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If cultures are living things, then ideas are their DNA, and the expression of those ideas are the bees of their hives. Ideas are developed to their fullest when a culture is isolated from others. A biological population becomes a new species when some barrier — geographical, ecological, or just distance — separates it from the rest of its race. In the same way, isolating a culture allows it to develop its own, sometimes unique but always interesting answers to the challenges of being human.
As human beings migrated out of Africa and spread around the world, the variety of challenges they encountered elicited an even greater variety of cultural adaptations. Unfortunately for our ability to experience and appreciate this diversity, the rise of centralized states and the subsequent waves of empire building began snuffing out these precious experiments, starting about six thousand years ago. By the Twentieth Century, a mere shadow of the original rich cultural ecosystem remained in Europe, Asia, and North America. By the beginning of the Twenty-First, the world is dominated by essentially one set of cultural ideas, and other values, languages, forms of artistic expression and varieties of human thought are all but extinct.
This paper will document some of the cultural richness now lost to us, with concrete examples from around the world and throughout time, and attempt to show what an extinct wealth of imagination these imply. If the reader goes away feeling culturally impoverished, I will have succeeded in my aim.
When I speak of the Twentieth or Twenty-First Century, the reader understands that I refer to the years 1901-2000 and 2001-2100 of the so-called Christian calendar now universally employed in commerce and science. Depending on his ethnic background and his education, the reader may be aware that other calendars exist, such as the Jewish calendar, the Moslem calendar, and the Chinese calendar. All of these calendars count years from an historical or legendary zero point, divide the year into months, and number the days of the month from 1 to 30 or so.
Calendars are based on three astronomical constants of life on this planet. The Earth spins on its axis, causing the Sun to appear to rise in the East and set in the West; this generates the day. The Moon revolves around the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, taking about 29.53 days to complete an orbit; this is the basis for the month. The Earth revolves around the Sun in about 365.24 days, which is the basis for the year. None of these periods are compatible; there aren't a whole number of days in a month, a whole number of days in a year, or a whole number of months in a year.
Every culture starts out in total ignorance of these phenomena. The rising and setting of the sun is immediately apparent and extremely constant, so every culture, however primitive, knows the day. They may count it from sunrise to sunrise, noon to noon, sunset to sunset, or midnight to midnight; they may regard the dark hours as part of the day, or a separate entity alternating with the day. But underneath these cultural masks, the fact is known.
The phases of the moon can also be observed directly, and so the earliest calendars are always lunar. Marking the months is more difficult than marking the days. The orbit of the Moon is inclined to the orbit of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the Moon varies, and the Moon swings slightly as it orbits the Earth (libration). Determining the exact beginning of a month is also difficult, whatever phase one decides is the beginning point. New moons, by definition, are almost invisible; the exact moment at which the crescent Moon appears, or the decrescent Moon disappears, is debatable; and the full Moon can appear full for three nights in a row. Cloudy nights can also confound the issue. Marshack has documented a tally of lunar phases carved on reindeer bone at a prehistoric European cave site.
By the time centralized agricultural states arise, they usually have a lunar calendar with a priest whose duty is to announce the beginning of each new month from his direct personal observation. In ancient Rome this was the duty of the Pontifex Maximus, a title later adopted by the Pope. The Navahos and the Moslems continue this practice today.
Connecting the seasons to the calendar is difficult. The seasons are extremely variable, nor is our European notion of Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter universal. In tropical countries there are no seasons, and one day is just like another, unless a typhoon comes along. In Egypt, the only annual cycle is the rise and fall of the Nile River, while India's seasons can be described as spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, pre-winter, and winter. Careful observation of the night sky establishes that the sun pursues a regular cycle among the stars. Naked-eye observatories for this purpose are found in megalithic Europe, ancient India, and Mesoamerica.
When Rome threw out its Etruscan kings and began the path of conquest that would lead to establishing an Empire throughout the Mediterranean, most of the states in the area had their own calendars based on Greek observation. Generally these were lunar calendars with 13 months alternately of 29 and 30 days. The names of the months differed from city to city, as did the names of the days, which were generally not numbered.
Rome's calendar evolved through successive stages by decree. Julius and Augustus Caesar set the form that it would retain until reformed by Pope Gregory in the Middle Ages. It was used throughout the Mediterranean world and our own calendar derives from it.
The interesting thing about the Roman calendar is that the days aren't numbered 1, 2, 3, etc. Three days in the month have their own name: the Kalends, the first of the month; the Ides, 18 days inclusive before the Kalends of the next month; and the Nones, 9 days inclusive before the Ides. Between these days the calendar counts down to the next; so the Kalends are followed by days named "so many days before the Nones", the Nones are followed by days "before the Ides", and the Ides are followed by days "before the Kalends" of the next month.
