1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [128]
Red and White Bundle’s royal palace was built on a cliff over a bend in the river. Guarded by sheer walls on three sides, its soldiers had only to watch the fourth side, across which was an earthen berm. Leading an army of a thousand, 8-Deer threw up ladders, swarmed over the berm with his men, and entered the palace. As befit a conqueror, 8-Deer was wearing elaborate cotton armor, a ceremonial beard wig, and a cowl made from the head of a jaguar. Gold-and-jade necklaces dangled across his naked chest. In the palace he found 6-Monkey and her husband, the king of Red and White Bundle. Both were mortally wounded. In Pohl’s account, 8-Deer held 6-Monkey as she died.
Captured with the royal couple were their two sons, the elder of whom, 4-Wind, was heir to the throne. Seizing him by the hair, 8-Deer forced the teenager to grovel before him. But he also made what seems to have been a sentimental decision: he spared the life of his lover’s son. The folly of this action became apparent when 4-Wind and his brother escaped from confinement.
Seeking revenge, 4-Wind approached the Zapotec empire for help. With Zapotec backing, he linked rebels in Red and White Bundle and a host of other cities defeated by 8-Deer. They besieged Tilantongo in 1115. The battle lasted six months and ended in total defeat for Tilantongo. In a mirror image of the past, the captured 8-Deer was forced to bow to 4-Wind. He was fifty-five years old and had six official kingships and dozens of petty states under his control. Victorious and vengeful, 4-Wind personally disemboweled him. Then he married 8-Deer’s daughter.
In 4-Wind’s first exercise of statecraft, he abandoned the Zapotec allies who had helped him achieve the throne, aligned Tilantongo with the Toltec empire to the north, and attacked the Zapotec. Ultimately the Ñudzahui under his lead took over much of Oaxaca, forcing the Zapotec states to pay tribute. The empire he established, far bigger than 8-Deer’s, lasted until the fifteenth century, when the Mexica invaded. And then came Cortés.
WHEELED INTERLUDE
As Matthew Stirling and his team were dodging ticks and unearthing stelae in Tres Zapotes, they found a cache of fifteen upside-down pottery bowls tucked into the ground six feet below the surface. The bowls protectively covered thirty-five toy-size, decorated figurines and twelve small, painted clay discs. Among the figurines were two dogs and a jaguar, each of which had thin tubes joining its two front feet and its two back feet. The discs lay beside them. Similar finds have been made further north, near Mexico City.
In the 1980s I saw the Tres Zapotes animals, or ones like them, at a museum in the Yucatán Peninsula. I was there with an Italian engineer whom I had met by chance a few hours before. Well before me, the engineer figured out the significance of the tubes between the figurines’ feet. “Those are for axles,” he said. “And those”—pointing to the discs—“must be the wheels.” Looking at the little figures, it seemed obvious that they had been equipped with wheels in precisely the form he suggested.
The engineer scrunched up his face with incredulity. Tres Zapotes dated back to at least 1000 B.C. So the Olmec and their successors must have had the wheel for more than two thousand years. “Why didn’t they use it for anything other than little toys?” he asked in Italian. “How could they not have understood that you could make bigger wheels and put them on carts? Hanno fatto proprio una stupidaggine, quei tipi.”
The word stupidaggine (an absurdity), similar enough in Italian and Spanish, rang out in the room, drawing stares. The engineer seemed not to care. He looked positively offended at the Olmec failure to see the world in the same way as a contemporary European engineer.
I’m giving my acquaintance a hard time, but his bafflement was easy for me to