and many times that number perished. Afterwards, now mat K.1.linga was annexed, the Beloved of tile Gods very earnestly practiced Dhamma, desired Dhamma, and taught Dhamma. On conquering Kalinga, the Beloved of tile Gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered the slaughter, deatll, and deportation of the people is extremely grievous to me Beloved of the Gods, and weighs heavily on his mind ... " (13th Major rock edict, Thapar 1997: 255).

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Notes to pages 157-72 2 As a result, it is difficult to estimate precisely how many inscriptions there are, since different scholars have recorded and counted inscriptions in quite different ways. 3 The early historic texts document four varnas or ranked categories of people. The varna structure grouped people into hierarchically ranked, ritually defined endogamous social units, and forms the basis ofthe South Asian caste system. From highest to lowest rank the four varnas are: Brahmans (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and kings), Vaisyas (merchants), and Sudras (agriculturallaborers and craft producers). 4 The Gupta dynasty persisted as late as 550 CE, but Thapar (1966: 141) has noted that the scale and authority of the state declined dramatically during and after the reign ofSkanda Gupta (455-467 CE), as a result of internal dissension and external invasions from Central Asia. 5 Fa-hsien nonetheless came up with some quite interesting translations that were highly favorable to his monastic brethren. He reported that a pillar in one site contained the following inscription: "King Asoka bestowed the inhabited portion ofthe world on the priesthood of all quarters, and bought it back from them with money; he did this three times" (Fa-hsien 1923: 48, traIlS. M. A. Giles). 6 Nehru described tlus decision in Ius 22 July speech to India's Constituent Assembly. Of choosing tile AsokaIl wheel as symbol, he said, "that wheel is a symbol of India's ancient culture, it is a symbol of tile many tllings tllat India had stood for through tile ages. For my part, I am exceedingl}' happy that in tllis sense indirectly we have associated Witll tllis Flag of ours not only tllis emblem but in a sense the name of Asoka" (1985: 71). 7 An important exception is a newly discovered sculptural panel of a royal figure from the Early Historic monastic site of Sannathi in northern Karnataka. Here a sculpted panel has recently been excavated by the Archaeological Survey oflndia. This depicts a male figure, with an associated Brahmi title inscription "King Asoka"; we do not however know for certain who sponsored this panel or its inscription (Shankar, personal communications, 1999). 8 The remaining "non-royal" inscriptions must be dated solely on stylistic palaeographic evidence, and are thus problematic; royal inscriptions are dated combining palaeographic evidence Witll correspondence to king lists and numismatic chronologies, themselves not without controversy. Note: Recently documented inscriptions from the site of Sannathi in northern Karnataka are not included here, though these tend to date to the second century C E, and not the early Satavahana period (Howell 1995). 9 "Rock-cut" in South Asian archaeological parlance refers to teatures (e.g., caves, treestanding structures, stupas, columns, chambers) constructed through excavation into the faces of stone outcrops or cliffS, a highly labor-intensive construction technique. A second century C E inscription ti'om Kanheri mentions specialized architects, stone masons, and polishers associated with their construction. 10 The inscription describes the king as the lord of Asika, Asa/m, Mu/a/m, Surasthra, Kt/kllr, Apamnta, Amlpa, Vidabha, A/mm, Al'anti and as lord of the mountains of Villdhya, RikshaJ>at, Paripatm, Sahiya, Krislmagiri, Mach, Siritalla, Ma/aya, Mahwdra, Sctagiri, alld Cha/lOm, whose "army drank the water of three oceans," and who "entirely destroyed the Khakharata [Ksaharata] race ... restored the f.1me of the Satavahana race ... [and] ... conquered his enemies in many battles" (and "who never disobeyed his mother"; Burgess 1964 [1881]: 109). 11 And archaeological "clearance" work at some of the larger monastic sites has resulted in the removal and destruction of remains of non-elite activities (e.g., Schopen 1987).

Notcs to pages 172-82 12 Renewed excavations at Paithan have been undertaken in the late 1990s; these are as yet unpublished. 13 This is a vexing challenge in the identification of preliterate empires and in the archaeological identification of political units of various scales, see Schreiber and Smith, this volume. 14 Though certainly not all; hunter-gatherers and so-called "tribal" communities no doubt persisted in man}' areas, and, like political territories, territories or communities participating in these broader "civilizational" processes were likel}' discontinuous. 15 A1t1lOugh people were no doubt moving over large areas during this period and the preceding Iron Age or Megalithic period, large-scale population migration does not seem to have played a major role in these changes. 16 In tile varna hierarchy of Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Sudras, the Kshatriyas are warriors and kings, while tile Brahmans are priests who perform tile sacrifices necessary to consecrate rulers (see Thapar 1984: 34 ff.; Heesterman 1985). A Brahman king disturbs this order, and Gautamiputra is portrayed as somewhat of a reluctant king who took power to prevent furtller abuses of tile populace by corrupt Kshatriya rulers. 17 This is evidenced in tile lack of caste names or references in the inscriptional record, as well as inscriptional evidence for occupational mobility. Guilds and artisan communities did exist in this period, but they do not seem to have yet acquired the religious and behavioral attributes that would later come to characterize caste. 18 As described in the Vedic literature, during the year-long aSl'amcdha ritual a specially consecrated horse was released to roam freely, accompanied by a group of warriors. As evidenced in the citation below, the sacrificial horse embodied qualities of the cosmos, and the king sponsoring the ritual could claim all territories through which the animal traveled uncontested (or where the warriors defeated those who sought to impede its passage), and in so doing established himself as a universal ruler. At the cnd of the year, the horse was returned to the ruler's capital and sacrificed in an elaborate and costl}' ceremony. Dawn verily is the head of the sacrificial horse. The sun is his eye; the wind, his breath; the universal sacrificial fire, his open mouth; the year is the body of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back; the atmosphere, his belly; the earth, his underbelly; the directions, his flanks; the intermediate direction, his ribs; the seasons, his limbs; the months and half-months, his joints; days and nights, his leet; the stars, his bones; the clouds, his flesh. Sand is the tood in his stomach; rivers, his entrails; mountains, his liver and lungs; plants and trees, his hair; the rising sun, his torepart; the setting sun, his hindpart. When he yawns, then it Iightnings; when he shakes himselt~ then it thunders; when he urinates, then it rains. (ti'om the Brihad Aran},aka I: 1: 1, quoted in Embree 1966: 52) 19 For example, an inscription in Cave LXXII at Nasik associated with a Satavahana princess, possibly the daughter of Pulumavi (110-138 C E) reads as tollows: . .. on the tenth (lunar day). On the above (date) Nagamulanika, daughter of the great king and daughter of the Mahabhoji, wite of the Maharat"hi, mother of Khamdanagastaka, and sister of the Mahabhoja Ahija Denaseana excavated a cave (as) a meritorious gift tor the community of the ascetics ... tor the benefit of her parents. (Burgess 1970 [1883]: 86) 7 DYllalllics of impcl'ia/ adjllStmmt ill Spallish America 1 For overviews of historical-archaeological studies of Spanish imperial expansion and its consequences, sce Deagan 1988; Milanich and Milbrath 1989; Thomas 1989, 1990,1991; Dillehay and Deagan 1992; Farnsworth and Williams 1992; Bray 1993.

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Notes to pages 184-287 2 For summaries and assessment of the voluminous literature on this topic, see Crosby 1972; Dobyns 1983; Henige 1986; Ramenofsky 1987; Bray 1993; N. D. Cook 1998. 3 See Deagan 1985: 300-4; Ruhl and Hoffman 1997; Fowler 1991; Charlton and Fournier-Garda 1993; Gasco 1993; Loucks 1993; and the contributions in Thomas 1991. 4 See, for example, Deagan 1983, 1995; Dominguez 1984; B. G. McEwan 1988; Ewen 1991; Charlton and Fournier-Garda 1993; Reitz and McEwan 1995; Senatore 1995.

8 Politics, resources, alld blood itl the Inka empire 1 N. D. Cook (1981) estimates that the prehispanic population of Peru alone was about nine million, but we do not have solid estimates for the remainder of the empire. 2 Rowe 1946: 201-9. That summaq' was based largely on the works of Sarmiento, Cieza de Le6n, Cabello Valboa, and Cobo, although he drew from other corroborative sources, such as Polo's writings, the Relaciolles Geograficas de Il1dias, BIas Valera, and Santillan. Rowe explicitly discounted the historical veracity of Garcilaso de la Vega, to that point considered the most reliable source on tllings Inka. Parssinen (1992: 71-140) has recently undertaken a review of Rowe's summary, drawing from a range of local documents. 3 For an early and extensive review of the various accounts of the life of Pachakuti, see Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1953. 4 Sarmiento de Gamboa 1960 [1572]: ch. 25, p. 230; see also Ca bello Valboa 1951 [1586]: ch. 14, pp. 298-9. The position taken by most of Sal' mien to's witnesses can be understood as protection of their own interests, since accepting Inka Urqon's legitimacy might have called their status into question. 5 This section oftlle chapter is in part a distillation of arguments presented in D'Altroy 1994. 10 Coercioll, res;stallce, alld hiel'archy 1 By hierarchy, I mean something akin to Dumont's (1970: 66) definition of a set (or sets) oflogic behind graded systems of ranking: "we shall define hierarchy as the principle by /JIhich the clemCllts ofa lI,hole are mlllled ill relatioll to the ",hole." I would not, however, necessarily subscribe to the essentialist Dumontian notion of a Brahminical view of caste structuring Indian society - nor, more broadly, to his belief that hierarchy is always fundamentall}' religious (see Berreman 1972; Appadurai 1986; Inden 1990; Parish 1996 for some ofthe many critiques of Dumont). 2 This may not account for all literary texts of the Vijayanagara period, certainly. However, the trend is very clear. Interestingly, the other to od grain sometimes mentioned in connection with royal dining is wheat, a product often associated with north Indian dishes. On the emulation ofIslamic models of kingly behavior by Vijayanagara kings, see Wagoner 1996. Very little wheat was probably grown in the area around the city ofVijayanagara (Morrison 1995a). 3 Many texts, in f.1Ct, describe worship practices in some detail, including menus. Like elite feasts, the meals of gods are invariably centered around rice, with significant quantities of dairy products, oils, and sweets. 11 Aztec hearts «lid millds 1 Specialists in the interpretation of the 260-day ritual calendar seem to have been widely distributed in commoner communities; the control of these ceremonies, perhaps, was beyond the reach of the Aztec state. It is also possible that the state