As far as I've ever read, this system was unique. No other culture I've ever heard about had a calendar in which the days are counted down to upcoming events. Normally the Romans were practical to a fault and beyond. The Gauls derided them as boring and unimaginative, and the Romans themselves felt that their own art was inferior to that of the Greeks, so much so that they hired Greek artists, had their children educated by Greek pedants, and slavishly copied Greek styles. But in their calendar they left a flight of fancy unparalleled anywhere!
To find the only other calendar that unusual we have to cross the Atlantic and visit the Classic Maya. The tropical jungle of the Maya has no seasons, and the Mayan calendar combined three different ways of counting days, only one of which was based on the annual cycle of the Sun through the stars.
First was the long count, which simply counted the days one after the other from a starting point long before there were any Mayans. A Mayan day is a kin, and 20 kin make one uinal; call it a month. 18 uinal make a tun, or year; 20 tun make a katun; and 20 katun make a baktun. 13 baktun make a Mayan era of 1,872,000 days, or about 5125.37 solar years. The Maya erected steles commemorating the beginning of the reigns of their rulers, and the first part of every date is the long count. A long count of 9.15.9.0.1 (as it's usually transliterated in the archaeological literature) means 9 baktuns, 15 katuns, 9 tuns, 0 uinals, and 1 kin since the beginning of the long count. Most steles have long count dates between 9.0.0.0.0 and 10.0.0.0.0, which is to say between 436 A.D. and 829 A.D.
The second part of a stele date is the tzolkin, a ritual calendar of 260 days. The dates of the tzolkin pair off the gods of the 13 numbers with the gods of the tzolkin, who were (in order) Imix, Ik, Akbal, Kan, Chicchan, Cimi, Manik, Lamat, Muluc, Oc, Chuen, Eb, Ben, Ix, Men, Cib, Caban, Edznab, Cauac, and Ahau. The numbering and the procession of the tzolkin gods were independent, so that tzolkin dates go 1 Imix, 2 Ik, 3 Akbal, 4 Kan, etc. Since 13 and 20 have no common denominator, it takes 260 days for a given tzolkin date to repeat.
The third part of a stele date represents the haab, or civil calendar of 18 uinals, named Pop, Uo, Zip, Zodz, Zec, Xul, Yaxkin, Mol, Chen, Yax, Zac, Ceh, Mac, Kankin, Muan, Pax, Kayab, and Cumku. Each uinal has 20 kin, numbered from 0 to 19, so haab dates go 0 Pop, 1 Pop, 2 Pop, 3 Pop, etc. After 19 Cumku come the 5 days of Uayeb, 0 Uayeb to 4 Uayeb, to complete the solar year.
The Mayan Calendar Round used both the tzolkin and the haab in combination, so that a date would be given as 10 Ben 11 Kayab, followed by 11 Ix 12 Kayab, 12 Men 13 Kayab, etc. A combination such as 12 Men 13 Kayab would take 18,980 days to repeat, a little under 52 years.
When the long count and the calendar round occur on steles, we get dates such as 8.11.7.13.5 3 Chicchan 8 Kan. The calendar round date can be seen as a backup or error-checking device for the long count. As we saw already, a long count date recurs every 1,872,000 days (5125.37 years), while a calendar round date recurs every 18,980 days (just under 52 years). The combination of a given long count date and a given calendar round date recurs only every 136,656,000 days, which is about 374,152 years or 73 Mayan Eras.
No other culture in history had a calendar like this. The haab was used throughout Mesoamerica; but the tzolkin, the long count, and the calendar round were invented and used only by the Maya.
I mentioned that Greek calendars named, rather than numbered their days, and every school child is familiar with "Roman numerals." The latter is a misnomer, because the Romans didn't have numerals, in the sense of special characters that represent numbers. Neither did any other Mediterranean culture. The Greeks used the first nine characters of their alphabet when they wanted to represent numbers; the Egyptians used some of their hieroglyphic symbols for different values, similar to the Roman system; in the ancient Near East, certain cuneiform symbols were used by the Babylonians to express their fascination with the number 60. But none of these cultures had characters that were numbers, and only numbers. Numerals, as far as I can determine, were invented exactly twice in the history of mankind.
The so-called "Arabic numerals" we use today were invented in India. They should be called Hindu numerals, but Europe got them from the Moslems, rather than from India directly. India not only invented numerals, but decimal notation, where the position of the character determines whether it represents 10, 100, etc. Positional notation requires a zero character for clarity, and Hindu mathematicians duly came through. Even cultures that use their own numerals got the idea from India, zero and all.
Once again it's the Maya who came up with numerals independently, complete with positional notation and a symbol for zero! Even the Mayans don't have a separate numeral for each number; they use dots for 1-4 (1 dot, 2 dots, 3 dots, 4 dots), a bar for five, and a conch shell character for zero. These symbols are written in positional notation from top to bottom, with a base of twenty, rather than ten. More cumbersome than the Hindu system, but far superior to any other, Mayan numerals could be regarded as one step short of the Indian model — except, of course, that there's no connection between the two cultures.
