The Long Millennium: Affluence, Architecture and Its Dark Matter Economy (Global Histories Before Globalisation) 9781032244143, 9781032244167, 9781003278481, 1032244143

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THE LONG MILLENNIUM

This book argues that long-distance trade in luxury items – such as diamonds, gold, cinnamon, scented woods, ivory and pearls, all of which require little overhead in their acquisition and were relatively easy to transport – played a foundational role in the creation of what we would call “global trade” in the first millennium CE. The book coins the term “dark matter economy” to better describe this complex – though mostly invisible – relationship to normative realities. The first full integration of dark matter economy with the emerging global flows took place in South India and Sri Lanka at the beginning of the m ­ illennium. The book then moves to other places in the world – “sweet spots” – where a particular type of affluence was generated through the trade in luxury goods. This upstream affluence manifested itself in the creation of shrines, palaces, temples and engineering works that all thickened the landscape of memory, control and extraction and also served as a defense mechanism against intrusions from afar. The book also explains the collapse of dark matter economy as a result of the cumulative energies of colonialism, modernization and nationalism that make it hard for us today to come to terms with this history. The Long Millennium will appeal to students and scholars alike studying the trade networks and economics of the early Middle Ages as well as anyone  interested in the effect of trade on medieval society in the first millennium CE. Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture in the Department of Architecture at MIT. In addition to his numerous articles and other works, he has published two textbooks: A Global History of

Architecture with co-author Vikramaditya Prakash (2017) and Architecture of First Societies, a Global Perspective (2014). In 2013, Jarzombek and Prakash founded the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) through a multimillion dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It supports scholars from around the world who are committed to infusing a global perspective into their academic and teaching practices.

GLOBAL HISTORIES BEFORE GLOBALISATION Series Editors: Nicholas Morton (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Kristin Skottki (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

This series opens a major new forum of debate for scholars working on Global History in the millennium between ca. 500 and 1500 AD. It seeks to connect previously disconnected historiographies and profoundly change our understanding of the so-called ‘medieval’ period. Exploring this millennium of history at a global level creates an opportunity to revisit nationalistic and Eurocentric master narratives, not only of the ‘medieval’ millennium, but also of the origins of the modern world. We welcome discussion on both alternative models of periodisation and alternative approaches to traditional constructions of spaces and identities. This unprecedented series seeks to initiate a global conversation in which scholars can share and debate their ideas on these topics through research monographs, translated sources and works of synthesis. Studies may include those on the cross-cultural transmission of ideas, global trade, warfare or macro theories/narratives concerning the development of human societies during this era. We are especially interested in microhistories with transcultural and transcontinental implications. Thus it is to be hoped that contributing studies will help to re-write the history of events as well as processes whose global implications have yet to be explored. Byzantine Ideas of Persia, 650–1461 Rustam Shukurov The Long Millennium Affluence, Architecture and Its Dark Matter Economy Mark Jarzombek

THE LONG MILLENNIUM Affluence, Architecture and Its Dark Matter Economy

Mark Jarzombek

Designed cover image: Detail from the Catalan Atlas Sheet 6 showing a map of the Western Sahara and Mansa Musa, 1375. incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo. Image ID: WAB990 First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Mark Jarzombek The right of Mark Jarzombek to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jarzombek, Mark, author. Title: The long millennium : affluence, architecture and its dark matter economy / Mark Jarzombek. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Global histories before globalisation | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023034290 (print) | LCCN 2023034291 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032244143 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032244167 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003278481 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Chiefdoms. | Civilization, Medieval. | Middle Ages. | World history. Classification: LCC GN492.55 .J37 2024 (print) | LCC GN492.55 (ebook) | DDC 909/.07—dc23/eng/20231023 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034290 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034291 ISBN: 978-1-032-24414-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-24416-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27848-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To: Mark Beck and to Nancy

CONTENTS

List of Figures

xi

Introduction: Leading Questions

1

PART 1

11

1 The Case of Musa I

13

2 Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

23

3 Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies

34

PART 2

49

1 “The Most Outlying Lands”

51

2 The Sri Lanka Wealth Rush

66

3 South Indian Emergence

82

4 The Central Role of Borneo

95

5 The Indonesian Seaway

108

x Contents

6 The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

117

7 The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

135

8 The North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot

150

PART 3

165

1 Beyond the Binary

167

2 Structural Asymmetries

175

3 Institutions Without Institutionality

187

4 Crossing Chieftain Geographies

201

PART 4

209

1 Shrine Landscapes

211

2 Feast and Dance

229

3 Great Works

250

4 Palace Universes

260

5 Looking and Sounding the Part

279

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts Index

289 307

FIGURES

0.1 Locals searching for jade in the White Jade River in the southern Xinjiang region of China. Credit: Gary/ Monika Wescott, www.TurtleExpedition.com 1.1.1 Detail from the late fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas. Credit: incamerastock/Alamy 1.1.2 Artisanal gold mining on the Niger River in Mali. Credit: Joerg Boethling/Alamy 1.1.3 Salt from Takedda arriving at Timbuktu, photographed ca. 1903 by François-Edmond Fortie (François-Edmond Fortier, Tombouctou. Arrivée d’une caravane de sel. Le sel en barres de 30 k. environ vient de Taoudennit, à 20 jours au nord de Tombouctou) 1.1.4 The general domain of influence of Musa I 1.2.1 Great Mosque of Djenné. Credit: Devriese/Alamy 1.2.2 Tomb of Askia Muhammad I, Gao, Mali. Credit: Taguelmous/Wikimedia Commons 1.2.3 The entrance to a house in Oualata, Mauritania. Credit: Kurt Dundy/Wikimedia Commons 1.2.4 Caravan Arriving at Timbuctoo, Heinrich Barth, 1853: Voyages et Decovertes dans l’Afrique Septentrionale et Centrale pendant les annees 1849 a 1855 (Paris, 1860– 1861), vol. 4 [1861], facing title page 1.3.1 Sweet spot areas toward the end of the first millennium CE 1.3.2 The author standing in the unexcavated ruins of Sijilmasa, Morocco 1.3.3 Author burning agarwood from Vietnam

3 14 15

16 18 24 25 26

27 35 36 40

xii Figures

.3.4 My Son, Vietnam. Credit: Sgnpkd/Wikimedia Commons 1 42 1.3.5 A coin from ancient Cyrene. Credit: International Numismatics Club/Wikimedia Commons 43 1.3.6 Crown Top or Usnisha Cover for the head of the Buddha, Java, 650–1000.  Gold sheet and gold wire with a crystal finial. Credit: Yale University Art Gallery 46 1.3.7 The Extraction and Invisiblity Horizons at the end of the first millennium CE 47 2.0.1 The major sweet spots and some associated cities of buildings 50 2.1.1 Balijatra festival in Cuttack. Credit: Kamalakanta 777/ Wikimedia Commons 53 2.1.2 River port near Mopti, Mali. Credit: David Forman/Alamy 54 2.1.3 An example of an ivory chest, engraved silver made in Cordoba in the tenth century/agefotostock 55 2.1.4 Established Arab/Islamic communities by the eleventh century 57 2.1.5 Musk and other aromatics in a shop in the market in Fes, Morocco 58 2.1.6 The author standing with Hi’ham Madi in his shop, Herboriste Avicenne, after buying a piece of ambergris, Marrakesh, Morocco 60 2.1.7 Grand camphor tree of Noin, Oyamazumi Shrine, Ōmishima Island, Japan. Credit: そらみみ/Wikimedia Commons61 2.2.1 Cinnamonum verum. Credit: H.Zell/Wikimedia Commons 67 2.2.2 Gem mining in contemporary Sri Lanka 68 2.2.3 Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Credit: Balou46/Wikimedia Commons 69 2.2.4 The banks of Tissa Wewa, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka/Alamy 69 2.2.5 A Sri Lankan pearl merchant, photographed in the nineteenth century (1849, Volume VI) 71 2.2.6 A Tamil Catamaran. Image courtesy of the British Library/Granger 72 2.2.7 Royal white elephant at the Grand Palace, ca. 1925 74 2.2.8 The Ruwanwelisaya in Sri Lanka/Alamy 76 2.2.9 Sigiriya, Sri Lanka. Credit: Wrobell/Wikimedia Commons 79 2.2.10 Sigiriya fresco. Credit: hadynyah/iStock.com 80 2.3.1 Krishna River, India. Credit: Rajaraman Sundaram/ Wikimedia Commons 83 2.3.2 South India – Sri Lanka Sweet Spot 83