2

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5 6

played an important role in the observance of rinlals in the 260-day calendar, but that briefer descriptions of these ceremonies were supplied by the Spanish because they were more attuned to rituals based, like their own, on a 365-day calendar. In montlls 4 and 12, telpochcalli youths, under tlle direction of their state-appointed leaders, collected corn stalks and fir branches to bring to people's homes for use in household rinlals (Sahagun 1981: 62, 127). On tlle one hand, this may have been regarded as a convenience by members of the households; on the other hand, it may have been an attempt by tlle state to increase the dependence of household ritual upon tlle state. Women also carried out war-focused rituals in tlleir houses when tlleir husbands were away on military campaigns (Burkhart 1997: 40). These rituals included sweeping tlleir courtyards witll extra care, making miniature tortillas to offer at tlleir household altars, and offering incense to the femllJ's of their husbands' captives, kept to commemorate tlleir battlefield successes. Blit tlle situational timing oftllese activities suggests tllat women were concerned specifically with the safety of their spouses and tlle integrity of tlleir family units, not witll warfare and human sacrifice as cosmic issues. Such battles also had overtones of fertility rituals. Warfare effected tlle union of contraries tllfough tlle defeat of one group by anotller and tl1US stood as a metaphor for sexual intercourse and impregnation (L6pez Lujan 1994: 289-92). C. F. Klein (1987: 305) suggests tllat tllis building was tlle Tlacochcalco Quauhquiauc. This was, however, more the case for non-Aztec spindle whorls from Cholula tllan for Aztec spindle whorls from tlle Basin of Mexico.

14 Cosmos, central authority, and commtmities ill the early Chillese empire 1 For the concept of "regional city-state systems," see R. D. S. Yates 1997a. The Qing polymatll Gu Yanwu (1613-82) points out that two oftlle regional kings were not eliminated until about a decade after the unification (Gu 1996: 778-9). Research for this chapter was made possible by a grant fi'om the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, for which I am most grateful. 2 It would appear tllat by this act the Qin were attempting to erase the texts that supported the claims of alternative memory communities (cf. Alcock, this volume; BlII'ke 1989; Geary 1994). The Connlcians were able to re-create their texts after the f.1ll of Qin because aged scholars had committed the canons to memory; moreover, "old script" texts of the Confucian canons were later discovered in the wall of Confucius' house in QunJ. The First Emperor is also said to have ordered the blll'ying alive of 460 advisors, later taken to be Connlcian literati, for informing Li Si that the emperor had notieed that he traveled with a large retinue. No one admitted to being the informant, so all who were with the emperor at the time were executed (Bodde 1986: 71; Fields 1989). 3 AltllOugh Emperor Wu promoted Connlcianism as the state ideology, replacing tlle previously dominant Huang Lao philosophy, he encolll'aged an expansionist foreign policy which he financed through monopolies on the production, distribution, and sale of salt, iron, and alcohol. These monopolies were managed by financial experts inclined towards "legalist" tllinking and were strongly opposed by Connlcians (Loewe 1974b: 91-112). Later, Emperor Wu was believed to have been a kind of Daoist transcendant (Schipper 1965). 4 It should, however, be remembered that, in Connlcian theory, tlle rites did not go down to tlle common people; tlle laws were applied to them. In a similar f.1shion, laws were not to be applied to the elite; they were to abide by the rites. This distinction was not enforced in the Qin, and rarely in later Chinese empires.

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Notes to pages 355-61 5 The late Joseph Needham looked to what he characterized as "bureaucratic feudalism" to account for China's inability to achieve the revolutionary scientific breakthrough into the modern world accomplished in seventeenth-century Europe (cf. Sivin 1982). 6 Sima Qian, like his contemporaries, conceived of the Yellow Emperor as a fully historical figure. This interpretation was revised in the New Culture Movement of the 1920s when he was recognized as a mythological being and culture hero. 7 The literature on the new legal texts is enormous: more than a thousand items since their discovery in 1975. Sce, iuter alia, Li 1985; Huang 1991. 8 For a general survey of the Qin, sce Bodde 1986. 9 Onc of the most impressive of Qin's engineering feats was the flood control project on the Min river completed b}, the Qin governor Li Bing and his son in the first half of the third century B CE. This project required cutting through a mountain to create a canal that could irrigate the entire Sichuan basin and control the f100dwaters coming off the Tibetan massif. This waterworks is still in operation today and Li Bing is still worshipped as a deity by the local populace. 10 X. Wang (1994a: 634) points out that of the 41,924 weapons excavated from the pits ofpotte!'}' warriors and horses at the First Emperor's tomb, only onc - an arrowhead - was made of iron. He suggests that the Qin reserved iron for agricultural tools, such as ploughshares, thus implementing in a practical way their ideological stress on the equal value of agricultural and military activity. In the summer of 1998, however, the present author saw two long Qin iron swords for sale in an antique shop on Hollywood Road, Hong Kong. These swords had probably been illegally excavated and cxported. They are the first such swords to be recorded for Qin. 11 These appear in contemporary sources, such as chapter 15 of the Xunzi, the collected writings of the Confucian philosopher Xun Qing (Knoblock 1988-94). 12 The linguistic affiliations, and ethnic identities, of these peoples are subject to much scholarly debate (cr Pulleyblank 1983). 13 The most extensive discussion of Qin material culture is by Wang Xueli (l994b); books and articles on other regional cultures of the Warring States period are too numerous to identif}' here. 14 The Qin system is still in use to this day in popular almanacs: for example, the cycle of twelve animals used to designate the cycle of twelve years (Rooster, Pig, Horse, R.1t, etc.). Promulgation ofa calendar was onc of the primary ways that a state claimed independence and legitimacy: it was the basis of a state's "liturgical order." 15 Only the king, later the emperor, of the dynasty was permitted to sacrifice to Heaven and the supreme cosmic spirits; teudallords sacrificed to the deities of the major geographical features of their territories, such as mountains and rivers; aristocrats worshipped their ancestors. Ordinary commoners only began practicing ancestor worship in the early Han, possibly another eHect of the establishment of the empire and the integration of the entire male population into a cosmic hierarchy (cr Loewe 1974b: ch. 5 ["K'uang Heng and the Reform of Religious Practices - 31 B.e. "]; Ord 1967). 16 It does appeal' that other states in competition with Qin had broadly comparable ranking systems, but the details have been lost with the destruction of their historical records. 17 For example, in the capital Xianyang, 100,000 bushels were reckoned onc stack; in the tormer capital Yueyang, directly north of the First Emperor's mausoleum on the other side of the Wei river, 20,000 bushels were reckoned onc stack.

Notes to pages 362-6 18 The First Emperor had many of these animals and birds buried near his tomb to the west side ofthe burial mound; the pottery army was buried to the east. 19 Traditionally transmitted textual sources indicate that the second level was a grouping often households, but this does not seem to be born out in the newly discovered legal texts (R. D. S. Yates 1987). 20 Members of the former aristocracy seem to have been registered separately from the ordinary population; merchants and government officials also had their own registers and were responsible for members of their work units (R. D. S. Yates 1987). 21 Mutilations ranged from shaving the beard and whiskers, to branding the forehead, cutting offthe nose, cutting off the left foot, and the ultimate mutilation, castration - a punishment the historian Sima Qian suffered at the hands of Emperor Han Wudi. What was so abhorrent in these mutilations was that the altered individual was considered unwhole and polluting and therefore unfit to perform religious sacrifices, including the essential sacrifices to the ancestors. Hard-Iabor terms probably ranged from onc to six years. 22 For example, the founder of the succeeding dynasty, Liu Bang, was originally a petty Qin official. As the dynasty began to collapse, he found himself in charge of a gang of convicts detailed for hard labor in a distant location. It was against tile law to arrive late for a rendezvous and, as his progress was held up by persistent heavy rains, he decided instead to free his charges and rebel with them against the Qin. 23 The cloth was 8 feet long and 2.5 feet wide (a foot equaled 23.1 cm) and was the responsibility of tile household womenfolk to produce. As cloth was a form of currency, the Qin would not permit the manumission of a bonded or enslaved woman who was an expert weaver, no matter what incentive was alTered by her f.1mily. 24 The owner of the tomb in which the Shuihudi legal texts were found made his deposition in 231 BC E, after the death of his father on the day dingsi in the seventh month (Shuihudi Qinmu bianxie zu 1980: slip 023; Shuihudi Qinmu zhujian zhengli xiaoZll 1978: 12, nn. 52-3). According to the Shiji, King Zheng ordered the entire populace to make this deposition in the ninth month of that year (Nienhauser 1996: 132; Ssu-ma 1993: 40). 25 Regrettably, however, no such registers have survived from Qin or early Han times, and the earliest total count of the population is preserved only as late as 2 CB (Bielenstein 1947). Onc of the cases, "Scaling and Guarding" (fcngsholl), may, however, preserve the form of the Qin registers (McLeod and Yates 1981: 137-9; I-Iulsewc 1985a: 184-5, E3; cr Du 1990: 6). 26 For capping in the Yin Yang Text 4 "The Thirty Seasons," sce R. D. S. Yates 1994b: slips 0927, 4941, 0244, 0969, 0961, 2470, 0798, 0837. 27 It is possible that this was so because legal infractions, and thus law cases, were seen to be disruptions of cosmic harmony. If a government was acting morally and maintaining the proper balance between Heaven, Earth, and Man, there would be few lawsuits (cf. Bodde and Morris 1967). 28 B. Anderson (1991) emphasizes the role of the written Chinese script in helping to "imagine" the religious community of the traditional Chinese that was bound together in onc of the "great sacral cultures," claiming that there was a radical distinction between this sacred language and written script and the print cululfes based on the vernacular of modern national states. Despite his claims that the Chinese had confidence in the "unique sacredness of their language[s]" (p. 13) and the radical nature of the distinctions between the two forms of writing, the actual forms of the Chinese graphs ("painted signs," according to Anderson) were readily adapted to the