Every language maps the real world to its vocabulary in a different way, which affects the way speakers of that language interact with the world. Gravity is gravity everywhere, and someone who walks off a cliff will fall, whatever he calls the force pulling him down. But we are social creatures, and dwell in a mental world whose concepts are shaped by our linguistic environment. Gravity is the same from country to country, but honor, pride, privacy, decency, and other abstractions are most emphatically different.
Waldo Sweet expressed this point so well that I can think of no better way to convey it than to quote him at length:
Languages are different. ... Speakers of other languages just do not view the universe in quite the same way as we. They don't talk about quite the same colors, recognize quite the same sort of family relationships, or think of time exactly as we do.
To give an example, there are two words for uncle in Latin; one is avunculus and the other is patruus. But they are not synonyms. The first is your mother's brother; the second is your father's brother. ... The difference between patruus and avunculus was important to a Roman boy because if his father died his patruus usually became his guardian. ... To give another example of kinship terms, there is no word for brother in Japanese; you must always specify whether you are talking about your older brother or your younger brother. This difference has an importance for the Japanese that it does not have for us.
There are languages that don't concern themselves with whether things are singular or plural, some that don't bother to indicate the time when things happen, some that don't have adjectives. In these countries, two and two apples still make four apples, one action still occurs before another, and objects still have size, shape, and color, but in these languages it is not obligatory to comment on these facts the way we do. This is the source of the greatest single difficulty in language learning; it is also what makes the study so fascinating. ...
Other languages differ from English not only in lacking certain features which English has but in possessing others which it does not. There are languages in which is it obligatory to comment on the shape, size, or texture of objects; others in which you must note the position of everything you discuss; and so on through a list that seems to be endless. In Hupa, a language of the American Southwest, nouns have tenses; one says xonta for a house now in existence, xontaneen for a house that used to exist but has ceased to be, and xontate for a house that will come into existence in the future. ...
The Comanche word for bicycle is nata'aiki' and that for rocking chair is navi'aiki'. Is this a chance resemblance, or do a rocking chair and a bicycle actually have something in common in Comanche? The verb stem na- 'aiki' means move in an oscillatory manner by the agency of a human; the -ta- morpheme means by means of the feet, and -vi- means by means of the buttocks. The two Comanche words are thus similar in both form and meaning. However bizarre this association may seem to us, we must always remember that it does not seem so to the Comanche, to whom it seems "the natural way" to talk. ...
It is perhaps obvious why cat is applied to lions and tigers; it is not at all obvious why it should be applied to a kind of whip, to a double tripod with six legs ... to a piece of naval equipment, or to a piece of wood pointed at both ends used in a game called tip-cat. Yet these meanings are all listed in my small desk dictionary, along with others.
Sometimes we will hear, "The word for cat in German is Katze." It is easy to misunderstand this statement. It does not mean that cat and Katze are interchangeable. It is only a short way of saying that the most common set of meanings of cat correspond pretty well with the most common meanings of Katze. My German dictionary (again, a small one) tell me that besides meaning a feline creature Katze also means a kind of shellfish, a kind of fortification, a battering ram, a money bag, a disease of the lungs, or a hook. No mention of the double tripod or even of lions and tigers.
What is the Latin word for cat? The word félés happens to have three meanings. The first is the house cat. The second refers to catlike animals, such as the weasel, but not to lions and tigers. The third meaning is a man who is a woman-chaser, the person we might term a wolf. Why did the Romans see a resemblance to cats in weasels and lady-killers but not in lions and tigers?
Because languages are different.
In French, "The word for cat is chat." The French use this for the domestic cat and for lions and tigers ... But when a person is hoarse, the French say, "Il a un chat dans la gorge," which does not mean "He's got a cat in his throat." It describes the same unpleasant sensation for which we use the expression "He has a frog in his throat." ...
[In Chinese, there] is no one word for the action of carrying, but instead some thirty different words, which are not interchangeable. It would strike a speaker of Chinese as exceedingly comical (or stupid, depending on his attitude toward you) if you were to use nye (carry between thumb and forefinger) in speaking of an article like a suitcase. From the point of view of a speaker of Chinese we use the English word carry to describe activities that have little or nothing in common; from our point of view the speaker of Chinese has divided one activity (carrying) into ridiculous subdivisions.
This catalog might be extended indefinitely; Russian, for example, places an emphasis on whether an action is being done, is just being started, has been completed, etc. to a degree I have encountered in no other language, with a bewildering variety of forms for each verb (see Pulkina, pp. 198-199 and 279-317). One of my Russian instructors at San Diego State had never learned where to place the accent in English words, which made him very difficult to understand, even though his English was otherwise very good. From the viewpoint of a Russian speaker, because I couldn't grasp the use of the perfective and imperfective aspects, I must have seemed to be choosing verbs almost at random.