Figures  xiii

2.3.3 Unripened black pepper growing on a farm in Kerala, India. Credit: Parin Parmar|Dreamstime.com 84 2.3.4 The Chera/Chola interaction zone 85 2.3.5 A Sadhu holy man blowing a conch shell on the banks of the Ganges River. Credit: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images 85 2.3.6 The Panchanadisvara Temple, Thirubuvanai, India. Credit: Jayaseerlourdhuraj/Wikimedia Commons 87 2.3.7 Bhima Ratha, one of the five rathas at Mahabalipuram, India. Credit: Destination8infinity/Wikimedia Commons 88 2.3.8 Shore Temple, Mamallapuram. Credit: Swarna1311/ Wikimedia Commons 89 2.3.9 Srirangam and the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple, India 90 2.3.10 Descent of the Ganges, Mamallapuram, India. Credit: McKay Savage 91 2.3.11 The Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, India. Credit: T M Cyriac/Wikimedia Commons 92 2.3.12 South India and Sri Lanka in the Long Millenium 93 2.4.1 Borobudur Temple, Indonesia. Credit: Kartika Sari Henry 96 2.4.2 The attack on the monkeys, Level 1, Balustrade at Borobudur: XXVII: 102.  Credit: Anandajoti Bhikkhu 97 2.4.3 Bezoar stone with case and stand 97 2.4.4 Locals harvesting bird’s nests on Borneo. Credit: saiko3p/Shutterstock.com99 2.4.5 Longhouse on Borneo. Credit: mypokcik/ Shutterstock.com 103 2.5.1 Indonesian Seaway Sweet Spot 109 2.5.2 Diagram of the Indonesian Seaway 109 2.5.3 Brunei, Borneo, the former capital of the Brunei Sultanate, as depicted in 1881.  Engraving by Bernardo Rico 113 2.5.4 Teak forest on the island of Muna, south central Indonesia. Credit: Edward Parker/Alamy 115 2.5.5 Southeast Asia in the Long Millenium 115 2.6.1 Vat Phu. Credit: Basile Morin/Wikimedia Commons 118 2.6.2 Comparison of the site conditions of Dali, China and Shrestapura, Laos 119 2.6.3 The Three Pagodas, Dali, China. Credit: Michelle Burgess/Alamy120 2.6.4 Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot 121 2.6.5 The horse market at Bac Ha Market in North West Vietnam. Credit: Paul Gibson/Alamy 122 2.6.6 A woman, Ayi Yang, pictured in her home with a block of locally harvested salt used for curing Nuodeng ham. Credit: Dave Tacon 123

xiv Figures

2.6.7 Tea garden workers returning to their home after morning work at Kalaigaon, 2015.  Credit: Dheerajdeka11/Wikimedia Commons 124 2.6.8 Miners digging and sorting Burmese amber at Noije Bum in the Hukawng Valley. Credit: Sieghard Ellenberger “Burmese Amber Fossils, Mining, Sales and Profits.” Geoconservation Research, 2020 126 2.6.9 The Shwezigon Pagoda, Pagan, Myanmar. Credit: DIMMIS/Wikimedia Commons 127 2.6.10 Temples and pagodas in Pagan, Myanmar. Credit: Corto Maltese 1999/Wikimedia Commons 127 2.6.11 Comparison of a cowrie shell from the Maldives (left) with one from the Philippines (right) 127 2.6.12 Bakong, Cambodia. Credit: Anandajoti Bhikku 130 2.6.13 Chinese imperial queen’s headdress from the Ming Dynasty with blue tian-tsui decoration 130 2.6.14 Mekong kingfisher. Credit: Barnabas/Shutterstock 131 2.6.15 Khmer bridge, known as Kampong Kdei Bridge, on the road from Angkor to Phnom Chisor. Credit: Robnaw/ Adobe Stock 131 2.6.16 West Baray, Angkor, Cambodia. Credit: Dario Severi 132 2.7.1 Pyramids of Meroë, Sudan. Credit: mbrand85 136 2.7.2 A reconstruction of Dungur Palace, Axum, Ethiopia – Musée national d’Addis Abeba. Credit: Zheim/ Wikimedia Commons 137 2.7.3 View of stele in Axum, Ethiopia 138 2.7.4  Bet Giyorgis (Church of St. George), Lalibela, Ethiopia. Credit: Jon Bratt/Getty Images 139 2.7.5 The water basin of Biet Marian, Lalibela, Ethiopia 140 2.7.6 High altitude view of Chew Bahir Basin, Ethiopia 141 2.7.7 Eleventh-century rock crystal ewer at the Louvre Museum 142 2.7.8 East Africa Sweet Spot 144 2.7.9 Mapungubwe, South Africa. Credit: Laura SA/Alamy 145 2.7.10  A photograph from ca. 1908 of a caravan on its way to the East Coast of Africa fording a river in Uganda. Illustration for The Graphic, January 14, 1899 146 2.7.11  Sub-Saharan Africa in the Long Millenium 147 2.8.1  Hunting for amber along the Black Sea. Credit: Eddie Gerald/Alamy151 2.8.2 Map of the amber route during Roman times 153 2.8.3  Cult figure on Mount Sleza, Poland. Credit: Merlin/ Wikimedia Commons 153

Figures  xv

2.8.4  Roman era amber rings from the Archaelogical Museum of Udine. Credit: Giovanni dall’Orto 154 2.8.5  Twelfth century portrait of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Unknown artist. © National Portrait Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY 156 2.8.6 Eynhallow Island, Orkney Islands. Credit: Rude Heath 158 2.8.7 North Sea – Baltic Latitudes Sweet Spot 160 2.8.8 Europe in the Long Millenium 161 3.1.1 Kurumba village in the Mudumalai National Park, 1996 172 3.2.1 The Irrawaddy River, Myanmar. Credit: Craig Lovell/Alamy177 3.2.2  Ceramic jars on the seabed belonging to the Belitung shipwreck. Credit: Michael Flecker 179 3.2.3  A Maori bartering a crayfish with an English naval officer by a Maori artist – known as “The Artist of the Chief Mourner.” Originally published in 1769 in drawings illustrative of Captain Cook’s First Voyage, 1768–1771.  Source: British Library 181 3.2.4  Interior of Borneo Longhouse with spirit jar. Credit: Timothy Tye 182 3.2.5 A sample of foreign made beads that were used in Borneo 184 3.3.1 A sacred grove near Mombasa, Kenya. Credit: Ninara 191 3.3.2 The Thorsberg Moor, Germany. Credit: Alexander Leischner194 3.3.3  Boums Lake in Haute-Garonne, one of many lakes near Toulouse, France 196 3.3.4 Mount Bromo, Indonesia. Credit: Kadek Gita 197 3.4.1 Samburu harvester collecting frankincense resin. Credit: Hilary Sommerlatte 204 3.4.2  Man harvesting black pepper in Kerala, India. Credit: Roger Cracknell/Alamy 204 3.4.3  Cross-ecological and polity interactions in the first millennium CE 207 4.1.1  First-century Roman Lararium from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. Credit: Patricio Lorente 213 4.1.2  Labuhan ceremony on the slopes of the Mount Merapi. Credit: Beawiharta Beawiharta/Reuters/Alamy 214 4.1.3 Draupadi’s Ratha, Mahabalipuram, India 215 4.1.4  The ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor in the shape of a cow in front of her shrine 215 4.1.5 Indian village shrine dedicated to Hanuman. © Rachanalodhi 08081996|Dreamstime.com 216

xvi Figures

4.1.6 A typical shrine interaction 217 4.1.7  A nat shrine in Yangon, Myanmar. Credit: James Jiao/ Shutterstock.com219 4.1.8  The Giant Rocks of Singida, Tanzania. Credit: Stephan Schramm/Alamy Stock Photo 220 4.1.9 St. Winefride’s Well, England. Photo by Tom Oates 221 4.1.10  Clootie Well on the Black Isle, Scotland. Credit: F. Leask/CC BY-SA 2.0 222 4.1.11  Hokora or small wayside Japanese Shinto shrine in the mountains of Japan. Credit: CulturalEyes-DH/Alamy 223 4.1.12  A kamidana with kagamimochi offering in a house in Japan. Credit: shig2006/Wikimedia Commons 223 4.1.13  The God of Thunder’s Temple in Ibadan (1910–1912). Image courtesy of Frobenius Institute 224 4.1.14 A Mumbai Street Shrine. Credit: Rainer Krack/Alamy 226 4.2.1  Reconstruction of a Viking house from the ring castle Fyrkat near Hobro, Denmark 233 4.2.2 General map of Petra, Jordan 234 4.2.3  The triclinium of the “Tomb of the Roman soldier.” Credit: Nick Brundle/Alamy 235 4.2.4  Diagram of rock-cut techniques base on an unfinished façade at Petra 236 4.2.5  A mountaintop altar overlooking Petra, Jordan. Credit: Verity Cridland 237 4.2.6 Entrance to a triclinium in Little Petra, Jordan. Credit: Ankur P 237 4.2.7 The Treasury, Petra, Jordan, compared to the Pantheon in Rome 238 4.2.8  Clay model of a dance scene with four men on a circular dance floor, with attached Horns of consecrations, marking the religious character of the dance. Kamilari, 1500–1400 BC. Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, case 98.  Credit: Zde/Wikimedia Commons 241 4.2.9  A sanctum inside the Hoysaleshwara temple in Halebidu, India. Credit: Anks.manuja/Wikimedia Commons241 4.2.10  A fragment of the frescoes on the wall of the tomb chapel of Nebamun, depicting guests, servants, musicians and dancers at a funerary banquet 242 4.2.11  King Munza of the Azanda dancing before his wives. Sketch by Dr Georg August Schweinfurth (1836–1925), German botanist who travelled in the interior of East Africa (from 1868) and studied the inhabitants. The