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Notes to pages 366-419 linguistically quite distinct languages of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and serve the contemporary Chinese nation-states perfectly well. 29 These texts were preserved by Sima Qian in the chapter "Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin" (Wu 1994). 30 Lii's relationship to King Zheng was complex. Lil had presented his own concubine to the king's father before the latter was chosen to be heir apparent, and there was a persistent rumor that King Zheng was actually Lil's own flesh and blood son. It seems that Lil was unable to resist maintaining a close relationship with his former concubine after she became a dowager and after she took a lover called Lao Ai by whom she had two children. This lover plotted to seize tile tllrone but tile attempt was discovered and put down witll much bloodshed; Lil was implicated, forced to resign, and to depart for a place of exile. He committed suicide before reaching his destination. 31 He believed tllat he was replacing the Phase under which tile previous dynasty ruled. The tlurd is the writings of the philosopher Han Feizi, a political tlleorist who strongly supported centralized rule and who had an interview Witll King Zheng in tile early 230s CE (Han 1959; Wang and Chang 1986). His doctrines seem to have found particular f.1Vor witll tile First Emperor, especially those advocating tllat the handles of power, reward, and punishment be kept in tile hands of tile ruler himself, and that an official's title should be commensurate with tile actual job performed. There is not space here to treat Han Fei's philosophy. 15 The fall of the Assyrian empire 1 The Sharafllameh was written by tile Kurdish emir SharafKhan Bidlisi, e. 1596. See the French translation by Charmoy 1868-70: 16-17 (Mas'udi's version), 32-3 and 343-5 (comments on tile Sharafnamehversion); 1870: 25-7 and 208-9 (translation of the pertinent passage). I thank Dr Paola Orsatti for her kind help. 2 It is interesting to note that in Charmoy's commentary (1868-70: 33) Zohak is already considered a representative of the Assyrians, and Faridun "a representative of tile new Median dynasty ... that overthrew the Assyrian empire" - on the basis, of course, of the classical sources. 3 The expression dabdd nill rabati ma'adi1/limnil iltakan (line 27 for Ashur, line 43 for Nineveh) - translated by Grayson (1972) in a rather solemn way: "they inflicted a major/terrible defeat to a great people" - simply means that a lot of people were killed. 4 I am indebted to Peter Machinist, who read the final version of my chapter and provided a series of penetrating observations. 5 Tainter (1988: 7, 68-9) almost completely misses the Assyrian case; Yoffee (1988: 57-9 and passim) is slightly more attentive. Both autllOrs seem more interested in the collapse of "Mesopotamian civilization" (basically following the demographic and agricultural development outlined by Robert McC. Adams) than in that of the Assyrian state. 6 On the contrary, Garelli's remark, "11 semble que les Mcdes n'aient fait que donner le coup de grace ~ un pays epuise" (Garelli and Nikiprowedzky 1974: 240), refers only to the short-term juncture. 17 Cuzeo, another Rome? 1 I use the Suma y narracilm de los Ineas by Juan de Betanzos (1987) as my principal source in this chapter because, of all tile early historians of tile Incas, his text is closest to what the Inca informants actually said. Indeed, in places he can be shown to have

Notes to pages 419-23 translated verbatim. Since I write, in large part, about Inca ideas, tI1is information is central. It can often be confirmed, supplemented, or modified by data given in other sources. Restrictions on space prevent me from citing most of tile se sources here. For Cuzco described as Rome, cf. MacCormack (1997: 279 ff). 2 Pachacuti, Tupa Inca Yupanqui, and Guayna Capac are historical figures, who were mentioned by Andean witnesses in early colonial litigation. Unlike tile time of tllese tllree Incas, that ofViracocha was too long ago to be included in personal memory. Information about Viracocha and his predecessors is thus of a different status from information about subsequent Incas, since for tile former, we must rely exclusively on Andean tradition (not personal memory) as recorded in colonial sources. 3 On guauque, see van de Guchte 1996. That Manco Capac (if not otller Incas also) was legendary, and not a real person is evident from Sarmiento de Gamboa (1960 [1572]: ch. 15, p. 219b), who observed tllat Manco Capac had no mummified body; a stone was revered instead. On tile problem of the historicity of tile Incas, see Zuidema 1990. 4 Betanzos 1987: 1,46, pp. 19 3b ff., for tile mothers ofAtahuallpa and Guascar; Betanzos does not agree with otller sources, for which see Rowe 1985a: 35-73. See Betanzos 1987: 11,2-3 on Guascar's plan of "hac er de nuevo linaje de Hurin Cuzco." An admirable account of tile Inca empire is found in Rostworowski de Diez Canseco 1988. 5 A local lord, under torture, informs Pizarro tllat Ataliba (Atahuallpa) "esperaba de guerra con su gente en tres partes, la una al pie de la sierra y otra en 10 alto y otra en Caxamalca, con mucha soberbia, diciendo que ha de matar a los christianos." For similarly dismissive formulations of Inca majesty, cf. MacCormack 1991: 141-68. 6 In Spain, Pedro Mexia's Historia Imperial y Cesarca (1547), going from the Roman empire to the emperor Maximilian, and in a further edition to Charles V (Anvers 1561; furtller continuations followed, e.g., to Ferdinand Ill, Madrid 1655; to Rudolph 11, in English, London 1604), was influential. Much of Me xi a's information about Rome came from Flavio Biondo's Historial'um Decades, cf. Clavuot 1990. Urbis Romae aedijicomm illustrium quae superstmt reliquiae summa cum diligentia a 10a1l11e Antonio Dosio stilo ftrreo ut hodie cermmtur descriptae et a 10. Baptista de CaJlaleriis acneis tabltlis illcisis repraescntatae (no place 1569) consists of fifty engravings of Roman buildings with brief descriptions that display some knowledge of Roman history and topography. Dosio also worked on the Forma Urbis (cf. Jacks 1993: 218). 7 See, for example, the heading to chapter 8 of Cieza de Le6n 1986: "c6mo despues que Mango Capa vio que sus hermanos se avian convertido en piedras vino a un balle donde hall6 algunas jentes y por cl fue fundada y edificada la antigua y muy riquisima s;ibdad del Cuzco, cabes;a prens;ipal que fue de todo eI ymperio de los Yngas." 8 Jesuita an6nimo 1968: 158a, on Coricancha and Pantheon; p.161a, Inca priests and the pontitcx maxim us; note the sOUl'ce for the picture of the Inca priest's headgear (he got it ti'om a manual on Roman antiquities). On the Pantheon, Urbis Romae aedijicomltl illustrium quae supers/mt reliquiae number 7: "templum inter venlsta urbis templa hodie nobilissimum fere integ\'llm quod omnibus diis sacrum esset Pantheon vocatum. " 9 Cieza de Le6n (1986: ch. 3, p. 4): "diluvio particular ... como fue en Tesalia"; possibly, Cieza was thinking of tile flood of Deucalion and Pyrrha, mentioned by Ovid (1984: 1.244-415) in the Metamorphoses. 10 For Andean counterparts to Jupiter, Mars, Sanu'n, etc., see in particular the Jesuita an6nimo (1968: 153b-154a); on Roman domestic worship, Betanzos (1987: 1,20, p.99a).

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Notes to pages 424-7 11 "no se contentaron con ser malos tiranos para los dichos naturales, pero contra sus proprios hijos, hermanos, parientes y sangre propria, y contra sus proprios leyes y estatutos se preciaron y fueron pesimos y pertinadsimos foedifi·agos tiranos ... " (free translation). 12 Vergil, AeneidVI. 853: "parcere subiectis et debellare superbos." 13 For a collection of early sources on this topic see MacCormack 1990. 14 Note Acosta 1962 [1590]: VI, 11, p. 293: "enu·e los barbaros todo es aI reves pOl·que es tiranico su gobierno y tratan a sus subditos como a bestias, y quieren ser ellos U·atados como dioses." 15 Given that Spain was the beneficiary of Inca empire-building, a point that did not escape Garcilaso de la Vega (1965: Prologue), Spaniards might be expected to appreciate its results. Hence, advocates ofthe Incas highlighted the usefulness of Quechua as an imperial language, comparable to Latin (see Santo Tomas 1994: Prologue). See also Mannheim (1991: pt I) on Spanish promotion of Quechua over regionallanguages, for the purpose of enhanced governmental and ecclesiastical conu·ol. For counsels of wise government advocated by reference to precepts taken from Roman authors in the early modern period, see de Mariana (1981); Saavedra Fajardo (1985 [1642]): e.g., empresa 59, p. 159b, advocating clemency. 16 "viniendo por el camino Real que va por la sierra hacia Caxamalca, por el cual camino iba el ansi O1ismo lIamando y sacando las gentes ... " 17 Crist6bal de Molina 1989: 53: "mand6 que ... se partiese elmayor de sus hijos ... y que fuese por el camino de los Andes y montanas de toda la tierra ... Y al otro hijo ... Ie mand6 que fuese por el camino de los lIanos ... " 18 This includes Cieza de Leon (1986: ch. 5, p. 8): the Maker "fue ... obrando estas maravillas por el camino de la serrania." See also Sarmiento (1960 [1572]: ch. 7, p. 209a): "eluno fue por la sierra 0 cordillera que lIaman de las cabezadas de los lIanos sobre el mar del sur, y el otro por la sierra que cae sobre las espantables montanas que decimos de los Andes ... " 19 See Betanzos 1987: l, 16, p. 75a, the clay model; p. 77a, measuring the city plan, etc., translation by Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan. Sarmiento tells the same story, although his wording would appear to be more distant from the Quechua original. But the distinction between planning (Betanzos' traza or pilltar) and execution is there (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1965: 30, p. 235b): "Luego nleron acabadas las fiestas, traz6 el pueblo por mejor Ol·den que solia tener, y hizo las calles principales que tenia cuando los espanoles entraron en el Cuzco y reparti6 los solares para casas ... haciendolas edificar ... " 20 Betanzos 1987: I, 18 p. 90b: "alii dijo a sus capitanes e principales de la ciudad del Cuzco que aquella era la pintura y dibujo que ellos le habian visto hacer cuando le fueron a rogar que tomase la borla de aquellas puentes e caminos que hasta alii habia hecho e mand61es que ansi mismo por do viera que nlesen cuando ellos nlesen conquistando gentes fuesen haciendo y mandando hacer los caminos y en los rios las puentes ansi como el las habia hechon ... " 21 With the one exception ofthe Huarochiri text (Salomon and Urioste 1991), which merits sUldying with these themes in mind, even though it describes a very different world from the environs of Cuzco here being discussed. 22 Pachayachachic: Molina 1989: 53; Betanzos 1987: 1,2, p. 14b, giving the translation of the title; Betanzos (1987: I, 11, p. 50a) defines Pachacamac as "dador del ser al mundo"; Garcilaso constantly uses this name for both the Andean creator and tile Christian god. 23 Molina 1989: 53: "Titiviracochan, que quiere decir yncomprehensible dios."