The point has been made, I think, that every language has its own universe of perception, which is not matched by any other. The existence of different languages adds a richness to human experience equaled by no other aspect of culture.
Unfortunately, human languages have been being extinguished for as long as cultures have been encountering each other, to the subsequent poverty of mankind. Who today speaks the language of the Hurrians, whom the Hittites conquered? What other Dravidian languages were spoken in India before the Aryans invaded? Nothing is known of the languages spoken in Western Europe before the Celts migrated there, but the survival of Basque tells us the area was inhabited. What language was spoken in Dacia before Trajan conquered it, and settled Roman veterans there in such numbers that it is today called Romania, and a language descended from Latin is its native tongue? What languages did the Inca extinguish when they conquered the Andes, and what languages would be spoken in China today if the area had not been unified in the time of the four kingdoms?
Today languages are dying out faster than ever. President Eisenhower adopted a genocidal policy towards the Native Americans which resulted in the "disestablishment" of many nations, the wiping out of their treaty rights, and their subsequent scattering from their reservations. As a result many nations which had survived into the Twentieth Century are now gone, and their languages with them. Similar policies around the world have wiped out most of the world's smaller languages, with or without the deaths of the human beings who would have been their speakers. With each language, we have lost a unique treasury of human expression.
Languages change through ignorance and apathy; a certain part of each generation's vocabulary isn't learned by the next, especially the more specialized and technical terms, the slang, and the terms applying to things which fall out of fashion or out of use. Artistic conventions and concepts change the same way. Take the case of the Chinese dragon, which is probably not a dragon at all.
Today lions live only in a few preserves in Africa and India, but lions were once widespread through Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. The African lion, Panthera leo leo, was found throughout Africa, even in North Africa and Egypt. The Asian subspecies, Panthera leo persica, roamed not only in Persia and India but throughout Asia, including China and Siberia. In Pleistocene Europe we have the so-called cave lion, Panthera leo spelea; the European lions extinct by historic times may have been descendants of these, or of Asian lions roaming far to the West. In northwestern North America the bones of Panthera leo atrox are found.
The Chinese dragon has no wings. There are a number of varieties, each of a different color and different number of toes, for various ranks of nobility in old imperial society. The emperor's dragon is yellow and has five toes on each foot. It has bulging eyes in a glaring face surrounded by a mane, and floats through the air in a position any European herald would recognize immediately as passant guardant. If you drop the cultural preconception that says this is a reptile, it is easy to see that this is a representation of a lion. There can be no proof; this artistic motif dates back to the days when the "first" Chinese emperor burned all the country's books to ensure that his reign would be the earliest known to history. But lions once roamed throughout Asia, and Chinese art evidently remembers them.
Are there other artistic motifs which may be faulty cultural memories of extinct lions? I find the "feathered serpents" of Mesoamerica highly suspicious. Cats and snakes are both very specialized predators, and the main difference between a cat's skull and a snake's skull are size, and the different number of sinuses that mammals and reptiles have. The difference between a "snake's head with feathers around it" and a lion's head with mane are little more than a matter of artistic convention, and faulty cultural memory.
Consider this as well: Panthera leo atrox, the American lion, was found primarily in the northwestern parts of what today is the U.S. and Canada. The Native American languages in that part of the continent are dominated by the Athapascan languages. Some Athapascans migrated south and settled in the Southwest; Apache and Navaho are Athapascan languages. Others kept going; they settled central Mexico, built a great city, and erected pyramids ornamented with "feathered serpent heads." They are remembered by history as the Aztecs.
Money, the Greeks tell us, was invented in ancient Lydia in 550 B.C. King Croesus was supposed to have stamped coins with the marks of his realm and guaranteed the purity and weight of each one. Before that, barter was the rule.
But money does not have to be made of gold. Money is a symbol for the exchange of goods; if it were not, paper money (invented in China, by the way) would be worthless. The symbolic nature of money is nowhere better illustrated than on the island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia. The official web site tells us that Yap is 200 miles from the island of Palau, and yet
The stone money of Yap, though not legal tender in the international currency market, is still used as legal tender on the island. The value of these limestone, donut-shaped coins varies, though not according to size. Today the money is still owned but not moved, even though ownership may change. (www.visit-fsm.org/yapsights.html)
The money cowry, a kind of shell found throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans, became both money and commodity in the Maldive Islands south of India, as archaeologist Egil Mikkelsen of Norway explained to a local newspaper:
However, for the highly developed cultures in Europe and the Far East, the money cowry (Cypreae moneta) was money, and Maldives was the financial market.
In the old world, money cowry had "different meanings and purposes," Mikkelsen said. "They were either symbolic gifts, a means of tax payment or currencies for exchange or all in one."