Figures  xvii

African Adventure: A History of Africa’s Explorers by Timothy Severin, page 247.  Credit: Smith Archive/Alamy 4.2.12 Nigerian chief during a dance. Credit: Tim Graham/Alamy 4.2.13  Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam, India. Credit: Foto Flirt/Alamy 4.2.14 Angkor Wat. Credit: Kheng Vungvuthy 4.2.15  Dancing apsaras carved at the Bayon temple. Credit: David Wilmot 4.3.1  Daisen Kofun, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. © National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism 4.3.2  Annual repair of the great mosque of Djenné. Credit: Ralf Steinberger 4.3.3  Locals participating in Sengu Ceremony at Jingu Shrine in Ise./Getty 4.3.4 Angkor Wat. Credit: Charles J. Sharp 4.3.5 Tirta Empul, Bali. Credit: Arian Zwegers 4.3.6 Pura Beji Sangsit, Bali. Credit: Ondřej Bahula 4.4.1  A few times a week, Muhammad Sanusi II, Emire of Kan (northern Nigeria), holds court. Credit: Jane Hahn for the Washington Post/Getty Images 4.4.2  Henry Morton Stanley in an interview before the chiefs at Wangata in the late 1870s 4.4.3  View of King Mutesa’s palace (Uganda), illustrated in John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York: Harper, 1868), 277 4.4.4  The ancestral shrine of the Royal Palace of Benin, Benin City; ­photographer Cyril Punch and first published in H. L. Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (Halifax: King and Sons, 1903), Fig. 84, p 79 4.4.5 Padmanabhapuram Palace, India 4.4.6 D  ance Hall of Padmanabhapuram Palace, India. Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images 4.4.7 Plan of Abomey Palace compound, Benin 4.4.8 Abomey Palace compound. Photo by Karalyn Monteil © UNESCO 4.4.9 A  marapura Palace, Myanmar, as depicted in a watercolor with pen and ink and made in 1855 by Colesworthy Grant/Alamy 4.4.10  Reconstruction of Husuni Kubwa, Tanzania. Credit: Windmill Books/Universal Images Group North America LLC/Alamy 4.4.11 The Great Zimbabwe, aerial view. Credit: Janice Bell

243 244 246 246 247

251 253 255 256 257 257

261 262

263

264 267 268 269 269

271

272 273

xviii Figures

4.4.12 Plan of the compound of the king of the Agala, Nigeria, from the mid-1930s. Credit: Miles Clifford and Richmond Palmer, “A Nigerian Chiefdom,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 66 (July to December 1936): 393–435 274 4.4.13 Audience Hall of Preah Barum Reachea Veang Chaktomuk Serei Mongkol (Royal Palace), Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Credit: Patricia Young/Alamy 276 4.5.1 King Rama V photographed at his coronation in 1873, Thailand280 4.5.2 The Royal Drummers of Burundi. Credit: guenterguni/ iStock.com283 4.5.3 M  uteesa 1 of Buganda receives explorers John Speke (at right) and James Grant in 1862.  Engraved from a drawing by Grant 284 4.5.4 Javanese Gamelan. Credit: Benjamin Hollis 285 4.5.5  Map of the route taken by the Litunga royal barge, Barotseland, Zambia 286 4.5.6  The Litunga royal barge, Barotseland, Zambia. Credit: Dietmar Hatzenbichler 286   Coda 1 The decline of the various sweet spots 290   Coda 2 Temple at Old Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, 1555 291   Coda 3 S vantevit statue made by Marius Grusas at the cape Arkona on the island Rügen (reproduction). Credit: Lapplaender/Wikimedia Commons 292   Coda 4 Candi Ceto Temple. Credit: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy 293   Coda 5  The signing of the Treaty of Labuan between the Sultan of Brunei and the British delegation on December 18, 1846 at the Brunei palace/Alamy 294   Coda 6  Ruins of Ta Prom, Siem Riep, Cambodia. Photo: Marcin Konsek/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 295   Coda 7 Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Credit: JJ Harrison 296   Coda 8  Ruins of Vijaya Vithala Temple, Hampi, India. Credit: Prashmob/Wikimedia Commons 298   Coda 9 T  he ruins of the mosque of Djenné as seen in a French postcard of c.1900, Djenné, Mali 299   Coda 10 N’zima Kotoko royal palace, Sud-Comoé, GrandBassam, Ivory Coast 300   Coda 11 Diagram of the Long Millennium 301

INTRODUCTION Leading Questions

The history of the first millennium CE is often told through the lens of the large, urban- and agro-based empires, namely those located in the regions of China, north India and the Mediterranean, including the Islamic and Persian empires of Western Asia. Whereas earlier generations of scholars tended to emphasize the obviously deep history of these places, more recent generations have begun to emphasize their equally deep interconnectivity with an emphasis on the great trade routes that spanned the globe. In this book, I want to discuss an interconnectivity of a different sort. It is not the one that linked the distant metropoles to each other, but the one that linked the metropoles to a wide range of remote “upstream” polity types from huntergathers and chiefdoms to even empires. If we avoid getting sucked into the specifics of how these polities were governed, we can quickly realize that this area, far distant from the military reach of the metropole, had a distinctive feature, the delivery of a vast array of luxury items. The list would be far too long to innumerate, so let it suffice to mention rubies, camphor, diamonds, pearls, aromatic woods, cinnamon, ivory and animal skins.1 Today, some of these items might still be expensive, but others are not. Camphor, now made artificially, can be bought in any dime store and the trade in fur and ivory is mostly illegal. It is, therefore, hard to imagine the items on this list as elements in an economic circulatory system almost unto itself, one in which all were on the order of “gold,” and indeed some might even have been considered more valuable than gold. Most of these items came from deserts, savannahs, mountains, tropical forests and island shores. Taken together, the people who lived there and who delivered the goods were protected as if by a vast natural fortress.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-1

2  Introduction: Leading Questions

The affluence that entered this world as a consequence of these exchanges manifested itself in various ways, much of which is invisible to us today. But it sometimes expressed itself very dramatically in architecture. One example would be the Khmer in Cambodia. Its rulers specialized in harvesting the blue, shimmering feathers of the kingfisher that lived along the shores of the Mekong River. The Chinese used these feathers in their imperial crowns. Though the birds had to be trapped and special ritual precautions had to be taken, the effort did not involve special technologies. A few bags of ­feathers – along with other forest products – were traded for the things the Angkor kings did not have, namely gold, silver, bronze and silk, all sent down by the Chinese through trader intermediaries. Feather exports alone did not finance the “over-the-top” temples of Angkor, quite possibly the largest on the planet at that time, but they were integral to its economy. The word “economy” to describe these exchanges is not the right word since the conversation would have to be interblended with issues of devotionalism, prestige, ancestrality, ecology, landscape potency, delivery mechanisms, risk management and slavery. These forces not only were all entangled, but also left little evidence in the historical record, lost in the powerful yet ephemeral practices of orality. Put together, they form a “dark matter” economy. In physics, dark matter is thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe that accepted theories of gravity cannot explain unless more matter is around than can be seen, implying dark matter’s ­presence. One can borrow that idea when it comes to the global economy of the first millennium. Dark matter economies, though invisible in the historical records, have clearly palpable gravitational realities, especially in the delivery of luxury goods across complex ecological and cultural boundaries. Dark matter economy went hand in hand with the rise of the desire economies emanating from the centralized, agro-based empires. The ancient Mesopotamians, for example, transformed the reed swamps where the Tigris and Euphrates emptied into the Persian Gulf into barley fields and are celebrated in our history books as some of the first agriculturalists. We even describe this moment of time as the proverbial “birth of civilization.” But apart from their grain, they were astonishingly poor when it came to luxury resources, which meant that they had to develop grain surpluses to trade for copper, stone, wool and even for the cypress beams for their temples, all of which came from remote mountain areas. The Mesopotamians were trapped in a world that ecologically tolerated little variation. Keeping it going required a huge amount of labor, political control, and well-maintained infrastructures. But the fact is that Mesopotamian cities could only exist because they were paired with a geographically attenuated, capillary system of exchange with people who lived in the Anatolian-Armenian highlands and who kept no records.

Introduction: Leading Questions  3

Similarly, the Chinese already in ancient times had made millet the f­oundation of their agricultural world. But they also needed jade for their shamanistic practices. Jade came, however, from riverbeds in the Taklamakan Desert, some 2,000 miles to the west of their cities! Chinese sources state that jade was delivered by a people called the Wūzhī (also spelled Yuezhi 烏氏) who were nomadic pastoralists. They traded jade for silk.2 How this worked in more detail from the Chinese side is not known and the Wūzhī perspective is, of course, also not known. In other words, a complex cross-cultural, cross-ecological, cross-calendric, cross-territorial, cross-linguistic exchange is reduced to a dull sentence: jade is exchanged for silk. It is a classic example of a dark matter economy (Figure 0.1). Over time, the list of things that the agriculture-oriented, desire economies wanted grew longer and longer. The Chinese wanted sulfur for a range of medicinal, shamanistic and practical purposes. They wanted bird’s nests for a soup that the elites drank and dragon’s blood (resin from a tree) for their famous enamels, feathers from the Cambodian forests and on and on. The Greeks wanted lapis lazuli and amber; Romans wanted pepper, pearls and animal skins; and on and on. The Islamic Caliphates wanted musk and

FIGURE 0.1  Locals

searching for jade in the White Jade River in the southern Xinjiang region of China. Credit: Gary/Monika Wescott, www. TurtleExpedition.com.