Notes to pages 427-35 24 Frequently in Betanzos; GonzaJez Holguin 1954: 78: "<':;apay Inca s:apay apu el rey desta tielTa. <,:;apay apup suyun el reyno ... Tahuantinsuyu." 25 The subject under discussion is Inca Viracocha's absorption of me Chimu kingdom into Tahuantinsuyo. The attribution of tllis major "conquest" to Viracocha fits witll tile pro-Guascar stance of me se quipucamayocs, for which cf. note 31 below. 26 Betanzos 1987: 1,20, p. 100a: Ruquicapana as "Capac s:apa apo yndichori que dice rey y solo senor hijo del sol"; I, 22, p. 116b: tile law; law on litters and attire: 1,21, p.ll0ab. 27 Betanzos 1987: 1,41, p. xx has the telling phrase "la ciudad senora." 28 The concentric circular agricultural terraces at Maras near Cuzco would seem to have been constructed precisely for plants from warmer climates: tile further one descends down tllese terraces, tile warmer tile temperaulre. Note also Betanzos (1987: 1,21, p. 110a), tllat no precious objects brought to Cuzco must be removed from tile city. 29 See also Betanzos 1987: I, 33, p. 153a, where Tupa Inca Yupanqui offers his spoils to his elder brotller Yamque Yupanqui for trampling on. Note also Guascar u·ampling underfoot tile gifts of Atahuallpa, which amounted to a declaration of war (Betanzos 1987: II, 2) Witll note 31 below. 30 Betanzos (1987: I, 31) describes tile purucaya. For the term puru ccayatl, see Gonzalez Holguin (1954: 297b). In their translation of Betanzos (1987: 309, note 1 to I, 31), Hamilton and Buchanan suggest: "Purucaya: Quechua pllrll, 'featllers'; caya or cayo, a special dance (?)." For the "younger brotllers," see Garcilaso de la Vega (1963 [1609]: pt. I, bk I, 16, p. 28a). 31 Sources clearly f.1Vorable to Guascar are the Quipucamayos of Vac a de Casu·o, and Garcilaso; for Viracocha's vision, see Acosta 1962 [1590]: VI, 20; for Pachacuti's vision, Acosta 1962: VI, 2l. 32 "ticci origen, principio nll1damento, cimiento, causa." 33 Apart from ceremonies of imperial succession, it would be possible to compare Roman and Inca triumphal ceremonies. Both have a twofold theme. First, there is the authorized and ritualized exercise of violence by tile triumphato/'/Inca toward prisoners displayed in the triumphal procession. In both Rome and Cuzco, these prisoners were publicly humiliated by being forced to walk in the triumphal procession, and selected prisoners were executed. Second, once the triumph was over, the impcrator/Inca displayed his clemency toward survivors, because they would fi·om then on be his subjects. At another level, one could analyze in relation to each other the vision of Constantine before the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and the vision of Inca Pachacuti. Both visions heralded a major religious reform, and its projection throughout the empire. 34 Not, at any rate, until the eighteenth century, when a series of indigenous revolts claimed to bring back the time or the Inca. But note, the most important of these revolts was led by a man, Don Jose Gabiel Condorcanci Tupac Amaru, who claimed to be a direct descendant of the last Inca. 35 Guaman Poma de Ayala (1987: 375-6): "El excelenticimo senor don Martin Guaman Malqui de Ayala virrey y segunda persona del Ynga deste rreyno principe." The document referred to is Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Charcas 56. 36 For a similar claim being made much earlier by the nobles ofPacariqtambo, see Urton 1990; see also Salomon 1987.

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507

Index

Index

508

Aachen, Carolingian palace at 396, 405-6,411 Abbas I, Shah 65 Abu-Lughod, Janet 132 Abydos 230 Achaemenes 93,109 Achaemenid empire: cohesion of 102-3; formation of 102-3; government 114-18; internal revolt 103; labor 118; landholding 116-17; language 98, 99-100,120; local adoption of Persian manners 121; local elites 119; military resources 117-18; military service 117; new approach to 94-5; nobility 111-14; origins 93; polygamy 110; provincial government 119-20; religion, use oflocal 120; road system 116; satrapies 114-16, 119; social rank 113; traditional characterization of 93-4; use of regional cultures 120; water, control of 121; written script 98 Achaemenid empire, kingship in: accession ceremony 11 0-11; centrality ofl03-9; education for 110; funeral customs llO; just ruler 107-9; motifs of 105-6; order 107; Persian identity of 106; relationship with nobility 111-12, ll3-14; succession 109-10 Achaemenid empire, sources for: administrative documents 99-101; archaeological evidence 101; classical writers 97-8; Old Testament 98; royal inscriptions 98-9 Actium, Battle of 329 Adams, W. Y. 228, 241, 245, 246 Aden 55

administration, and empires 31-2 Admortitio Gmeralis 406 Agrippa 318 Ahmadnagar, Sultans of 63 Ahuitzotl138-9 Ahuramazda, and Persian kingship 103-5 Akbar 64 Akhenaten 227 Akkad empire, collapse of 380-1 A1buquerque, A1fonso de 55; and capture of Melaka 55, 57 A1cock, S. E. 228 A1cuin of York 403-4, 415 Alexander the Great 36,93,97,110, 118,379; influence on Roman empire 317 Alexander VI, Pope 185, 187 Alfonso V, Dom 52 A1meida, Dom Francisco de 44,55 Amara West 235, 237 Amenemhat I 232 Amenhotep 1I 235 Amenhotep III 227 Amenirdis I, Princess 246-7 Ammon 119 Anum 247 Anum cult 240 An Lushan Rebellion 22-3 Anagnost, A. 365 Anahita lll, 120 Anc6n 85 Anders, Manha 85 Andes 76-7: creation myths 425-6; Early Horizon cultures 78; Early Intermediate Period cultures 78-80; human settlement in 77; Initial Period

..

cultures 77; Middle Horizon cultures 78; see also Wari empire; Inka empire Andlua Pradesh 167, 169 Aniba 234 Anjedive 55 Artrta/es School 382 Apollonius ofTyana 346 Aquinas, St. Thomas 59 Arakan 61 Arana, Ra6l151 Arbela 101 Arch of Constantine 403 Archaeological Survey ofIndia 161, 177 archaeology: evidence for prehistoric empires 71-4; historical 181-2; identifYing ancient empires 129-32; limits of 154; social memory 327-8, 349-50; world systems tlleory 132-3 Arichis 11 409, 414 Aristides, Aelius 321 Arnulfings, and origins of Carolingian empire 393 Arrian 97 Arriuti, Don Fernando Ayra de 435 Arsames 101, 116, 117 Artaxerxes I 11 0, 119, 120 Artaxerxes 11 llO, 112 Arthasastra, The 157 Artobazanes 109 Artystone 100 Ashmbanipal 374, 388, 389, 391; and fear of internal danger 384-5 Ashm-etil-i1ani 389 Asiatic Mode of Production 354-5 Asiatic Society, Royal 161 Askut 228 Asoka 156-7, 161, 162, 173, 175, 176, 177,228,371; edicts ofl57 Aspathines III Assurnasirpal 11 249 Assyrian empire: astrological code 385; Babylonia and downf.'lll of 389-90; capital city growth and rmal depopulation 388; collapse of 374; economics and collapse 387-9; extent of 374; inner decline and collapse 383, 384, 387-9; Kurdish legend of collapse 374-7; Medes and downfall of 389-90; military enfeeblement 389; modern

interpretations of collapse 386-7; outer shock and collapse 383, 384, 389-90; patterns of expansion 389; public buildings and collapse 388; territorial growth and collapse 388; treaty with Medes 391 Aswan 100 Atahuallpa, see Atawallpa Atawallpa 204, 205, 208, 210, 213, 214, 219,419,321,422,427,431,432, 434 Atllens: tile agora as memory theater 337; transformation of the agora 335-6 Augustus 313, 315, 318, 320, 329, 332 Autpert, Ambrosius 412-13 Axayacatl 138 Axtell, James 192 Ayala, Felipe Guaman Poma de 213, 435 Azangaro 89 Azcapotzalco 137, 138 Aztec empire: administrative groups 290-1; ca/pull; groups 290-1; chronology, problems Witll 128; context of expansion 128; definition 128; economic strategy 140-3; economy 137, 139; elite strategy 144-5; establishment and expansion 137-9; frontier strategy 143-4; ideological variations 310; imperial strategy 139-45; militarism 295-301; political strategy 143-5; provincial organization 143-4; provincial society 145-52; te/pochcalli (young men's houses) 293-5; trade, stimulation of 141-3; tribute system 140-1 Aztec empire, state religion: agricultmal basis of rituals 301; archaeological somces 305-6; audience for 283-4; calpulli groups 290-93; cultmal difference 284; household rituals 288-90,301; human sacrifice 288, 293,295-6; ideological indoctrination of young men 301-2; low acceptance ofwarfare-centered ideology 303-5, 305-6; militarism 287; mock battles 296-9,304-5; monthly rituals 287; organization of ritual 287; origins 307-8; political consequences of283, 284; provincial e1ites 309; public

509

510

Index Aztec empire, state religion (cont.) warrior displays 299-300; purpose of 309; ritual in Tepepolco 302--4; structural poses in 308-9; subsistence concerns of288; targeting of young men 284; telpochcalli (young men's houses) 293-5; textual sources 285-6; warfare-centered ideology 295-301; warrior recognition 300-1 Aztec Imperial Strategies 140 Aztlan migrations 133 Ba peoples 358, 359 Babylon 114, 115 Babylonia, and downt'lll of Assyrian empire 383, 389-90 Badagas, tile 276 Bahadur of Gujarat, Sultan 58 Baird, E. T. 286 Bakenranef 248 Ban Gu 11 Banda Islands 57 Bandyopadhyaya, Narayan Candra 162 Banerjea, Pramathanath 162 Bardiya 112; revolt by 103 Bat'low, Robert 140, 144 Barros, Joao de 53 Bat·tel, B. 228,232 Basha, A. L. 161 Basra 61 Basrm 63 Bassein 58 Bay of Bengal 45, 55, 58, 61, 64 Before European Hegemony: The World Systcm, AD 1250-1350 132 Behistun 98, Ill, 121 Beja, Duke of 51, sec also Manuel I, Dom Benakataka 170 Berdan, Frances 141, 153 Betanzos, Juan de 204, 212, 222, 419, 422,423,425,427,430,431 Bhatkal 58, 59 Bhayala, Prince 169 Bijapur 64; Sultans of 63 Blanton, R. E. 133 Bocarro, Ant6nio 45-7 Book of Lord Shang 366-7 Boxer, C. R. 47 Bradley, Richard 338