Cowry played a great role in the life of Maldives, which is believed to have a civilisation dating back to some 2,000 years.
In the pre-Islamic period, some 800 years before, they were regarded as sacred gifts. ...
Mikkelsen has come across a Chinese coin from the Kaashidhoo site dating back to 992 AD, and believes that Maldives may have carried out gift exchange programmes, by which the islands sent cowry shells to China while China reciprocated in sending porcelain chinaware here as gifts. ...
Since there are records that Maldivian ambassadors twice visited China in 658 AD and 662 AD to present gifts to the emperor, gift exchanges may have continued between the Maldives since that time. Hence, the porcelain chinaware that are turning up in excavations in Male and other islands.
There is a record that a Maldives ambassador visited the Roman Empire in 362 AD, and presented gifts to the emperor, perhaps cowry shells. This fact may shed light on the origin of cowry shells making an impact on Europe.
Cowry shells dating back to 550 to 600 AD have been found in Russia and Scandinavia.
In northern Norway, archaeologists have discovered graves containing ornaments made from cowry shells, Mikkelsen said.
While there is no proof that it was Maldivian cowry that made its way into Europe, and much of the world, there is a very strong case in favour of Maldives. While there are some 140 species of cowry, this particular type of money cowry is not found [at] latitudes above the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf. ...
For the [18th-century] Dutch, money cowry served many, even darker, purposes; they paid for slaves from Africa with cowry and resold them to other colonial powers.
African kings and tribal leaders were more than happy to sell off their friends, relatives or tribal folks in exchange for cowry. Cowry proved a flashy ornament for them.
Whole thrones and chairs made from cowry are on display in European museums, gifts sent by African leaders to their European colonial masters.
Cowry shells continued to make a great impact on people's lives even as late as the 20th century. In Sweden, cavalry and the army generals had their horse saddles filled with cowries between 1800-1910. (Rasheed, www.haveeru.com/english/cowry.htm)
Shell money is also used in the Solomon Islands of the Pacific, along with money made from feathers, though barter is still common:
Indeed, in the outer islands, where there are little communications and no shops, [money] is still not widely employed. So, rather than use artificial or minted cash, barter remains important — or an intermediate type of exchange based on uncommon natural objects whose values derives from their rarity and the amount of time invested in their preparation. Such are shell, tooth or feather monies.
They are still a part of everyday life coexistent with currency in towns, gaining in importance as the distance from the city increases. All are conceived to be carried about and worn, though the most valuable, feather money, is clumsy in such an application. Shell money is the handiest and is met as necklaces everywhere on both men and women. It is a series of small pierced discs in descending values of colour — red, orange, brown, black and white. Since they are less easy to make, the smaller beads are the more prized; the valued red ones being however difficult to find in large size of perfect colour, some judgment is called for to value these opposing trends.
This money is made mainly in the island of Malaita by a group of craftsmen, who divide the processes. The shells are first broken into roughly circular discs about 10mm in diameter. The sides are flattened; an abrasive powder is pounded down and used with water. They are then pierced and threaded on a cord stretched along a plank and the discs rubbed round. They are finally made up into strings of different value; these may be restrung into necklaces or belts or into an elaborate halter for a bride.
Red feather money is more precious, is based on something rarer and demands more time and skill in its manufacture. It is more perishable and was used for larger transactions: the purchase of canoes, women, or in fines. Its source is the distant islands of Santa Cruz and Reef to the southeast. The red feathers come from a small honey-eating bird Myzomela cardinalis lured by a live decoy, or a carved one and an imitated call, caught on gummed twigs, plucked and released. The down of ten or more birds yields half a coconut cup of feathers; the usual catch is from five birds in one day. When enough feathers have been assembled, they are taken to the moneymaker who, using additional pigeon feathers, glues them up into plates about 6 x 3 cm with the red feathers edging the rest. A good roll of feather money is 10m long and has about 1500 [feathers]. These are attached to four cords, the roll being finished with thin plates of turtle shell. Working without haste, it might take a year for a man to make one coil; at least 300 man-hours are needed and some estimate it much higher.
The price of a bride is generally set at ten rolls. (That of a concubine was much larger). This figure is still quoted today but the transaction is now of a more symbolic nature designed to cement together the families involved. The value of each roll varies greatly. Arranged into a pile of ten for example each piece is conventionally taken to be worth half that of the one below it from reasons of age and wear. If, mathematically speaking, the top roll has a value of 1 unit, the middle roll would be worth 16 and the bottom one 512! In times past, a single coil of the highest quality would purchase an ocean-going canoe 10 metres or more in length and capable of carrying a ton of cargo. Pig's teeth and charmed shells or stones would be attached to the coil, which was carefully wrapped and kept above the fire in a smoky place for care against damp and insects. (www.melanesianhandcraft.com/the_shell_money.htm)
Why was gold valuable in the first place? It has no practical use; you can't eat it, it's too heavy and too soft to make anything useful from it, it won't even keep an edge. So why was gold valuable enough to be used for coins? For that matter, why is silver valuable, and the precious stones like rubies and emeralds?