4  Introduction: Leading Questions

camphor. Not only were the sources of these items thousands of kilometers away, by the end of first millennium CE, the list was so long and the flows so ­astonishingly voluminous that the world that controlled it all, though physically remote from the great metropoles, was certainly not remote economically. The Silk Route played, of course, a huge role in the trans-Asian world of the first millennium CE. But the Silk Route had a dynamic that was far different from the one discussed in this book. It was governed by a civilization/ nomad binary that was not the determinant element in the more peripheral zones of the world’s dark matter economy. The Silk Route by its very name also focuses on the Chinese side of the story. Even if historians today try to overcome that problem by looking, for example, at what went into China rather than away from it, history leaves completely untracked the economies that were typical of Africa, Southeast Asia and Scandinavia during that period. Though the Asian steppe and its associated mountains produced horses, copper and gems, the diamonds, scented woods, ivories and camphor, among the various luxury goods that were carefully packed between the Persian carpets and various leather goods, came from places that had nothing to do with the Silk Route. That world, responsible for delivering luxury items to the metropole, was so robust by the end of the first millennium that in the subsequent centuries, it took the massive, globally scaled efforts of colonialism, monotheism, nationalism and modernization to beat it back – and then only partially and inconclusively. So instead of writing the story of great urban-based empires and working our way outwards through the domain of “trade” into the hazy zone of unruly tribal contacts, aiming for the teleological endgame of modernity – as reinforced through the nation-state – where there are more and more “states” and fewer and fewer “tribals,” what if we wrote a history that is peripheralcentric? What if we treated dark matter economy and its attendant societies with the same disciplinary respect as the history of civilization? The difficulties that a scholar faces are real. The seminal book Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (1898) by Janet Abu-Lughod argued that by the thirteenth century, the international trade economy that stretched from Europe to China had become an unshakable element of the global world, and yet the book makes not a single reference to the Bantu who were the world’s suppliers of ivory or even mentions the word chiefdom, even though chiefdoms – not to mention the so-called “hunter-gatherers” – were fundamental parts of the world system at that time. Angkor is mentioned only once and in passing. The problem is that because dark matter economy is fundamentally oral, its place in the conventions of history is by definition invisible, meaning that if we focus only on texts, records and ledgers, we will never get a sense of the true scale – and indeed the globality – of dark matter economy. And yet, we tell ourselves

Introduction: Leading Questions  5

that is precisely texts, records and ledgers, supplemented by archaeology that makes up the foundations of “history.” Anthropologists are now increasingly willing to accept the limitations of what we call “knowledge.” David Zeitlyn, for example, asks “What if the point of anthropology is not to produce a synoptic view of everything…what if we accept our limitations and start thinking seriously and positively about partial views and about incompleteness.”3 This holds true for historians as well. Having a partial view does not mean that we have to give up on history. In fact, it might allow us to see other types of history, in this case having to do with the status of luxury. Historians in the past have argued that the great civilizations produce surpluses and that from these surpluses they can then afford luxury commodities. That may be true, but from the other direction it misses the fact that back in the first millennium, the things we call “luxury items” were particularly foundational to global commerce of the early capitalist systems. The closer we come to the great urban centers, the more these items become integrated into other economies, but the further we go in the opposite direction, out into the deserts, mountains and forests, in other words, the further we move closer to the sources, the more central a so-called “luxury item” becomes to a polity’s culture, identity and even its history.4 Take, for example, the Punan of Borneo. Even back in the 1970s, when anthropologists journeyed into the highlands to visit them, they noticed that the women wore jackets decorated with ancient beads from China along with ancient coins. There was a reason for this display. The Punan – long before they were known by the English and Americans as ‘headhunters’ – had been the world’s traditional suppliers of camphor, bird’s nests and gold from about the fifth century CE to the late nineteenth century! Today, the Punan – or at least those that have survived the onslaughts of modernity – are classified as “hunter-gatherers” or “migratory forest people,” but as recently as a century or so ago, they were the equivalent to forest millionaires. The book by James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009), has already moved conversations in the right direction and today scholarship is generally more aware of its potential for a civilizational bias. As Scott makes clear, the hill people of Southeast Asia have a unique and legitimate place in history. My book, however, is not about governance. Rather, I am focusing on zones of affluence, since affluence, through its wealth distribution networks, developed a predilection for conspicuous consumption (of which the jackets of the Punan could be considered an example), even if there are often few traces of it in the historical record. Affluence was hardly uniform. Some areas were fortunate to have specialized resources, others less so. I identity particularly successful areas as “sweet spots,” places where extracting and delivering luxury commodities (and this would include slaves) had become the prime energy – ­perhaps one can call it even “identity” – of the system.

6  Introduction: Leading Questions

The idea of a “sweet spot” adds dimensionality to our already familiar ways to study global economy. We talk, for example, of “regional systems,” “oceanic systems” or “spheres of interaction.” The concept of a “sweet spot” is different from these, in that it focuses on upstream and downstream exchanges that are often left underrepresented. Sweet spots, as I present it, are also temporally constrained. They emerged in the first millennium, but did not survive the rise of the various colonial and postcolonial economies. This emergence and disappearance goes against the normative history of trade that is often treated linearly, starting from some “earliest times,” beginning, for example, when the first Roman coins appeared in an Asian port or the first Arab travelers reached Ghana.5 Then we follow that story through the proverbial “rise and fall” of kingdoms, to end inevitably in the modern, globally connected, capitalist world, where kingdoms are replaced by nations.6 I do not follow this track. The sweet spot systems I am talking about grew out of ancient networks for sure, but were of a different structural magnitude than their predecessors in their capacity to extract and deliver luxury goods and to integrate them into the larger flows of trade and exchange. The tendency to see history linearly from “earliest times” onward makes it difficult to see the different types of economic energies that flow through certain geographies. Since these systems were not yet fully dominated by coin-based monetary systems, a history of these areas is by definition impossible. But traces of affluence can be found, which is why I seek to integrate the history of sweet spot affluence with architectural history. The fields of “economics” and architectural history do not mix very well even under the best of circumstances. The problem is particularly pronounced in that part of the world under consideration. A good architectural history needs documents, receipts, mason’s marks and so forth, and these are systemically absent in the chieftain world. A good architectural history would also need a wide spectrum of buildings, big and small, and these are, in the period I am talking about, also often absent for any number of reasons, including the fact that many were not built of stone. So, to attempt to put the architectural history and economic history of the first millennium into alignment is an impossible task at the get go, meaning that one has to approach the problem that is oblique. The reason I am attempting this disciplinary rapprochement is not to explain how buildings are paid for, but rather to demonstrate that the history of architecture in the broad horizon of a sweet spot and its chieftain polity types – by which I mean, once again, the world out of reach from the great urban-imperial centers – is uniquely attached to and in some cases directly representative of the affluence that comes from luxury trade. My intention is to deploy the awkward techniques of the historian, dependent as I am on the inadequate and biased regimes of evidence, so as to see the inextricable and foundational relationship between economic flows and the building arts.

Introduction: Leading Questions  7

The trouble for us historians is not just the “lack of evidence,” but also that sweet spot economies were mostly undone by modernity and so do not exist today or do so only as curious sidebars to reality. I reject the idea that the modern-day capitalist system developed quasi-naturally out of trade systems that existed at the end of the first millennium CE. The dark matter economies within sweet spots have all disappeared, the victim of an increasingly powerful administration-centered global economy that aimed to reach further and further into the hinterlands and replace orality with writing. To boil it down, we should be talking not just about the so-called “rise and fall” of kingdoms and chiefdoms that set the stage for the modern, ostensibly permanent nation-state, but about the externally induced destruction and collapse of regional sweet spots. In this, the book aims to lay out the parameters a possible transdisciplinary, geographic anthropology of interdependency.7 The five points are: (1) prestige economies within the chieftain world were the general means by which affluence was mobilized and distributed; (2) these prestige economies in certain places relied on trade in mostly lightweight luxury items that served as a binding agent that interlocked communities of different sorts across ecologies and landscapes; (3) particular areas of affluence emerged that I call sweet spots; (4) architecture, as in palaces, shrines, mortuary complexes, feasting areas and so on, served as the way in which the success of a particular p ­ restige/devotional economy was made “visible”; and (5) the sweet spot systems that emerged as a global force during the “long millennium” were undercut and mostly destroyed in the postcolonial era, making it difficult to recapture their place in global history. Part 1 will set the stage. Parts 2 and 3 focus on a particular set of geographies and issues. Part 4 looks more specifically at architecture. The Coda looks at the processes by which the modern world began to decouple sweet spots from their wealthgenerating mechanisms. Throughout the text, I have placed those elements of the discourse that are closer to my argument in italics, and indeed an impatient reader might well concentrate only on those. Naturally, I hope that the reader will allow me to flesh out the particulars of the argument. I would like to also note the challenges of writing this history within the cultural zone of postcolonialism and modernity in which I am situated. Scholars like me explore these topics using materials and cataloging systems that are Eurocentric and nation-state-centric and that reduce the discussion about pre-nation history, especially in non-European contexts, to the rather awkward disciplinary categories of anthropology and ethnography. A dark matter economy and chieftain-centric cataloging system would be structured very differently from the expectation of these disciplines where the center dominates over periphery, high over low, stone over mud, writing over ­orality and nation-state over chiefdom. In writing this book, I – like many other

8  Introduction: Leading Questions

scholars working on these types of topics – had therefore to work against the grain of these and other similarly imposing systems of bias. Notes 1 None of these items, apart from ivory, are mentioned, for example, by Philip D. Curtin, Cross-cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The book centers itself on merchants and their institutions and communities. It also emphasizes the importance of states like the Chinese and Islamic dynasties as organizers of demand economies as well as the unequal distribution of resources. While these are without doubt critical to cross-cultural trade, my book emphasizes the unequal distribution of luxury resources, since it was not trade in general that tied remote communities to the metropole but luxury trade; thus my attempt to carve out a distinct place for that in our world histories. 2 Criag Benjamin, The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria. Silk Road Studies, 14 (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2007), 32. See also: Xinru Liu, “Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan. Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies,”  Journal of World History 12, no. 2 (2001): 265. 3 David Zeitlyn, “Understanding Anthropological Understanding: For a Methodological Anthropology,” Anthropology Theory 9 (2009): 211. 4 “Upstream” and “downstream” are established code words for relationships between mountain tribes and the more agrarian-oriented and valley-based kingdoms and empires. Goods might not always be moving literally upstream and downstream, since cross-polity interactions involving luxury items also took place along shores and also across rivers and deserts, and thus my emphasis on crossecological trade and exchange. 5 An important model that is now being used is that of an “interaction sphere.” It is helpful, in that it gets us past the conventions of political history and focuses on material exchanges within geographic zones. See, for example, S. Gupta, “The Bay of Bengal interaction sphere (1000 BC–AD 500),” Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 25 (2005): 21–30. My approach builds on that, except that I am only trying to focus on the commodities that traverse not just polities of different types, but geographies and climates. These are goods within larger interaction zones that precisely because of their special place in the flows energized those flows in particular ways that directly affected affluence during the course of its movements. Heading from remote forest or shore to urban palace, these goods moved beyond the limits even of an interaction sphere. 6 At stake here is not the distinction between reciprocity, redistribution and market exchange that are widely discussed in histories of early trade. In the first millennium CE, it is more or less impossible to determine how these operated, given the obvious lack of documents. The issue in this book is less about the specific nature of trade than about the overall flow of trade. What is known in that respect is that upstream affluence – in the human dimension – was integrally tied to spirit world wealth. To discuss trade without discussing how affluence is structured in the upstream world is to mistake an effect for a cause. Karl Polanyi is responsible for popularizing the concepts of reciprocity and redistribution. See Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as Institute Process,” Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 243–270. See also Neil J. Smelser, “A Comparative View of Exchange Systems,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 7 (1959): 173–182.