Index Bragan.,a, Duke of 52 Brazil, and Portuguese colonization 61 Breckenridge, C. 265, 267 Brugese 51 Brumfiel, E. M. 199 Buchanan, F. 275 Buhen 230, 232 Burckhardt, Jacob 382 bureaucracy, and empires 31-2 Burgess, J. A. 177 Burke, Edmund 3 Burke, Peter 330 Burkhart, L. M. 302, 306 Bmma, and capture of Syriam 67 Cabello Valboa, Miguel de 204 Caesar, Julius 315, 319, 332 Cahuachi 79 Cajamarca 208, 419; cultme 79 Calancha, Antonio de la 425 Calicut 55, 58 Calpish 83 Cambridge Ancient History 386 Cambyses 120; and expansion of Achaemenid empire 102 Cambyses II 93 CamiIlo, Giulio 337 Canary Islands, pattern of Spanish colonization 184 Cannanore 55, 58,60 Cape Comorin 45, 55, 56 Capilco, excavations at 146-50 Carolingian empire: administration 396-8; ancient Rome 370, 396,404-6; appropriation of Roman rhetoric 404-6; appropriation of Roman material culture 411; architecture 405-6,410-11; building works 396; Carolingian Renaissance 395, 402--4, 413,414; characteristics of39; church and state 400-2, 404, 407; coherence of 398-9; concept of empire 392, 415-16; consolidation 399; correct L1tinity 407-8; comt culture 406-8; desire for order 398; divine sanction for mIc 401-2, 404; economy 400-1; education 406-7; elite identity 407, 414; elites 400; emperor and elites 396; empire of nostalgia 39; expansion 393;

extent of 392-3; failure to impose ideology 414; fall of 417; grand strategy 416-17; heterogeneous nature of 393, 395; internal exploitation of 399; invasion ofItaly 408; legitimacy of succession 401; local eIites 400; mediation of power 395; military 399; monastic conquest ofItaly 408-12, (and resistance) 413; origins 393; reconstructing tile past 401, 402-3; relationship of past and present 401, 402,404-6; restitution of Frankish realm 416-17; strategies of integration 395; succession problems 393-5; trade 400; tratlSfnission of dominant ideology 406-8; warfare 398-9; written word 398,401 CaroIingian Renaissance 395,402--4, 413,414; and Frankish imperial project 417 Cartilage, colonization ofIberia 182 Casas, Bartolomc de las 188 Caso, A1fonso 287 Castillo, Dfaz del 296 Castro, Dom Joao de 57 Castro, Vac a de 428, 431 Cato 316 Cerro Amaru 87 Cerro Bald 83, 88 Cerro Blanco 78 Chankas 212 Charlemagne 392, 398,402,405,409, 417; and economic integration 400; invasion of Italy 408 Charles Martel 393 Charles tile Bald 392,405,415,417 Charles V 422 Clm·tier, R. 402 Chau155,58 Chavfn culture 92 Chavfn de Huantar 78 Childeric I 416, 417 Chiml! culture 89 Chinese empire: appeasement of steppe nomads 16-17; civilizing mission 353; Confucian morality 353; control of trade Witll Xiongnu 25; cosmographic design 362-3, 368; cultural uniformity 356; emperor 351-3; emperor and

cosmological harmony 367-8; empires of nostalgia 38-9; ellinic diversity of emperors 353; failure of military campaign against Xiongnu 26; historical records of 10; identification willi emperor 351-3; imperial mylli 351,368; linguistic revolution in 366; Mandate of Heaven 353; natural sociopolitical formation 353--4; notions of continuity 355; popular culture and customs 355; population control 364; pre-imperial notions of identity 358-9; registration of population by Qin 364; regulation of trade witll steppe nomads 19; response to frontier violence 16-17; restructuring of time 359; role of emperor 353; steppe nomad military aid 22-3; steppe nomads 355; tllreat from nomadic empires 10; trade, attitude toward 21; tributary system 26-7; vultme empires 38; western perceptions of 354-5; writing system 355, 366; see also Han dynasty; Qin dynasty; steppe nomad empire Chittagong 56 Cholula 135 Chronicon Vulturtlcsc 411 Chu peoples 358, 359 Cicero 315, 319 civilization, and imperial unity 32 Clovis 416, 417 Club of Rome 382 Coatetelco, excavations at 151 Cobo, Bernabc 220, 419 Cochin 55,60 Codex Mmdoza 140,143,144 Codice Casanatcllsc 62 Colombo 55 Columbus, Christophel' 52, 53, 184 communication systems, and empire 31-2 Connerton,P.326 Conrad, G. W. 280, 287, 307 Constantinople 73, 405 Contreni, J. 407-8 Coricancha 74 Con'eia, Gaspar 60 Cortcs, Hernando 133, 139 Cosmin 61 Council of tile Indies 185

511

512

Index Couto, Diogo do 45, 63 Cowgill, George 386-7 Croesus, and conflict with Achaemenid empire 102 Crouch, D. P. 189 Crown Patronage of Missions, Portuguese 47, 53 Ctesias 110; and Achaemenid empire 97 Cuauhnahuac 137, 138; excavations at 152; state 149 Cuexcomate, excavations in 146-50 cultural archaism 330 Cunningham, Sir Alexander 161 Curtius, Quintus 97 Cuzco 30,74,76-7,201,207,419; foundation of 426-7; Spanish comparisons with Rome 422-3; the Inka's position within 429, 432 Cyrus 120, 379 Cyrus II 93; and creation of Achaemenid empire 102 Cyrus the Younger 109 D'Altroy, T. N. 228 Daman 58 Damascus 101, ll5, ll9 Danver, Fredrick 8 Darasamudra 260 Darius I 94,103,109,110,121; inscription on tomb 103-5; relationship with co-regicides lll-12; seizure of throne 111-12; text of98 Darius II 112, ll9 Darius IIIll0, ll7-18 Daskyleion 115 Dc iusto imperio lusitatlOrllttl Asiatico 69 Deetz, James 192 Dehejia, V. 171 Demarest, A. A. 280, 287, 307 DeMarrais, E. L. 284 Dewachler, Michel 238 Dias, Bartolomeu 52 Diaz, Bernal135 Diez Canseco, Maria Rostworowski de 208,210,214 Disney, A., 44 Diu 58,61 diversity, and empires 29-30 domination, and empire building 255

Index Doyle, Michael 129 DUc
economic control, and Wari empire 89-90 economic integration, and empire 30-1 education, and empires 31-2 Education ofCyrlls, 11Je 97 Egypt: attitude to empire 227, 234; kingship 227; Kushite domination of 244-51; Middle Kingdom expansion into Nubia 232; Middle Kingdom withdrawal from Nubia 232; New Kingdom expansion into Nubia 232-4; Old Kingdom expansion into Nubia 230; relationship with Nubia 230-2; sce also Egyptian empire in Nubia; Kushite empire Eg}'ptian empire in Nubia: administration 235,237; archaeological sources 234-8; economy 241-3; Egyptian expansion into 232-4; end of 234; historiography 228-30; imperial cult 240-1; integration 237-8, 239-41; local elites 238-41; non-elites 241; political geography of234-8; population 242; religion 240-1; royal intermal'l'iage 239; trade 242-3; urban centers 235-7 El Palacio 83 El Puerto, excavations at 151-2 Elephantine 100, 115, ll8, 246 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 65 Empircs 129 empires: administration 31-2; afterlife of 370; bureaucracy 31; characteristics of 71-4, 125, 129-32, 311; collapse of 377-82, 386-7; communication systems 31-2; consolidation 196; contemporary understanding of term 3; cosmological naturalization of power 320; death of 369; definition of 2-3, 3-4,29,42-4,71,125,320; derivation of term 2; diversity of sources for studying 6-7; domination

255; economic integration 30-1; education 31; elites 197-9; empires of nostalgia 371; emulation of other empires 370-1; enduring interest in 1; expansion and collapse 388; heterogeneous nature of 125; historiography of 372-3; ideology 279-81; "imperial projects" 32-3; inner crisis and collapse 382; integration of 195-200; internal characteristics of primary 29-33; internal diversity 29-30; international context ofl30-1, 132; limitations of archaeological approach 154; limits to expansion 32; local effects of expansion 126; local elites 197-8; maintenance of internal order 32; marginalized participants in 277-8; military elite 198; military force 32; non-elite subjects 199-200; perceptions of 371; political conu'01130; political motivations for studying 8; precursors and model of states 33; prehistoric 70; rapid creation of 195; Roman as archetype 1-2,312-13,370,422; secondary types 10, 12; semantic history of term 2-3; size of 72-3; social memory 325-6, 349-50; sources for studying, paucity of 126-7; sovereignty 2,4; state 2, 4-5; trade witllin 130; typology of29-39, 44 empires of nostalgia 371 Ephesos, Salutaris foundation in 342 Esarhaddon 388; fear of internal danger 384-5; treaty with Medes 391 Estado da flldia 43-4; as maritime aft:1ir 63; sec also Portuguese Asian empire Esther, Old Testament book of98 expansion, limits on imperial 32 Ezra, Old Testament book of98 t:1ctory, and Portuguese overseas system 50-1 Fa-hsien 161 Falc6n, Francisco 419 Fall ofAssyria, The 386 Farfa, monastery at 408, 409, 411-12, 413 Fars (Iran) 93

Fatalidade historica da ilha de Ceiliio 68 Fauman-Fichman, Ruth 150 Feinman, G. M. 133 Ferdinand and Isabela 183, 185 Feynman, Richard 42 Firdausi 375-6 Firth, Cecil241 Fischer Weltgeschichte 386 Flormtitle Codex 285-6 Florus 322 Fox, R. G. 274 Fran'rois I, King of France 51 Frandsen, P. 228, 237, 238 Freitas, Frei Serafim de 69 Galvao, Duat·te 53 Gama, Vasco da 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60 Gamboa, Pedro Sarmiento de 212, 419, 423-4,425 Garelli, Paul 386 GatT, D. J. 189 Geary, Patrick 324-5 Gebel Barka1235, 237, 238, 249 Geography, SU'abo's 97 Gibbon, Edward 433 Goa35,45,48,55,57,58,60 Gobryas 109, Ill, 112 Godunov, Boris 65 Golconda, Sultans of 63 Gomara, Francisco L6pez de 422 Gongsun Yang 366 Great Temple, at Tenochtitlan 283 Great Wall of China 362 Greece, ancient, view of Achaemenid empire 97-8 Greece, Roman: architectUl'e 342; collective memory 323; commemorative practices 334; Greek identity 345-6; land ownership patterns 333; landscape reconstruction 332-4; local elites and memory theater 344-5; memorial landscape 334-44; memory theaters 334-8, 338-44, 344-6; monuments and memory 336-8, 338-44; new memory communities 332; non-elites and cultural archaism 334-5; obsession with past 329; past as communication channel to Rome 330-1; public presentation of memory