An answer is suggested by the crowns of ancient Babylon, and the jewelry of ancient Egypt. The museums of the world contain a number of crowns of queens and princesses from very early Mesopotamia. Most of these consist of flower garlands, like the "crowns" of May queens and brides later in history. But these garlands have gold wire for stems, beaten gold leaves, and flowers made from gold, silver, and precious stones for color. It takes no great leap of the imagination to see that crowns were originally actual garlands, and then were replaced by jewelry. Flowers wilt and rot; gold does not. In addition, gold is a very soft metal, easy to draw into wire or beat into foil. Try doing that with silver, which is, as any jeweler will tell you, a much harder metal. Precious stones probably became precious because they provided color; and it's notable that the stones with the brightest, clearest, most consistent colors — emeralds, rubies, sapphires, amethyst — are precisely those which are most valuable, while stones with murkier or less consistent colors are less valuable.
The gods of Sumer and Ur wore hats wrapped with horns for crowns, and the penultimate kingdoms of the Nile, Upper and Lower Egypt, each had its own crown, a white miter-like hat and a kind of red headband that rose to a spike in the back. Pharaoh's crown was the two of them worn together, with the white part inside the red part.
But even Pharaoh wore diadems, pectorals, and necklaces. The jewelry of Egypt supports my contention that gold and precious stones became valuable for their use as artificial flowers. Gold is common in Egypt, and the pharaohs mined precious stones from the eastern and western desert. Egyptian jewelry motifs are dominated by flowers, bees and other insects, fine miniatures of larger animals, and abstractions in gold wire, electrum, and lapis lazuli.
Ancient Egypt was a very conservative place. The Egyptians went far beyond their neighbors in preserving old things just because they were old. Egyptian writing preserved the actual pictographs long after the Babylonians, for instance, had stylized their signs out of all recognition. Every Egyptian city-state kept its own religion, which became the state religion whenever the city became the capital. Egyptian mathematics never moved past the fractional form 1/n to forms like 3/4 or 7/8, instead representing such fractions as sums of 1/n, where n was different numbers. Their art preserved the convention of representing the heads from the side but the chest from the front, found throughout Africa and in the art of children, from the beginning of their civilization until its fall. Their language survives as the liturgical language of the Copts (Egyptian Christians) down to this day.
This kind of cultural enshrinement can preserve evidence of origins that a more progressive culture would long ago have lost. A particularly interesting example is the Egyptian khopesh sword, whose form suggests that this sword originated as a lighter form of axe.
It may seem obvious that a sword is just a big knife, but all swords may not share this derivation. When a sword is relatively short and used primarily for thrusting, as the leaf-bladed sword of the Greeks or the Roman gladius, the obvious answer is probably the correct one. But what about swords that are very long and used by swinging instead of stabbing, especially when they are curved like scimitars or sharpened only on the leading edge like a Japanese katana?
The ancient Egyptian khopesh or khepesh (Semitic and Hamitic languages don't write vowels) comes straight up from the hilt, angles forward and down, and then curves in a forward-facing quarter-circle. This is precisely the shape of an axe and its shaft; and it is the first Egyptian sword. In the Predynastic period we find depictions of spears, maces, and axes, and the actual artifacts themselves; but no swords. It appears, then, that in Egypt the sword originates as a stripped-down outline of an axe!
Another cultural innovation we take for granted is the chair. This "natural" idea simply did not occur to most cultures. The chair seems to have been invented in the ancient near East as the throne. Only the kings of Babylon, Egypt, and African kingdoms like Benin sat on chairs. Everyone else stood. In everyday life, when not standing, one sat on the ground, or crouched. When sleeping, whether in ancient Egypt or medieval Japan, you laid on the ground, perhaps with a mat or rug under you, and in most cultures and most times, had not even a pillow.
In ancient Rome, furniture was sparse. There were couches for dining, and until quite late the Romans lay sideways on these couches as they talked and ate. In the Senate, the Senators when not standing and engaging in rhetoric sat in curule chairs, which were a kind of x-frame chair.
When Rome fell, and whenever a Roman city was sacked, the barbarians would often take these chairs home with them, or, if they stayed there, take them to their new home in the plundered cities. The countries of Europe are descended from the barbarian kingdoms founded upon the fall of the Roman Empire, and the thrones of Europe descend directly from the plundered chairs of the Roman Senate. Indeed, depictions of chairs in medieval manuscripts, and surviving medieval thrones, are very often x-frame chairs virtually identical to curule chairs.