Introduction: Leading Questions  9

7 Through most of the twentieth century, anthropology mostly focused on the idea that the essence of human social organization hinges on governance and the structures of power. The result was that peoples and their communities in places across the globe were seen as quasi-discrete “bodies.” Anthropology today has amassed about a dozen or so different categories that it uses to describe these “bodies”: egalitarian societies, hunter-gatherers, bands, tribes, triblets, chiefdoms, predatory chiefdoms, migratory cultures, statlets, theater states and so forth. Economy and social economy were mostly seen as a subtext having to do with the materiality of daily life. In this book, I avoid the issue of governance altogether, because “dark matter” economy is a type of supply chain economy that requires people with different governance perspectives work together in some way or other. The glue in that system was provided by the invisible fabric of personal and family ties, by oaths, alliances calendric relationships and cultural traditions. Helping out were ancestors and landscape deities, forest spirits, feasts and even dances. None of this excludes the instrumentalities of force and coercion, but those were often deployed toward specific ends within the system.

PART 1

1 THE CASE OF MUSA I

Had European colonialists not risen to such dominance, the world today would not look all that much different from the world of the sixteenth ­century. This is not to say that things would have remained static, but one of the significant differences between today and the sixteenth century is the absence of what we can generally call chieftain societies. Built on the bedrock of clans, family units, common ancestry, orality and landscape empowerments, chieftain societies with a wide range of polity types had begun to develop around 9000 BCE in various parts of the world within the emerging pastoral and agro-pastoral horizons; but it was only in the centuries leading to the end of the first millennium CE that these societies, whether categorized as tribes or kingdoms, created for themselves a truly global profile, larger in territory and wealth than the proverbial civilizations that had traditionally been centered around the Mediterranean, in Mesopotamia, in northern India, in the north and east coast of China and in parts of the Americas. The ascendency of that world into a global economic force took place over the course of what can be called the “long” first millennium CE, which stretched roughly from the age of the Roman hegemony over the Mediterranean in the first century BCE to the era of European colonialism beginning in the sixteenth century CE. Identifying the appropriate place of that ascendency in this stretch of time is by no means easy. Let us take as an example Musa I (c. 1280–c. 1337), the nephew of Sundiata Keita (died 1255), who was the founder of the Mali Empire and who ruled from Niani on the Niger River (on the border of the modern-day countries of Guinea and Mali). Musa was no random African potentate. In fact, he might well have been one of the richest men in the world and he was famous.1 In 1324, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca, accompanied by a retinue of men wearing brocade and DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-3

14  The Case of Musa I

FIGURE 1.1.1  Detail

from the late fourteenth-century Catalan Atlas. Credit: incamerastock/Alamy.

Persian silk as well as heralds and slaves who each carried gold bars. It was perhaps the most awe-inspiring transcontinental display of wealth in history. It earned him a prominent spot on the famous Catalan Atlas (1370) where he is depicted seated on a throne holding a golden orb (Figure 1.1.1). Even though the only textual records about Musa’s kingdom are from outsiders, most of whom obsess about the gold, here and there we learn a rather astonishing and often overlooked fact: Musa did not get the gold directly. The gold was acquired from forest-based tribes who lived amongst the various tributaries of the Niger River. The eighth-century Arab scholar, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, was told by informants that these people were known as the Nuba and the Zanj and that they had devised special bowls made of bird feathers to trap the finest grains.2 They exchanged the gold, as described by Al-Biruni, the eleventh-century Iranian scholar, in an unusual way, using “gestures from afar and visual evidence of mutual satisfaction.”3 Today’s anthropologists call this type of exchange silent trade.4 It is a process where the forest people leave their goods on a log or in a prominent position and signal by drum or gestures to the arriving traders that they were ready. The traders, supported by middlemen, would then approach the spot, examine the goods and deposit their exchange goods nearby and withdraw. The forest people would return and either accept the trade by taking the goods left for them or

The Case of Musa I  15

FIGURE 1.1.2  Artisanal

gold mining on the Niger River in Mali. Credit: Joerg Boethling/Alamy.

withdraw. If they withdrew without taking anything, the process would get repeated until everyone was satisfied (Figure 1.1.2).5 What did the Nuba and the Zanj get in this exchange? One c­ ommentator noted rather casually that what they wanted was Egyptian cloth. “They desire nothing save that cloth, but this they fall upon eagerly.”6 And it was not just any cloth, but one that “has red fringes and is dyed different colors and is patterned with gold.”7 None of the Arab commentators explained why they wanted this cloth, nor has any modern scholar speculated on its role in their community. It is unlikely that they used it as clothing. Most likely, the cloth was needed for ceremonies to honor the ancestors in their forest shrines. It might have also been used as a prestige item for marriage or other ceremonies and even possibly as something that gave its owner special protection from harm. This means that to get the gold, Musa had to have a good supply of cloth. The problem was that it obviously came from Egypt, some 4,000 kilometers to the east. There can be no doubt therefore that Musa on his return from Mecca came back with as much as his camels could carry. But that was not all Musa had to organize. He also controlled the salt mines to the north and east of his capital. And just as with gold, salt was not mined by workers from Mali. The thirteenth-century Arab traveler, Ibn Battúta, writes that the tribe called the Massufa mined the salt and that they subsisted “on dates imported from Dar’a and Sijilmasa [Morocco], camel’s flesh, and millet imported from the Negrolands.”8 In other words, to get salt, Musa had to make sure that dates and millet arrived at the salt deposits in a steady supply. The dates from the oasis of Sijilmasa were considered some of the finest, but were some 1,000 kilometers to the north of the mines. Where did Musa get his millet? Quite possibly through the trade in coral beads, which were fashioned at the Mediterranean port of Ceuta. According to Al-Idrisi (Figure 1.1.3):

16  The Case of Musa I

FIGURE 1.1.3 Salt

from Takedda arriving at Timbuktu, photographed ca. 1903 by François-Edmond Fortie (François-Edmond Fortier, Tombouctou. Arrivée d’une caravane de sel. Le sel en barres de 30 k. environ vient de Taoudennit, à 20 jours au nord de Tombouctou).

At Sabta (Ceuta, across the Mediterranean from the Rock of Gibraltar) they fish for coral tree which is unequalled by any kind of coral extracted in any region of the seas and at Sabta there is a market where it is cut, polished, made into beads, pierced and strung. From there it is exported to all lands, but carried mostly to Ghana…., because in those lands it is much used.9 The text does not tell us what the beads were used for. The Mali probably brought them to the south-lying kingdoms where such beads were hallmarks of social distinction. The crown of the king of Oyo (in what is now part of Benin and Nigeria), for example, was described in the mid-nineteenth century as a tall cap that was “profusely ornamented with strings of coral.”10 Ornamented is not the right word, since the coral beads were imbued with a special magic that substantiated kingship. What the Mali got in return for delivering the coral was never documented, but possibly the millet that the Mali needed for the salt miners.11 And then there were the copper mines. Musa himself is quoted by the governor of Cairo, whose job it was to look after the great pilgrim, as stating that in Takedda, “there is a mine of red copper. There is nothing in all my empire which is such a large source of taxes as the import of this unworked copper.”12 Copper was mined by slaves. Acquiring slaves was no simple task. The Mali authorities went on slave raiding campaigns, mostly into the riverine regions to the south. But such raids were risky as they created ripple effects of tension with outlying communities and kingdoms; the Mali authorities purchased slaves – as we know from Arab accounts – at a place called Burnu (probably the Kanem–Bornu Kingdom that was in the general