513

514

Index Greece, Roman (cont.) 337-8; reverse imperialism 329; rituals and memory 342; Roman attitudes to Greek past 346-7; rural depopulation 332-3; Second Sophistic 329-31; selection and celebration of memory 330; social memory 334; transformation of the Athenian agora 335-6; use of the past 348 Grimoald, Prince 414 Grzymski, K. 238 GlIascar 421, 431-2 Guayna Capac 421 Gujarat 45, 55, 64 GlIpta empire 159-61 Gupta I, Samudra 161 Gupta, Candra 161 Habachi, L. 240 Hadim Suieyman Pasha 61 Hadrian I, Pope 405, 413 Haku-sri, Prince 169 Halbwachs, Maurice 324, 326 Han dynasty 24, 351: collapse of, and consequences for Xiongnu empire 28; f.1ilure of military campaign against Xiongnll 24,26; "marriage alliance" policy toward Xiongnu 24; naming of subjects 365; relations with Xiongnu 24-5; tributary system and Xiongnu 26-7 Han Feizi 358 Han peoples 358 Ran shu 11 Han WlIdi 11, 366 Hare, Timothy 150 Harpalus 115 Harran 383 Han·ell, S. 353 Hatshepsut 233, 239 Heath-Smith, Cynthia 146 Henrique, Inf.1nte Dom 51, 53 Hermopolis 100 Herodotus 31, 107, Ill, 112, 113, 116, 118,121; and Achaemenid empire 97 Herzfeld, Michael 347 Hicks, F. 143 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi 66, 67 Hierakonpolis 230

.. Hieronymus of Cardia 122-3 Hincmar of Rheims 415, 417 Hirth, Kenneth 151 historical archaeology 181-2 Hobson, J. A. 1,8 Hockings, P. 272-3, 276 Hodge, Mary 143 Hodges, R. 410 Honawar 63 Honco Pampa 81, 83, 90-1 HOl·ace 329 Horemhets 234 Horvath, R. J. 228,232 Hoysala empire 260 Hsliang-tsang 161 Huaca del Loro 88 Huamachuco 79, 87 Huaro 83, 91 Huarpa culture 79, 81 Huexotla 308 Hughli 68 Huhanyeh 26: acceptance of Chinese tributary system 26-7; inner-frontier strategy 27; reestablishment of Xiongnu unity 27 Huitzilopochtli 288, 302 HumaYl.ln 64 Hurmu~55,56,57,58,59,60,65,68

Hutton, Patrick 328 Hydarnes 112 Hyslop, J. 221 Iberia, invasions of 182 Ichabamba 83 ideology: as cohesive force 281; centrality to imperial dynamics 280; complexity of280; definition 279; f.1lse 279-80; variations 310 Idumaea 119 Icyasu, Tokugawa 66, 67 imperialism, material-culture model of 129-32 Inca empire, scc Inka empire India, Archaeological Survey ofl6l, 177 India: foraging/trading groups in 272-7; spice trade 272, 273-4, 275; trade and power relationships 274; tribute system 274; scc also Vijayanagara empire

Index Ingelheim, Carolingian palace at 396, 405 Ingoaldus, Abbot 411 Inka empire: achievement of 201; afterlife of 435-5; aims of 209; ancestor worship 208, 421; archaeological sources 207, 221-3; ay!tu (kin group) 206,215; chronology 204-5; comparison witll Roman empire 432-5; creation mytlls 425-6; discontent within 421; divine mandate 201; downf.111 of208, 434; economy 210, 214-23; e1ites 208-9, 215, 218, 225-6; emergence of 203-8; emperor 209; expansion and concept of universal sovereignty 428; heterogeneity of201; ideology 431, 433; Inka's lineage 421; institutions 209,216; integration 209-10; kinship and etl1l1ic groupings 208; labor 215-16; marital alliances 206; military 210; mytllical history 203-4, 206; oral histories of 203; organization 420-1; panaqa (royal kin groups) 205, 208-9, 213,214,220,221,225; past 432; Pizarro 419; political conflict 210; political system 208-10; powers of the Inka 426, 427-8; preeminence of the Inka 428, 429; preimperial era 204-7; provinces 209; religion 210; rise of 207-8; ritual on the Inka's death 430-1,433; Spanish comparison with Roman empire 422-5; state economy 214-18; succession 210-14, 429-30, 431,433; Tawantinsuyl.l 201,203; textual sources 203-4; the Inka's position within Cuzco 429, 432; transportation system 72, 210; warfare 206 Inka Pachacuti, scc Pachakuti, Inka Inka Roq'a, scc Roq'a, Inka Inka Urqon, scc Urqon, Inka Inka Viracocha, sce Viracocha, Inka Inka Yupanki, sec Yupanki, Inka, alld sec also Pachakuti, Inka Intaphernes 112 Iran, and Portuguese Asian empire 65 Irem 246 Irons, W. 34

Isabela, Queen 183, 184, 189, 190 Isbell, W. H. 91 Ismail, Shah 64, 65 Italy: Carolingian invasion 408; Carolingian monastic conquest 408-12 Itzcoatl138,307 Japan: conflict with Jesuit missionaries 66-7; expulsion of Portuguese 67; market opened b), Portuguese 62 Jargampata 90 Jerusalem 119 Jesuits, and mission in Japan 66-7 Jia Yi 25; and downf.111 of Qin 356-7 Jincamocco 80, 83, 87, 90, 91 Joachim of Fiore 53 Joao II, Dom 51, 53, 54; policies of 52 Joshua, Abbot 410, 411 Joyce, R. 295 Juvenal322 Kafadar, C. 198 K.1nha, King 168, 169 Karakorom 35 Karashima, N. 268,269 Karnataka 176 Kashta, King 246, 247 Kaundinyapur 174 Kautilya 157 Kawa 235 Kclbasken 248 Kemp, B. J. 228,237,238,240,241, 243 Kendall, T. 246 Kerala 45 Kerma kingdom 232, 235, 239 Khan, Chinggis 35 Khudabanda, Muhammad 65 Kilwa55 kingship, and Achaemenid empire 103-9 Klein, C. F. 302, 306 Kollam 55, 58, 60 Konkan 55 Kotalingala 169, 173 Krishnadevaraya 64 Kurds, foundation legend 374-7 Kurru cemetery excavations 245, 246 Kl.Ish province 234, 235, 237

515

516

Index Kushite empire: administration 250; chronology 245; control of elites 248-9,250; economy 249, 251; expansion of 246-8; integration oflocal elites 251; marriage alliances 248; regions of250; state formation 245-6; as successor state 245-6 Kushite Kingdom 229 La Isabela 181 Labat, Rene 386 Lake Titicaca 204 Lattimore, O. 125 Laws of Burgos 186, 187 Lembranfa das Cousas da j,~dia 58 Leo Ill, Pope 402 Le6n, Pedro Cieza de 212, 419, 423 Uon-Portilla, M. 287 Les Cadres sociaux de la memoire 324 LiSi353,356 Libri Carotini 404 Life ofArtaxerxcs 97, 110-11 Lima culture 76, 79, 89 Lishan 357 Liverani, M. 130 Livro das Cidades e Fortalezas 63 Livy 315 Louis the Pious 392,407,411 LU Buwei 367 Lucan 322 Lupaqa, the 204 Macau, foundation of Portuguese settlement 62 McClendon, C. 411 McEwan, G. F. 89 McIGtterick, R. 414 Machiavelli, Niccolo 2 Magadha 156, 161 Maharashtra 167 Malabar 48,55 Manchu dynasty 355 Manchuria, and vulture empires 37-8 Manco Capac, see Manqo Qhapaq ManetllO 249 Mangalore 63 Mann, M. 125 Manqo Inka 221 Manqo Qhapaq 204,421,424

Index Manuel I, Dom 50, 51, 52, 53, 59,60; messianic beliefs of 53-4 Maodun, Emperor 24-5 Marca Huamachuco 79, 87 Margabandhu, C. 168 maritime trade empires, 35-6, 40: character of 35-6; evolution into primary empires 36; in ancient world 35-6; weaknesses of 36 marriage-alliance policy, and Han dynasty 24,25 Martaban 56, 57, 61 Marx, Karl 354 Maurya, Candragupta 156, 157 Mauryan empire 152-62, 164, 371: archaeological sources 157; edicts of Asoka 157; extent of 157-9; historiography of 161-2; significance ofl55, 159-62; textual sources for 156-7 Maymi 85 Medes: defeat by Cyl'llS 11 102; downfall of Assyrian empire 383-4, 389-90, 391; doubts over empire 391; treaty Witll Esarhaddon 391 Megasilienes 157 Melaka 51, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60; Portuguese capture of 55 Memorandum on Indian Affairs 58 memory, see social memory memory ilieater, in Roman Greece 334-46 Memphis 114 Mencher, J. P.263 Meneses, Dom Henriques de 58 Meng Tian, General 357, 362 mercantilism, and Portuguese Asian empire 50 Merovingians 393,401,416 Mesoamerica: changes in world system 133,135-7,139; development of citystates 135 Mesopotamia, and political collapse 377-8,379 Metiochus 118 Mexia, Afonso 61 Mexla, Pedro de 418 Mexica people, and establishment of Aztec empire 138

military expansion, as characteristic of empires 71-2 military force, and empires 32 military strengtll: nomadic states 12-13; secondary empires 40 MiIitiades 118 Minbin 61 Ming dynasty, and Portugal 62 Mirashi, Vasudev 175 mirror empires 34-5, 40 Mitchell, T. 5 Mixteca-Puebla style 135-6 Moche culture 76, 78, 79-80, 89 Moctezuma 307 Molina, Crist6bal de 425 Moluccas 56, 57, 59 Mongol empire: sources for 11-12; see also steppe nomad empires Mongolia, shadow empires in 10 Monte Cassino, monastery at 408 MontllUemhat 248 Montiel, Lisa 150 Moquegua 85 Morelos 139; Aztec empire in 145-52 Morris, B. 274 Motecuhzoma 135, 138 Motecuhzoma II 139 Mozambique 55 Mrauk-u 61 Mughal empire 64 Mughal state, expansion of 64-5 MUller, Ingeborg 238 Mundigo, A. I. 189 Ml\l'ashu f.1mily, records of 100 Ml\l'ra, J. V. 209, 215 myth, role of in empires of nostalgia 38-9,40 Nabonidus 383 Nabopolassar 382, 389, 390 Nabu-shezzi-banni 249 Naganika, see Nayanika Nahuatl-speaking peoples 133 Nahum, oracle at 384 Naneghat 168 Naqsh-i Rustam 110: Dm'ius' tomb at 103-5, III Naram-Sin 380 Nasca culture 76,79,88,90