Then the Renaissance came, which is characterized by Europe rediscovering and embracing all things Roman. The new breed of Renaissance prince, merchant, and middle-class burger had furniture in their houses; real tables, real beds, and real chairs. The chairs, needless to say, were more often than not x-frame chairs with lion heads on the arms.
I have been attempting to show that many cultural notions, and their physical incarnations, come from surprising places. As James Burke demonstrated, the connections between ideas are contingent on accidents of history, as quirky as the course of a war or a political campaign. It is easy to imagine a few changes resulting in a world without chairs or Chinese dragons. But we must also wonder, when we see how the Roman universal calendar lapsed back into the ordinary numbering of days used by everyone else, what new ideas would emerge if history could be rewound, and started forward again. What have we lost with vanished cultures, each with its own language, art, political structures, kinds of kinship, and ways of looking at the universe?
Ideas with their cultural baggage have been described as memes, a term denoting an idea as almost a living thing, a virus struggling to infect as many minds as possible in the face of competition from other viruses. Some of these viruses are harmless, some benign — and some have destroyed millions upon millions of people.
Consider smoking. When the Europeans came to the Americas, the literal bacterial and viruses they brought with them from the crowded Old World wiped out entire nations. A single exploring party moving through virgin territory could and did spread diseases that the long-isolated and less dense populations of the New World had no defense against. For every nation known to be devastated by contact with "white men" there must have been dozens of others that perished unseen; we know them by their bones and artifacts, but have no record of their languages and cultures, not even the names they called themselves.
In return, and just as inadvertently, the Native Americans passed the idea of smoking to the Europeans. In its American environment, smoking was practiced on ceremonial occasions only, for a brief time only, among the men in the men's lodge only. The Europeans had no ceremonial context for it, and smoked as often and as long as they could afford to. Large upswings in the number of European males becoming addicted to tobacco occurred especially in the male fraternities of armies during long, tough wars: the Peninsular War, World War I, and World War II mark veteran populations who mostly did not smoke before they were inducted. The millions of Europeans who have died from smoking are the true "Montezuma's revenge."
Unfortunately, the [smoking] meme propagates through its connection with the [advertising] and [commerce] memes, and the people most susceptible to that kind of persuasion are the stupid, the poorly educated, and the young. Due to their societal marginalization and the barriers placed between them and good education, minorities such as Native Americans have a much higher rate of smoking than the general population.
Smoking is not only a physically lethal practice and a physically addicting practice, but an extremely virulent meme; it spreads despite all attempts to discourage it, mostly because of the heavy [advertising] of the tobacco [companies]. Other ideas have killed their millions without commerce or advertising, and so must be judged more virulent.
Religion, for instance, proceeds from no factual or evidential basis, yet most people through most of time have professed to believe in the gods, or in a god, i.e., have been infected with the idea. Partly this has been through religion's link with the [family] meme (parents infect their young, thinking they're doing the right thing), partly through its connection with the [state] meme (recall that Socrates was executed for impiety), and partly through its usurpation of the [morality] meme, even though morality precedes religion. But this begs the question (which is far beyond the scope of this paper) of how religion got its hooks so deeply into the mental environment. But it's interesting to note that
In the case of racism, another lethal virus, there is no mystery as to its origin or spread, only what to do about it. One's "race" originally meant one's country of origin, or culture. Thus the Spanish sneered about the English race, the English sneered about the French and Irish races, the Greeks and Romans sneered about barbarian races, and just about everyone looked down on the Gypsy and Jewish races.
When European countries began setting up colonies around the world, they found a whole bunch more "races" to look down on. Everyone else was carrying on the way they always had, while Europe was enjoying the beginning of the scientific and industrial revolutions. This allowed Spain, Portugal, England, and France, especially, to do as they liked in the "New" World and the Far East, although other nations soon followed suit.
Spain was the first country to buy slaves in Africa and the first to plant permanent New World colonies. Spanish overlordship was vicious, but not genocidal (except by accident by means of disease, as previously noted). There was a limited market for household slaves, and Native Americans did most of the necessary work of raising missions, tending crops, etc.
In the long run the English were much more destructive, because they were more ambitious. English colonists sought trade on a larger scale, and began growing cotton and tobacco on large American plantations. Native Americans, it was soon found, died when forced to this work; and it was too expensive and too difficult to ship enough convicts or indentured servants. English traders turned to Africa for slaves, and the African slave system exploded overnight to meet the demand. What had been a way of disposing of captives captured in war became wholesale raids and the destruction of whole populations.
To justify these crimes, slavery apologists coined the myth of "race" as we know it today. The notion that human beings are biologically different, and that these differences correlate to the darkness of one's skin, is nonsense. Human beings are remarkably uniform, compared with most other species, and the differences that do exist have no single correlation. That is to say, you can divide populations according to blood type, immune responses, melanin production in the skin, or hundreds of other ways; but each way will produce different "races", whereas if human beings really were different biologically, many if not all of these divisions would correlate with each other.