The Case of Musa I  17

region of Chad) about 1,000 kilometers to the east of the mines.13 Where the elites of Burnu got the slaves is not known. Not all slaves were used for labor. Some were deployed within society as leatherworkers, smiths, woodworkers, pottery makers and so forth. There were also village and domestic slaves and finally there were slaves specially targeted to be sold as export. As to the proportion of slaves to the general population in the Mali Empire, we have no knowledge, but it was not negligible. Among the Soninke, who were the founders of the empire of Ghana that preceded the Mali Empire, slaves constituted up to half of the population.14 That the elites of Mali were nominally Islamic was another factor that Musa had to consider, meaning that he had to import things from the Islamic north that were proof positive of that connection to the outer world. Roses, for example, have a special significance in Islam and used in marriage and birth ceremonies. The flower itself is even considered as a symbol of Prophet Muhammad. Though the history of the famous roses that are grown in a Moroccan oasis along the Asif M’Goun River, nicknamed today the Valley of the Roses, some 100 kilometers to the west of Sijilmasa, is not well known, it is assumed that the Islamic invaders and traders to Morocco brought the plant sometime in the ninth century.15 The species that is grown in the valley is, after all, Rosa damascena, the Damascus rose, and it was grown not just for local consumption but also because it carried the imprimatur of Islamic civilization. The trade in rose petals and rose oil leaves no archaeological record, but one should not underestimate its role as one of the mechanisms that sucked luxury goods out of the hinterland. The distances that the various items had to traverse for this to work were huge. Takedda is 1,000 kilometers to the east of Niani and Burnu another 1,000 kilometers even further to the east! The salt mines were 1,000 kilometers to the north of Niani. The dates, aromatics and roses from Morocco yet another 1,000 miles northward, and as for the millet, it had to travel well over 1,500 kilometers up from the south. To reach Nigeria, the coral beads had to travel across Mali some 3,000 kilometers! To get a sense of the scale, it is about an area the size of Europe, including Scandinavia (Figure 1.1.4). A key element was the landscape itself. It was not neutral, but guarded over by a complex array of spirits and ancestral beings of various importances and potencies, all of which required continual negotiation and sustained maintenance. An Islamic description of this area from the fifteenth century would certainly have rung true for Musa, who ruled not just with power of men and women, but within the auspices of landscape deities: Sunni Ali’s father was the sultan of its people and his mother was from the land of Far, and they are an unbelieving people who worship idols of trees and stones; they make sacrifices to them and ask their needs at [sic] them.… These idols have custodians who serve them as [sic] act as

18  The Case of Musa I

FIGURE 1.1.4 

The general domain of influence of Musa I.

intermediaries between the people and them.… Now Sunni Ali, from childhood to manhood used to frequent them a great deal to the extent that he grew up among them and became stamped with their pattern of polytheism and with their customs.16 Few economic histories of Africa would consider “landscape” as a key element in the discussion, but in the kingdom of Mali, as throughout the chieftain world, the health of the landscape, as mediated by its shrines and associated activities, was critical to and indeed reflective of the economic health of the kingdom. Musa had to perform prescribed rituals to his ancestors in various shrines and be watched over by priest intermediaries. This was not without its complexities, for Musa was a Muslim in a world that, at that time at least, was mostly not. Bringing all the elements into relationship with each other across the uneven geographical, ecological, tribal and cosmological terrain was tricky and complex. Musa had to strengthen his alliances with neighboring chiefs, many of whom were all quite likely scheming to improve their lot during his absence. Though the Takrur, who controlled the mouth of the Senegal River, were seemingly pacified, they were certainly itching for autonomy, and this

The Case of Musa I  19

went for all the components of the system at the periphery. Musa also had to work with elders, warriors and slave providers. The routes to the capital had to be policed, the horses and camels cared for, the black market suppressed and alliances made. Musa had to be on good terms with the Tuareg, the famous cross-desert transportation specialists, one of whom was represented on the Catalan map riding his camel and facing Musa. He also had to master the tribes that controlled the river traffic and made the boats.17 To call Musa’s territory an empire does not really do justice to the astonishing cross-ecological, cross-tribal, and cross-economic nature of this world. His “empire” was defined by an import/export economy that specialized in luxury commodities with a wide array of entry and exit points that stretched over vast distances. Though the empire is often portrayed on maps as a conventional blob, it was in shape more like a spider with Niani at the center. Each “leg” constituted a well-defined ecological, economic and cultural identity, held together not by a vast bureaucracy but by the powerful conventions of an oral-based society. Everything had to be organized and managed not just at the point of a spear, but through gifts, exchanges, orations, rituals and sacrifices of various sorts and all calibrated in just the right way. It was a communication-rich environment for which Musa needed cattle, silks, beads, furniture, rose petals, iron objects, incense and on and on, not to mention Egyptian cloth; this meant that on his way back from Mecca, he would have carefully planned the acquisition of these items. In other words, it was not the trip to Mecca that I would like to focus on but the trip back. We know that by the time he arrived back to Cairo from Mecca, he was already short of funds and had to borrow money, which he eventually repaid.18 But there are no records of his purchases. He certainly sold some of his slaves which were a valuable commodity, though he needed enough, along with his camels, to carry his purchases. One commentator, Al-Idrisi, wrote simply that “many good things are imported to them from the outermost parts of the earth…”19 He did not list what these things were. These “imports” were not there to simply enjoy, but to grease the system. Though the trip to Mecca was often described as a religious event, it was also certainly designed as a conspicuous display of Musa’s acquisitional capacity. His return would have been celebrated with huge feasts, dances and ceremonial exchanges. The whole thing was economic stagecraft at its best. Somewhere along the way, Musa decided that to further enhance the mystique of his persona, he had to give his kingdom an architectural upgrade and so – probably with the promise of gold and celebrity status – he brought back with him the Andalusian architect/poet, Ishak al-Tuedjinto. Al-Tuedjinto built mosques at Gao and at Timbuktu as well as an audience chamber in the palace at Niani.20 Fourteenth-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun described the latter as “square, surmounted by a cupola, which he covered

20  The Case of Musa I

with plaster and decorated with arabesques in dazzling colors.”21 It was probably the building depicted in the Catalan Atlas just to the left of Musa’s throne. Musa was doing more than just throwing around his wealth; he was demonstrating his capacity to pull in foreign expertise, a critical element in strategies of conspicuous consumption. Just as the English colonialists in the Americas often built in a Palladian style to mark their connection to a distant “civilization,” Musa similarly wanted to show off his membership in the community of transcultural relations. Building an exotic, foreign styled building in his palace compound demonstrated to friends and foes his legitimate and transcendent place in the over-the-horizon realities.22 The problem for us historians is how to tell the story. The documents of the Islamic traders and geographers that I quote above give us a dangerously incomplete picture. The texts are also governed by a monotheistic bias. Ibn Battuta, who reached the Mali capital in the spring of 1352, was pleased that the members of the court observed traditional Islamic practices and had a “zeal for learning the Koran by heart,” but when he witnessed a state ceremony that involved dancers dressed as birds, he viewed this as an insult to Islam, so too the naked slave girls in Musa’s presence.23 One might think that indigenous bodies of evidence could help since, as Heather Sutherland has pointed out, they can be a valuable corrective to the profit-obsessed, civilization-centrism of the more accessible sources.24 But because most of such evidence focuses on dynasties, battles, heroes and genealogies, they give us practically no insight into the day-to-day workings of the economy or into decision-making processes, much less into issues about how the culture, landscape and architecture were perceived and defined. This is true even for the famous Epic of Sundiata, which was handed down over the generations and that tells of Sundiata Keita (died 1255), who was the founder of the Mali Empire and Musa I’s uncle. The Epic reinforces the victor’s perspective. In it, we read that according to the court historians of Mali: If you want salt, go to Niani, for Niani is the camping place of the Sahel caravans. If you want gold, go to Niani, for Bouré, Bambougou and Wagadou work for Niani. If you want fine cloth, go to Niani, for the Mecca road passes by Niani. If you want fish, go to Niani, for it is there that the fishermen of Maouti and Djenne come to sell their catches. If you want meat, go to Niani, the country of the great hunters, and the land of the ox and the sheep. If you want to see an army, go to Niani, for it there that the united forces of Mali are to be found. If you want to see a great king, go to Niani, for it is there that the son of Sogolon lives, the man with two names.25 With no written documents and trade ledgers from Musa and without enriching texts from the hill people, the gold panners, the slave traders, copper

The Case of Musa I  21

merchants, caravan leaders and so on and without more extensive oral ­histories, this region’s complex economic and cultural history is by definition incomplete and unknowable. One Arab commentator, Ibn al-Khatib, from the fourteenth century and living in Granada, seems to have hit the nail on the head: “Their wealth knew no bounds and became more than could be counted…others carry from it gold and [yet others] bring to it that which soon dwindles away and disappears.”26 Indeed, in Musa’s empire, the incoming commodities and their associated meanings and economies disappeared into the complex capillary system that often goes under the rather dull heading of “trade.” But imported goods did not disappear by accident and certainly not because locals failed to understand their value, as implied in Ibn al-Khatib’s sentence; they were meant to disappear. The key to what we call power was not in hoarding the accoutrements of wealth, but in their distribution. Like food in a digestive system that which disappears is that which gives the body its life. Notes 1 Most historians attribute the map to Abraham Cresques, sometimes referred to as Cresques le Juif, a Jewish cartographer from Palma, a seaport city located on the island of Majorca. Made in the 1370s, it was commissioned by Charles V of France. The Atlas consisted of six large wooden panels that were covered with parchment on one side. 2 Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, eds. Nehemia Levtizon and J. F. P. Hopkins (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 96. 3 Ibid. 59. 4 James Woodburn, “Introductory Note to “Silent Trade” with Outsiders: HunterGatherers’ Perspectives,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016): 473. 5 Corpus, 59. Though we focus on silent trade, because of its unusualness, the whole process was assisted by middlemen of various sorts. See P. F. de Moraes Farias, “Silent Trade: Myth and Historical Evidence,” History in Africa 1 (1974), 9–24. 6 Corpus, 96. 7 Corpus, 59. 8 Ibn Battúta, The Travels of Ibn Battúta: Explorations of the Middle East, Asia, Africa, China and India from 1325 to 1354: An Autobiography, trans. H. A. R. Gibb (Pantianos Classic, 1929), 187. 9 Corpus, 130. 10 Richard Lander, The Niger Journal of Richard and John Lander, ed. Robin H ­ allett (New York: Routledge, 1965), 84. 11 They also probably imported kola nuts from the huge forests to their south, and that were another important cross-regional trade commodity. For discussion, see Paul E. Lovejoy, “Kola in the History of West Africa (La Kola Dans l’histoire de l’Afrique Occidentale),” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 20, no. 77/78 (1980): 97–134. 12 UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. IV, Abridged Edition: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, ed. Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Djibril Tamsir Niane (Paris: UNESCO. International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, 1998), 60.

