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By Root 1939 0

The Zapotec were based across the mountains from the Olmec, in Oaxaca’s high Central Valley—three forty-to-sixty-mile-long bowls that intersect in a ragged Y. By about 1550 B.C., they were abandoning the life of hunting and gathering to live in villages with defensive palisades.*21 These early villages had wattle-and-daub houses, fine pottery, and some public architecture. They were controlled by “big men,” the social scientist’s term for the alpha male who is able in such informal settings to enforce his will through persuasion or force. Within a few hundred years, the big men acquired rank—that is, they began to wield power not only because of their personal charisma, but also because their societies had given them an elevated official position. It is the difference between the leading spirit on a pickup basketball team and the officially selected captain of a college squad. After this, political consolidation proceeded apace. Soon the valley was dominated by three main chiefdoms, one at each endpoint of the Y. They did not get along; a thirty-square-mile buffer zone in the middle, Flannery and Marcus noted, was “virtually unoccupied.”

The biggest of the three chiefdoms was located near today’s village of San José Mogote. Around 750 B.C. it was attacked and its temple razed in a fire so intense that the clay walls melted. San José Mogote quickly rebuilt the temple a few yards away.

Across the new threshold artisans laid a carved stone. Splayed across its face, suitable for stomping on, was a bas-relief of a naked, disemboweled male corpse, apparently a defeated enemy, blood welling from his side. The carving, to my taste, is beautifully done, as graphically elegant, despite the gory subject matter, as a Matisse. What matters most to researchers, though, is not the design but the two curious marks between the cadaver’s feet. The two marks are glyphs: the oldest firmly dated writing in the Americas. Despite their brevity, they are full of information, both because of the nature of written language, and because of the special way Mesoamerican people chose their names.

COUNTING AND WRITING

Writing begins with counting. When a culture grows big enough, it acquires an elite, which needs to monitor things it considers important: money, stored goods, births and deaths, the progression of time. In the Fertile Crescent, village accountants began keeping records with clay tokens around 8000 B.C. As the need for precision grew, they scratched marks on the tokens as mnemonic devices. For example, they might have distinguished a count of sheep from one of wheat by drawing a sheep on one and a wheat stalk on the other. Gradually the information on each record increased. The bureaucrats were not intending to create writing. Instead they were simply adding useful features as they became necessary. By 3200 B.C. Sumerian scribes had progressed to inscribing on clay tablets with sharpened reeds. A tablet might contain, say, two hash marks, a box, a circle with a cross in the middle, an asterisk-like shape, and an arrangement of three triangles. Scribes would know that the hash marks meant “two,” the box was a “temple,” the circle stood for “cattle,” an asterisk meant “goddess,” and the triangles were “Inanna”—two cattle owned by the goddess Inanna’s temple. (Here I am lifting an example from Gary Urton, a Harvard anthropologist.) They had no way to indicate verbs or adjectives, no way to distinguish subject from object, and only a limited vocabulary. Nonetheless, Sumerians were moving toward something like writing.

In Mesoamerica, timekeeping provided the stimulus that accounting gave to the Middle East. Like contemporary astrologers, the Olmec, Maya, and Zapotec believed that celestial phenomena like the phases of the moon and Venus affect daily life. To measure and predict these portents requires careful sky watching and a calendar. Strikingly, Mesoamerican societies developed three calendars: a 365-day secular calendar like the contemporary calendar; a 260-day sacred calendar that was like no other calendar on earth; and the equally