The coiners of racism, however, didn't have to face modern biological and genetic knowledge, and they linked racism with religion, using the Bible to justify their genocide. As a result, though slavery is illegal today and most overt expressions of racism as well, every one of us was raised a racist and must fight against it in our own minds every day.
Racism is an example of a virulent meme that persists even when it is counter to personal and group survival. Other examples are not hard to find. Archaeologists have discovered a culture of ancient Australia, living on the shore right across from Tasmania, that starved to death. The Tasman Sea is rich with fish, shellfish, sea weed, and other food, but apparently this culture did not eat seafood; no fish bones or shells are found in their middens, and their bones are deformed by vitamin deficiencies that a seafood diet would have prevented. So they died out with a rich larder right at their feet.
If we are aware of how limited our notions are, we can strive to expand them. This means that when we are faced with a problem, whether as individuals or as a culture, we'll have more answers to choose from. A common expression is "thinking outside the box". The more we realize how small the box is, the more easily we can discard conventional solutions and come up with truly original ones.
Knowing how diverse human cultures have been helps fight racism, parochialism, and other forms of (and contributing factors to) bigotry. It's harder to say "that's just the way it is" when you know that "the way it is" is an accident of history expressed in our culture, and that other cultures had other ways that worked just as well for them.
The world has shrunk dramatically from the beginning of the Twentieth to the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, and many worlds of human thought have vanished entirely. Early Twentieth Century explorers could go among the Native Americans of our own continent, to Africa, to Asia, to South America, to the Pacific Islands, and find ways of life hundreds or thousands of years old, expressed in languages totally unlike English, with rich cultural support of music, games, social systems, and cuisine rooted in an unspoiled native ecosystem. Today we find people all over the world speaking English, drinking Coke, and listening to Rock and Roll, wherever we go. We are much the poorer for it, and need to be aware of our poverty.
Not much.
The best we can do is educate our children. Education is always the key; if we teach our children the history of the world and the ways of all the cultures the world used to have, perhaps they won't take our culture so much for granted, and will prize the remaining differences instead of finding in them reasons to hate.
The plain fact is, the world is very alike now, and getting more alike every day. Languages are dying, cultural barriers are falling to commercial invasion, and every country becomes more like Anywhere U.S.A. every day. This means that we have fewer cultural resources all the time. Rock and roll, a Twentieth Century musical innovation, arose from black musical roots, themselves the result of mass importation of slaves into America. It was tamed by "respectable" white singers, then revitalized by British singers who preferred the black originals to the white imitators. But how could such a sequence of events come about again, now that Rock and Roll has conquered the world? There are a lot fewer other musical forms to draw upon, and most of them are much less popular even in their own countries. Perhaps the next innovation in music will derive from Tropical or Merengue, two surviving popular music forms of the Spanish-speaking world. More likely, there won't be any further innovations, but only a descent into less and less original music, for example Rap with its gutter dialect, street-trash attitude, doggerel lyrics, and no melody.
Cultural diversity rose from isolation, and isolation is our best hope for its renewal. If, for example, a planetary disaster destroyed our culture, most people would perish and the survivors would have to create their own cultures in their isolated little populations. Such a solution would probably be final; while the seas would renew themselves, the forests grow back, and animals fill the niches made vacant, the ore bodies we're used up would not be replenished. The survivors would find few useable metals in our alloy and plastic cities; enough to outfit a king's guard with armor and swords, but not enough to build an industrial revolution.
Space provides a better alternative. Not from aliens; as I discussed in an earlier paper, "Intelligent Life in the Milky Way Galaxy", there probably aren't any aliens out there to visit us, or at best very few and very far away. Alien culture wouldn't help much anyway; there's no particular reason to suppose that an alien language, for instance, would operate at frequencies we could hear, or make sounds we could recognize or imitate because of their non-human bodies. Even a Terrestrial bird makes sound in a way completely unlike a human throat; how much less accessible to us would alien speech, music, or culture be?
No, the promise of space is human isolation. Put human beings years away from Mother Earth in the asteroid belt, or better yet decades away on the planets of another sun, cut off from fads and fashion, and new cultures will begin to emerge. This becomes even more true if the humans don't have, or can't maintain, our current level of technology. The death of colonists will be the fertilizer of renewed cultural innovation.
Short of such bloodshed, either through the collapse of our civilization or stellar colonization, our only hope is a genius, or series of geniuses, who will invent completely new art forms; or the invention of an art form that involves the creation of whole new cultures. Such a genius, or such an art form, has never existed; cultures were pieced together bit by bit from nothing, as human beings discovered their potential for the first time in various places and times. But where there are human beings, with their infinite inventiveness, there is always hope.
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