Nash, June 192 Nasik 168, 170 nayaka system 268,271 Nayanika 168, 169, 175 Naymar, Setu 55 Near East: moral judgement and collapse of states in ancient 380-1; structural collapse of states in ancient 377-82 Nebuchadnezzar 383 Nebuchadnezzar 11 98 Nehemiah, Old Testament book of98 Nehl'll, Jawaharlal 162 Nciteqert 251 Nelson, Janet 196, 396,400 Nezahualcoyotl ofTexcoco 138 Nicholas V, Pope 59 Nicholson, H. B. 286 Nicote, Filipe de Brito e 67 Nineveh 30, 374, 375, 384, 388, 390 Nippl\l' 100, 380 Nobel, T. 407,412 Noble, W. A. 275-6 Nobunaga, Oda 66 nomads, diet of 18 Nonantulo, monastery at 408 Nora, P. 327 nostalgia, empires of 38-9: Carolingian empire 38-9; China 38-9; character of 38-9,40 Nubia: as successor state 245-6; effect of Egyptian domination 243-4; Meroitic phase 244; Napatan phase 244; postEgyptian rule 244; relationship with Egypt 230-2; state formation 245; vulture empires 37; see also Egyptian empire in Nubia; Kushite empire Nlll11ero Ocho 85 Nylander, Carl 390 Oates, John 386 Oaxaca 139 obsidian, and early Aztec city-states 134 O'Connor, David 228, 229, 230, 238 Old Testament, as source for Achaemenid empire 98 Oliva, Anello 435 Ollantaytambo 225 Olson, Jan Marie 150 Ondegardo, Juan Polo de 419

517

518

Index Oriental Despotism 354-5 Ottoman Empire, and rivalry with Portuguese 61 Otys 119 Oxford Hirtory of India 161 Pachacamac 85, 89 Pachacuti, see Pachakuti Pachakuti, Inka 204, 205, 207, 210, 212, 213,218,221,421,426,427,428, 429-30,431,432,433 Pacheco 85, 90 Pachero 88-9 Paderborn, Carolingian palace at 396 Pagden, A. 2, 3 Pahang 57 Paithan, excavations at 172 Panegyric of Rome 321 Paracas culture 78 Pariamarca 83 Parsa 93,118,121-3 Parssinen, M. 208 Parysatis 112, 119 Pasai 55 Pasargadae 101, 103, Ill, 121 Patalim, Rui de Brito 55 Patani 57 Pataraya 85, 90 Patiliputra 161 Patronato Real 185 Pausanias 333, 338, 342, 348 Pearson, M. N. 44, 274 Pedro, Dom 43 Pegu 57 Pereira, Duarte Pachero 53 Periplus oftbe Brytbreatl Sea 163 Persepolis 100, 101, 103, 110, 114, 121 Persian empire, see Achaemenid empire Peru 76-7; see also Andes; Inka empire; Wari empire Philip II of Spain 63, 65 Philostratus 329 Pikillaqta 83 Pippin III 401, 417 Pirenne, H. 416 Piye 247, 248, 249; Sandstone Stela of 247; Victory Stela of247, 249 Pizarro, Francisco 208,419,420 Pliny 163, 330-1

Index Plutarch 110-11; and Achaemenid empire 97 Polybius 314, 318 polygamy, in Achmaenid empire 110 Portugal 183: Asian expansion and Portuguese state 50; backwardness of 49-50; Brazil 61; factory, role of 50-1; Indian u'ade 274; maritime trade 51; mercantilist state 50; monarchy, u'ade interests of 51; origins of Asian expansion 51-2; religious aspect of Asian expansion 53; role of monarchy 50; see also Portuguese Asian empire Portuguese Asian empire: Anglo-Iranian alliance 65-6; Asian trade 59-60; capture of Syriam by Toungoo dynasty 67; cartaz system 60; changes in trade 63; commercial-religious poles of 47; competitors with 64; conflict with Saf.wids over Hurmurz 66; crown revenues 59; crown voyages 56, 59; decline of66-8; the Dutch 67; expansion of55-7; expansion of Mughal state 64-5; extent of 45; first viceroy 55; fiscal and economic crisis 62; the "great freedom" 57; growth of private trade 62; imperial decline 63-4; Japan 66-7; joint ventures with local allies 55-6; limited interference with local administrative systems 61; mercantilist foundations of 50; military component of 48; missionary presence within 47-8; patterns of expansion 57; Portuguese population of 45-7, 57-8; private settlements 57; problems of definition 43-4, 69; rivalry 61; Safavid rulers ofIran 65; settlements 58; shipping resources 58; subject populations of 48-9; trade in 64; trade patterns 58-9; tribute system 60 Poto, Abbot 412-13 power: empire-building 255; struculral 255-6; strucUlres of 277 Prakrit language 156 primary empires 29-33; internal characteristics of 29-33 Primeros Memoriales 286 Prinsep, James 161 Psamtik I of Sais 249, 250, 251

Ptolemy, Claudius 163, 170 Pucara culture 79 Puebla 139, 308 Pulicat 56, 57, 58 PuJumavi, King 170, 172 Puranas, Vedic 161, 163, 166, 167, 169, 171 Qhapaq Ayllu 219 Qi peoples 358 Qiang tribal group 27 Qin dynasty 24, 38, 351, 353, 355, 356: agricultural bureaucracy 361; cosmographic designs 362-3, 368; cosmological harmony 367-8; criminal investigation in 365; division of space 362-3; hierarchical adminisu'ative system 362-3; ideology 366-7; imperial expansion 364; land reform 360-1; law code 357-8, 359, 360; Lord Shang's reforms 367; micromanagement methods 361; military organization 363; monetary system 364; naming of subjects 365; population control 363, 364; punishment under 363, 364; system of linked responsibility 363-4; system of rank 360; u'aditional views on 356-8; unifYing project 358; see also Chinese empire; Han dynasty Qolla 204 Quito 73, 431, 435 Qustul230 Raheja, G. G. 267 Raimondi Stone 78 Ramesses II 240 Ramesses VI 234 Ramesses IX 243 Ramesses XI 234, 243 Ray, H. P. 171 Ray, Himanshu 166, 168, 169 Reconquista 183 Recuay cululre 79 Reddy, D. R. and S. 169 Reisner, George 238, 245 Res Gestae 318,320 Reuter, T. 400,416 Ribeiro, Joao 68

Roe, Sir Thomas 65 Rogers, Guy 342 Roman empire: acceptance ofideals 320-1; afterlife of 434; archetype 312-13,422; attitudes toward Greece 331,346-7; centrality of literature 314-15; citizenship 314, 316-17; civilizing mission 319; claims of world rule 317-18; comparison with Inka empire 422-5, 432-5; concept of "imperium" 314; conflict and disunity 316; consu-ucting a new tradition 317; cultural identity 315, (of emperor) 433; diversity within 311-12; elite tensions 311; fall of434; formulation of Roman identity 314-15; geography 318; Greek models 315-16; Iberia 182; imperial cult 321; incorporation of barbarians 321-2; influence of Alexander the Great 317; influence on Carolingian empire 396; influence on imperial historiography 1-2; intellectual resistance 321-2; lack of precedent for 313; legacy of370; melting pot 315; perceptions of 371; power of the Roman people 313-14; religion 319; Roman ethnicity 315-17; semantic range of "imperium" 313-14; succession 433; virtue 319; see also Greece, Roman Roq'a, Inka 206, 218 Rosenthal, J. 396 Rowe, J. H. 207 Rudradaman I 176 Sahaglm, Bernardino de 137,285-6,294 Sai, fortress at 235, 237 Said, Edward 345 Sais 120 Salcamaygua, Joan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui 435 Sallust 3, 315 Salutaris foundation, in Ephesos 342, 345 Saman ofNasika, Mahamau'a 168 Samaria 119 Samarkand 115 San Vincenzo, monastery at 408, 409, 410-11,412-15 Sanatkumara Gbarite 262

519

520

Index Sanchi 168 Sancho, Pedro 419 Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. 391 Sannathi 176 Santillian, Hernando 419 Santo Domingo 189, 190 Sao Jorge de Mina 52 Saqqara 101 Sardis 101, 114, 116 Sargon 11 384, 385 Satakarni I, 168, 169, 175 Satakarni 11 169 Satakarni, Gautamiputra 170, 173, 175,

177 Satakarni, Vasisthiputra 176 Satavahana, Simutra 169 Satavahana empire: archaeological sources 164,171-4; capital city 170; chronology, problems with 166; cultural identity and legitimation 174-7; elites 175-6; extent of 170; geographical origins 166-70; imperial evolution 371; legacy 178; Mauryan empire 159; monastic construction 171-2,176; nature ofl77-8; political organization 173; religion 172,175; royal status 175-6; settlements 170, 172-3; social organization 175; textual sources 162-3, 168-70; trade 171-2; Vedic sacrifices 175-6; women 176 satrapies, in Achaemenid empire 114-16 Savanorola 53 Save-Soderbergh, T. 228, 238, 241 Schaedel, R. P. 206 Schmitz, G. 408 Schneider, Jane 132 Schuyler, Robert 192 Scott, J. C. 253 Scrutakarti 260 Sebasteion, at Aphrodisias 338-41 Sebastiao, Dom 53 secondary empires 33-4; empires of nostalgia 38-9; maritime trade empires 35-6; mirror empires 34-5; types of 34-9; vulture empires 36-8 Sedeinga 235, 237 Selim I 64 Sennacherib 385 Senusret I 232 Sesebi 235, 237

Index Seyala 230 Shabaqo 248, 250 shadow empires 33-4; in Mongolia 10

Shah rlameh 375-6 Slung dynasty 354 Shang, Lord 358: legal reform 360, 367; land reform 361

Sharafrlameh 376 Shebitqo 248 Shepenwepet 11 249, 251

Shiji 10 Shu peoples 358, 359 Shulgi 380 Sicharus, Abbot 411 Siculus, Diodorus 97 Sima Qian 10-11,356,357 Sin-har-ishum 389 Sivatatvacintamani 258 Smitll, H. S. 230 Smith, J. 395 Smitll, M. L. 174 Smitll, Michael 309 Smitll, S. T. 228, 229, 241 Smith, Sidney 386 Smith, Vincent 161 Soares, Lopo, and tlle "great freedom" 57 social memory: archaeological investigation 327-8; archaeology 349-50; as political force 324-5; cadre matcriCt 326,327; empires 325-6, 349-50; fluctuations in 325; landscape 327,328; memory communities 324; monuments 327, 328; nature of 324; sOlJl'ces of 326-7; spatial setting 326-7 Socos 85 Sofala 55

Soldado Pratico 63 Soleb 235, 237 Sonay 85 Sondondo valley 86-7, 90 Sousa, Martim Monso de 61 sovereignty: archaeological evidence for 74; featUl'e of empire 2, 4; universal and Inka expansion 428; Wari empire 86 Spain: American Indians 186-7; character of imperial expansion 193; comparison ofInka and Roman empires 422-5; effects of Roman colonization 182;

imperial strategy 184-5; influence of Muslim and Berber invasion 182-3; interest in Roman empire 422; Patrorlato Real 185; policies of Ferdinand and Isabela 50; Reconquista 183; sixteentll-century imperial expansion 179; scc also Spanish American empire Spanish American empire: Mrican slavery 187; American Indians 186-7; archaeological sOUl'ces 181-2; CatllOlic ChlJl'ch 188-9; character of expansion 193; civilizing mission 424; class 187; context of 182-3; Council oftlle Indies 185; disease 184-5, 187; economic motivations 183; elite accommodation 187; encomienda 186-7; from mercantile to imperial venture 181; frontier 188-9; gender 192-3; ideology 181,182,185-6,193-4; intermarriage 187,190-3; labor supply 186-7; Laws of Burgos 186, 187; local accommodation 188-9; local experience of 181; missionary impulse 188-9; pattern of colonization 184-5; perceptions of Roman empire 371-2; popular influence on 181; race 185-6, 190-1,192; redllcd{m 186-7; religion 187; religious motivations 183, 185; social integration 179, 181, 182, 186-93; social relations 185; towns 189-90; women 192-3; sce also Spain spice trade, in Vijayanagara empire 272, 273,275 Spithridates 119

Sprillg a11d AlItumn AnlIals of Lii Bttll'ci 367 Sri Lanka 48 state, and empire, 2, 4-5 State ofIndia, scc Estado da India state religion, and ideological targeting 284 states, and derivation fi'om empires 33 Stein, Gil 192 Stephen, Pope 402 steppe nomad empires: archaeological sources 11; creation of imperial confederacy 13-14; economic organization 14-15; exploitation of China 15; historical sources for 10-11;

international trade 21-2; military advantages 12-13; military aid to China 22-3; mirror empire 34; outerfi'ontier strategy 15-17,24,27; political organization of 13-14, 17; relationship witll China 12, 13-14, 17-18,22-3; shadow empires of 10; trade Witll China 19-22, (attitude towards) 21; sce also Xiongnu empire Strabo 163; and Achaemenid empire 97 Suleyman 61 Sumerian King List 379 Suqotra 55 Susa 101, 103, 114, 116 Swain, Simon 330, 345 Syriam, £111 of 67 Tabin-shwei-hti 61 Tacitus 3 Taharqo 249 Tahmasp 65 Tahuantinsuyo, sce Tawantinsuyu Tainter, Joseph 386-7, 388 Talaricus, Abbot 410 Tanwetamani 249 Tarascan empire 138, 144 Tawantinsuyu 201, 203, 420, 422, 425, 428 Tefnakht of Sais 247-8 Tello, Julio C. 80 Temple of the Sun 423, 428 Templo Mayor 74,81, 137 Tenasserim 57 Tenochtitlan 74, 138, 139,283,284, 287,291,301,309; household rinlals in 288-90, 301; organization of religious ritual 287 Teotihuacan 129, 132 Tepancc polity 138 Tepepolco 284, 286, 308; religion in 302-5 Tepozteco, excavations at 152 Texcoco 137, 138,284,302 textiles, and early Aztec city-states 134 Thapar, R. 156, 159, 161 Theodosius 405 Theodulf of Orleans 403-4 Thomas, David 188 Thomaz, Luis Filipe 43-4 Thupa Inka Yupanki, sce Yupanki, Inka

521

522

Index Thutmose Il 239 Thutmose III 233, 239 Thutmose IV 235 Tiglath-pileser III 249, 384, 385 Tiribazus 113 Tirupati, temple at 265, 267 Titicaca, Lake 79, 92 Tiwanaku culture 79-80; comparison with Wari empire 92; emergence of 91-2; extent of92 Tiye, Queen 227 Tlacopan 138,284 Tlahuica Ceramics 151 Tlatelolco 139 Tlaxcalla 139, 144, 308 Tocroc 83 Toledo, Viceroy 423 Toltec state 133; and empire 307 Torok, L. 246 Toungoo empire 61, 67 Tower of Babel 380 Toynbee, Arnold 245 Tranakayira, Maharathi 169 Trautmann, T. R. 157,175,176 Travancore, Raja of274 tribal organization, types of 34 Trigger, B. G. 237,240 Troy, Lana 228, 238 241 Tula 129, 131, 133,307 Tupa Inca Yupanqui, sce Yupanki, Inka Udjahorresnet 120 Uighur empire, and aid to Tang dynasty 22-3 UNESCO, and Nubia 229 unity, and "imperial projects" 32-3 Ur III 381; downf.1ll of379 Urco 429-30 Urqon, Inka 212 Valangai-Idangai revolts 269-71 Vedic Puranas, see Puranas, Vedic Vega, Garcilaso de la 423,424 Vega Nova, Hortensia de 150 Veracruz 139 Vergil315,317 Vijayakumari Charite 260 Vijayanagara empire, 63, 64; agricululral expansion 276; archaeological sources 253,261; as conquest state 256;

Index construction and investment activities of temples 265; disputed nature of 252; diversity of256; dry farmers 261, 263-4,268; economy 266-7; elite goals and intentions 257-8; expansion pattern 268; famines 271; food 257; food grains and power relations 261, 263,264-6,267-8; foraging/trading groups in 272-7; human ecology of the conquered 258-9; labor 257; land control 269, 271; local self-government 259; marginalized participants in 277-8; market economy 266; military 257,258; nature of rule in Tamil country 268-71; nayaka system 268, 271; religion 265-6; religious patronage 258; responses to 256; role of military leaders 268; significance of 252; social dynamics of the conquered 259-60; social storage 264, 267; spice trade 272, 273, 275; Tamil resistance movements 268-71; taxation 266, 269, 271; temples 264-5; trade 272, 273-4; Valangai-Idangai revolts 269-71 Vijayanagara (city): agriculture 261-2, 263-5; canal construction 263; dry grain production 263-4; elites 262, 263,266,267; growth and production patterns 261-2; importance of rice 262,266-7; organizational and material base of256-7; palaeobotanical sources 261-2; rice production 262-3; temples 265; textual sources 261-2; water resources 262-3, 267 Vila Real, Conde de 51 Vinaque 80 Viracocha, Inka 421, 426, 429-30, 431, 432 Viracochapampa 83, 87, 88 Visigoths, and invasion of Spain 182 Volney, C. F. 382 vulture empires 36-8: character of 36-7, 40; Manchuria 37-8; Nubia 37 Wallerstein,Immanuel132 Wari empire 129, 131,204; absence of source material for 70; administrative architecture 82; capital city of 81-2; collapse of91; comparison with Tiwanaku 92; derivation of name 80;

discovery of 80-1; economic control 89-90; expansion of85, 91; growth of Wari 81; infrastructure of82-5, 86; Nasca cultural influence on 79; occupation sites 85-9; physical environment of 76-7; political control 86-9; reorganization 91; size of 82-5; sovereignty 86 Wari Willka 83 Warring States China 360, 364 Waskhar 205, 208, 210, 213, 214, 218, 219 Watson, James 355 Wawat province 234, 237, 242 Wayna Qhapaq 207-8, 213, 216, 219, 220,223 Weber, Karl 320 Wedjarenes 248 Wei peoples 358 Wei Yang 366 Weidner Clu-onicle 380 Werner, K. 400 Wilkinson, Tony 388 Williams, Bruce 229, 230 Wiraqocha Inka 205, 207, 210-12, 218 Wisajirca 83 Wittfogel, K. 8, 354 Wolf, E. R. 255, 321 world systems theory 132-3 Wudi, Emperor 21; conflict with Xiongnu 25-6; f.1ilure of military campaign against Xiongnu 26 Wuhuan tribal group 27 Xaltocan 308 Xavier, Francis 67 Xenophon 109, 115, 117, 374; and Achaemenid empire 97

Xerez, Francisco de 422 Xerxes 94, 103, 107, 109, 112 Xia dynasty 354 Xianbei tribal group 27 Xianyang 357 Xiao ofQin, Duke 367 Xico 308 Xiongnu empire 24-8; acceptance and exploitation of Chinese tributary system 26-7; civil war within 26, 27-8; collapse of28; conflict with China 25-6; extraction of trade concessions from China 25; Huhanyeh and reestablishment of unity 27; internal conflict 26; international trade 22; longevity of 24; mirror empire 34; origins of24; outer-frontier strategy 24,25,27; rejection of Chinese tributary system 26; trade with China 21 Yamobamba 83 Yamque Yupanqui 429,430 Yanahuanca 83 Yautepec, excavations at 150-1 Yawar Waqaq 218 Yoffee, Norman 386-7 Yupanki, Inka 207, 212, 213, 219, 220, 221,225,421,427,429,430 Zacharias, Pope 401 Zawadzki, Stefan 386 Zhao peoples 358 Zhonghang Yue 15 Zhou dynasty 354 Zhou peoples 360 Zi6lkowski, M. S. 213 Zuidema, R. T. 208

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