22  The Case of Musa I

13 Abdullah Smith, “The Early States of the Central Sudan,” in History of West Africa, Vol. 1 (158–201), ed. J. F. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 171. 14 Barbara G. Hoffman, Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 8, 10–12, 30, 31. 15 Henna was also important, but unlike roses, henna is much easier to cultivate. ­Andalusia geographer al-Bakri (ca. 1014–1094) writes in his book Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms) that the city of Awdaghust of the Ghana Empire “containing markets, numerous palms and henna trees.” In other words, henna did not need to be imported. E. Ann McDougall, “The View from Awdaghust: War, Trade and Social Change in the Southwestern Sahara, from the Eighth to the Fifteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 26, no. 1 (1985): 7. 16 Kristina van Dyke, “Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa,” RES 48 (Autumn 2005): 39, 40. 17 John O. Hunwick, Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire (Leiden: Brill, 1999), xxx–xxi. 18 Corpus, 299. 19 Corpus, 111. 20 Jonathan Bloom suggests that the Arab documents about the architect are on the order of a tall tale. “The complete absence of the cuboid Maghribi minaret in Africa beyond the Sahara region until modern times … calls into question the often-repeated story of an Andalusian poet who supposedly travelled with Mansa Musa, the fourteenth-century king of Mali, and built him a pleasure-dome and mosque. Had this individual, known as al-Sahili or al-Tuwayjin, introduced western Islamic architectural forms in the region, one might have expected to see some evidence of it.” See Jonathan Bloom, Minaret (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 336. I am inclined to believe the documents since there are other reasons that might explain why the building type did not develop, the most important being that a building like this was not meant to be a prototype but a one-off. 21 M. Talbi, “The Spread of Civilization in the Maghrib,” in General History of Africa IV: Africa from Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, eds. J. Ki-Zerbo and D. T. Niane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 60. 22 Excavations at Niani, which only began in 1968, identified the location of the royal town and its various palaces protected by a circular wall. There was also an Arab quarter and various villages along the river for various trade clans. On the archaeological work at Niani, see W. Filipowiak, Études archéologiques sur la capitale médiévale du Mali (Warsaw: Muzeum Narodowew Szczecinie, 1979). 23 The Travels of Ibn Batūta, translated by Samuel Lee (London: Oriental Institute Committee, 1829), 239. 24 Heather Sutherland, “Geography as Destiny? The Role of Water in Southeast Asian History,” in A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories (27–70), ed. Paul Boomgaard (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 50. 25 Niane, Djibril Tamsir, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans.G. D. Pickett Pearson (London: Longmans, 1965), 82. 26 Corpus, 308.

2 DARK MATTER AFFLUENCE AND SWEET SPOT SYSTEMS

There was a powerful historical dimension to the success of Musa, for as ­significant as his empire was the capacity for affluence had already been baked into the region’s geography beginning in the eighth century. I call it a sweet spot, as it transcended the physical boundaries and temporal conditions of the individual kingdoms and polities that defined it. This particular sweet spot – the Sub-Saharan, Niger River Sweet Spot – was first established by a people known as the Soninke who came to control not just the crossSahara trade, but also the slave procurement networks. Though aspects of this economy were certainly ancient, the pieces fell into place only beginning in the eighth century. The introduction of the camel and horse by Islamic invaders provided the necessary muscle. The other pieces – dates, copper, salt, roses and more – quickly followed, with these elements circulating until a type of economic proportionality was established. Proportionality was key as it created – like the gears in a watch – predictable flows and expectations. The results were impressive, leading to the emergence of the Ghana Empire, more properly known by the Soninke as Wagadu. One Arab commentator noted that when it comes to their caravan leaders, “merchants in the countries of Islam seldom approach them in affluence.”1 And as to the king of Ghana, who ruled from his capital Koumbi Saleh (in modern-day Mauritania), he was described by Ibn Ḥawqal, a ninth-century Islamic historian, as “the wealthiest king on the face of the earth.”2 Kumbi Saleh at that time had a population of about 30,000. The most important part of the city had a stone wall that protected the royal palace, the spiritual center of the empire with its sacred grove of trees. This was where the high value items like gold, salt and bronze were brought together under the watchful eyes of the authorities and deities. This was also where the king, DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-4

24  Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

deities and ancestors presented a unified front. Al-Bakri, an eleventh-century Andalusian-Muslim historian and geographer, writes that his informants told him that: The king has a palace and a number of domed dwellings all surrounded with an enclosure like a city wall. In the king’s town, and not far from his courts of justice, is a mosque where Muslims who arrive in his court pray. Around the king’s town are domed buildings and groves and thickets where the sorcerers of these people, men in charge of the religious cult, live. In them too are the idols and tombs of the kings.3 It was only a matter of time before the authority of Ghana was challenged by external and internal forces. And indeed, the Mandika people, unified by the Keita clan to the south, rose to power to create the Empire of Mali with their capital at Naima. The Soninke, though no longer in power, continued to play a role as trader intermediaries. Naima was some 400 kilometers to the south of Koumbi Saleh, and so was better protected from northern invaders. It was also closer to the sources of gold. The tighter control of the gold meant that the military could be expanded. This meant that slave raids could be more productive. More slaves meant that the copper mines could be better exploited, and with more copper, more slaves and so on. Djenné, which was a tribute-paying fiefdom of the Mali Empire (mid-thirteenth to early fifteenth

FIGURE 1.2.1 

Great Mosque of Djenné. Credit: Devriese/Alamy.

Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems  25

centuries), became an important element in this network. In the twelfth ­century, King Koi Konboro, Djenné’s first Muslim sultan, built an impressive mosque (though the building that we see today is its reconstruction that was completed in 1907 (Figure 1.2.1). Over time, yet another power emerged, the Songhai in the fifteenth and ­sixteenth centuries, which was centered in Gao, 600 miles to the east of Naima. The reasons for the change could be any number of things: a change in the value of commodities, a change in the access to transportation, a change in food resources and so on. The Mossi Kingdom to the south of Songhai in modern-day Burkina Faso also played a role in this transforming trade system. And yet, the basic components of the sweet spot, because of well-­established routines, was still in place when Askia Muhammad I (1443–1538) built a 55-foot-high pyramidal tomb structure that still exists in Gao. As a Muslim, he too felt obligated to make his pilgrimage to Mecca from which he returned in 1495. He brought back with him the materials to make his tomb; all of the mud and wood, so it seems, came from Mecca with a caravan that is said to have consisted of thousands of camels. The tomb had within it a house with rooms and passageways. The whole was packaged in a structure that might be a reference to the pyramids in Egypt that he saw. Here, however, the pyramid is accessible and is clearly intended as a sacred mountain (Figure 1.2.2). The changes of imperial centers impacted the towns and villages throughout the area. During the Ghana period, the southern terminus of the trade route was Aoudaghost in south central Mauritania as it was on the way to Koumbi Saleh. In the thirteenth century, with the shift of power to Mali, Oualata, some 220 miles to the east, became the terminus. Koumbi Saleh was abandoned and is now a barely explored archaeological site in the windy desert. The exact location of Aoudaghost is not even known, but presumed to be the ruins near the village called Tegdaoust. With the demise of the Mali Empire,

FIGURE 1.2.2  Tomb

of Askia Muhammad I, Gao, Mali. Credit: Taguelmous/ Wikimedia Commons.

26  Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

Oualata fell into ruins, with glimpses of its former glory visible only in the decorated entrances to the governor’s house. The buildings in Timbuktu have fared better. The Sankore Mosque, founded in 989 CE and built to the dimensions of the Ka’abah in Mecca, still exists as well as the building belonging to Sankore University, funded by a wealthy Mandinka patron. A drawing from 1853, made by the German explorer Heinrich Barth, shows a compact city on a shallow hill with the mosques dominating the skyline. The uneven survival record of the physical evidence of the empires of Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Mossi make it difficult to envision the scale and relative autonomy of the SubSaharan, Niger River sweet spot zone from the ninth century to the fifteenth century and beyond. We talk about the “rise and fall” of individual kingdoms rather than the sustained regional economy (Figures 1.2.3 and 1.2.4). Let me stand back now and try to describe how this sweet spot system worked in more abstract terms. Its affluence was built around the fact that the system was not dependent on a single product but on the integration of a range of luxury products, enmeshed by the time they came to the ports on the Mediterranean and elsewhere with a wide range of bulk and fabricated products and goods. The economy also involved, of course, its own internal, ancillary circulatory systems of food, domestic objects, building materials and slaves. But unlike local trade and even regional trade, long-distance trade in luxury commodities involved transportation specialist and somewhere down the line, traders and merchants. But for it to operate not just in the context of material heading downstream but also in the context of how items were pulled back upstream, a special type of regional economy was required, one that for it to succeed needed collaboration among people that technically do not collaborate. Such systems were obviously guarded over by those nominally in control and lusted after by those who were not. Weak points were constantly being tested by neighbors, rivals,

FIGURE 1.2.3  The

entrance to a house in Oualata, Mauritania. Credit: Kurt Dundy/Wikimedia Commons.

Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems  27

FIGURE 1.2.4 Caravan

Arriving at Timbuctoo, Heinrich Barth, 1853: Voyages et Decovertes dans l’Afrique Septentrionale et Centrale pendant les annees 1849 a 1855 (Paris, 1860–1861), vol. 4 [1861], facing title page.

and disgruntled family members. Yet, despite being vulnerable in any number of different ways when well managed, the system – locked as it was into its cultural geography – had a powerful resiliency.4 I call it a “dark-matter economy.” Dark matter is a form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe that accepted theories of gravity cannot explain unless more matter is present than can be seen – imply dark matter’s presence. It is called “dark” because it does not interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb or reflect and is thus hard to detect. Dark matter holds the universe together but leaves little physical traces. It is an excellent metaphor for the type of economy one finds in a sweet spot system, as it involves a wide range of undetectable, asymmetrical relationships that included skills of procurement, navigation, negotiation and risk assessment. Ancestors, spirits and competing clan loyalties play a part a well. Even the landscape. Though we might have some inkling of what was exchanged in these environments, most items, such as food, drink, animals, clothing, songs, titles, and ancestral memories, as well as brides and gifts, leave no traces in the archaeological record, and yet these exchanges went into everything from facilitating trade to establishing social networks to building shrines, tombs and temples. These economies exist on a gradated scale. The closer to the ports and markets, the more dark matter transforms into the conventional “this for that” trade, a type of trade that becomes increasingly visible in the ledgers and accounts of the time. But as one moves upstream or into the hinterlands, it becomes increasingly less visible and yet more central to the cultural definitions of the locals, especially in situations where the materials were lightweight requiring little overhead in the form of extractional labor

28  Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

or transportation. Though we know nothing about the Nuba and Zanji, for example, they certainly felt that that affluence was “coming to them” in the form of Egyptian cloth, just as much as they contributed to it downstream. In 1961, George Dalton, in studying the Trobriand Islanders off the coast of Papua New Guinea, asked a rather straightforward question: “What is the place of the ‘economy’ in [their] society?”5 He was right in putting the word economy in air quotes, and indeed this might be one of the first instances where an economist was willing to equivocate on what that word would mean in such contexts: The absence of machine technology, pervasive market organization, and all-purpose money, plus the fact that economic transactions cannot be understood apart from social obligation, create, as it were, a non-Euclidian universe to which Western economic theory cannot be fruitfully applied.6 Unfortunately, Dalton describes this “economy” as primitive, a word that he does not put in air quotes, when in reality we should actually see this type of “economy” as complex, nuanced and sophisticated. We today differentiate body and soul, people and animals, spirits and people, the individual and the community. In dark matter economy, none of these were separated, thus its incredible strength. Instead of comparing everything with advanced capitalism, which tends to see earlier forms of economy as a stage before it, we should accept the fact that emerging bureaucracy-based market economies of the first millennium were only the visible half of larger systems, of which dark matter economy was the other half. The impenetrability of this type of economy was twofold. First, it is inaccessible to us in the modern world, given the basic fact that no matter how hard we might try, we can no longer imagine how a large-scale, oral-based economy worked. Just as importantly, it was designed to be inaccessible in historical times was well, as it served as a defense mechanism against encroaching cultural forces that came with long-distance trade. We are so used in the modern world to think of economy either in terms of land ownership or in terms of measurable wealth that we have a hard time seeing that this type of “economy” was established through people. In Africa, as in Southeast Asia and as in the sweet spots discussed in this book, the key to power and wealth had less to do about land than about the relationship of the chief to his subjects and between people in general.7 The making, creating and sustaining of what we call prestige played a huge part in these operations, working its way through the system in a wide variety of scales, producing the web of relations and dependencies that are far too complex to ever diagram with any precision, but that would have been known to all across the regional, onto-epistemic horizon. Prestige systems, a topic that I return to later in the book, needed a huge outlay of resources

Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems  29

and constant construction, mending, repairing and replenishing. The system of c­ onnectivity had a lot to do with perception. Musa’s trip to Mecca was a calculated display of his affluence, designed both abroad and back home to be the stuff legends are made from. This type of connectivity was surprisingly durable because it operated on traditions that were deeply rooted in cultural identities.8 Groups that were responsible for transportation would remain in that position for centuries. And the same applied to those responsible for craft refinements, animal husbandry, for extraction and so on. Naturally, affluence had to be backed up somewhere along the line by wealth and force, but as François G. Richard in studying Senegal has pointed out, abundance and scarcity are not necessarily mutually exclusive; rather, they cohabit with each other and are contingently called upon by different casts of actors to meet historical situations.9 Affluence and its dark matter economy, especially at the chiefdom level, rarely happened without a coherent structuring of slaves, and not just as the proverbial labor, but as a constituent part of the integrative nature of a chiefdom’s social operations, including, as we have seen with Musa, the requirement for display. Unlike later in the millennium when African slaves became international commodities, slaves in the first millennium CE were mostly from proximity cultures. In other words, they were often people from the hills or marshes or from neighboring polities that had been captured in battle or otherwise subjugated. They were the living and breathing manifestations of the victor’s historical, territorial and ancestral consciousness. Even in remote Borneo, a longhouse chief was known by how many slaves he possessed. The higher the capacity of the elites, the more likely that a large part of the distinction of a household was its array of servants and cooks, including artisans, dancers, musicians and soldiers. Slaves also often specialized in various crafts, and over time in many places, they could earn some form of freedom. We should not look at this phenomenon through modern/colonial notions that emphasize labor. In the first millennium, owners did not always set out to make the lives of slaves miserable and abject, but to incorporate them into the dual logic of labor and prestige. For sure, the slaves among the Vikings were used as part of an increasingly extensive support system: as farm laborers, sheep herders, carpenters and as sailmakers and ropemakers. But because slaves, cut off from their homelands, had no access to their ancestral worlds – only to those of the elites – their bodies enhanced, literally thickened, their owner’s social and cosmological positioning. Slaves were also obviously a currency. Women slaves, captured in war, were perhaps given as tribute to a neighboring chief to become an integral part of the numerous palace cultures of Southeast Asia or given to a temple to serve as part of its crew of dancing girls.10 It was part of the standard equation of life and power. Affluence was a multidimensional system of distributed interconnectivity. By achieving the right balance, whether this was done actively or

30  Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

inadvertently, a chiefdom’s power and reach could expand. Failure to control an advantageous balance could easily spell the decline or even the complete failure of a chiefdom or kingdom. Putting the elements all together was never an easy thing, even though here and there kingdoms and empires arose that could for a while manage large parts of it. Sweet spot economies were governed by powerful sets of rhythms. In some places, traders arrived with the monsoon winds. In other places, they arrived during the dry season, or after the harvest, or during seasonal floods, or with the melting of the ice or in tune with regional market days. The gold that came down the hills was best harvested after the spring floods, setting in motion a complex calendric rhythm of exchanges. A sweet spot would have had several such major and minor rhythms intermixed across its geography that once they had been worked out, with some degree of proportionality, became permanent fixtures in the cultural and political landscape. Routines and expectations stabilized, if not outright determined, the geopolitical realities associated with them. How affluence was articulated spatially or architecturally differed from place to place. In some cases, it was the desire to make something bigger than past rulers. In other cases, it was a singular act that stamped the legitimacy of the ruler or clan into the historical consciousness of the region. In the ­northern part of South Africa, some of the Bantu-related people who developed city-states left huge ash heaps – the result of feasts –to advertise a particular homestead’s generosity and wealth. In most cases, however, architecture – and we have to understand that term quite broadly – was deployed to add mystique to power, as was the case with Musa and Ishak al-Tuedjinto. Architecture in the sweet spot world was not just a sidebar to cultural expression. It was not just a manifestation of the long march of tradition. Tombs, palaces, roads, shrines and temples, among other things, designed in some cases by imported architects or craft experts, were staged as demonstration pieces to the living as well as to the ever-observant ancestors. The construction of huge mosques in the Sub-Saharan, Niger River Sweet Spot was undertaken not because everyone had suddenly found religion. Initially, it was only the elites who were Islamic, using the religion as a unifying agency among the different clans and, of course, as a means to connect to powerful over-the-horizon forces. The mosques were demonstration pieces of cohesion and belonging, whether real or imagined, and were needed for both internal and external consumption. The mosques and their maintenance were the proof positive of affluence in the visual and cultural landscape. Affluence may have come in different forms, but it was clearly palpable when it existed, just as its source was mysterious.11 This does not mean that everyone was happy, or that there was peace, or that the elites were just or fair minded, or that subjugated groups were not eager for a rebellion or that the neighboring people did not have to worry about slave raiding. Nonetheless,

Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems  31

no one, either then or now, can tell exactly why in some situations things went well for the controlling elites, but similarly no one can explain why things then went wrong. Warfare, clan rivalry, climate change, invasions are some of the usual suspects listed by historians, but these were often secondary or even tertiary conditions of phenomena that have left no trace in history. Perhaps it was an oracle, perhaps a failure in planning, perhaps a weakness in the command structure, perhaps a plague was sent by the gods for some infraction. According to Greek historian Herodotus (484 – c. 25 BCE), the fall of Sardis was caused by the birth of a lion. We today would certainly reject this, but in more ancient times this could well have been seen as a fact. According to an Islamic observer about the kingdom of Mali: If good befalls them they claim that it is those idols who gave it to them and if it does not befall them they believe that those idols withheld it from them.12 In the mid-nineteenth century, during an exploration for the source of the Nile, John Hanning Speke, an officer in the British Indian Army, made the following observation: On resuming our march, a bird called kbongota flew across our path; s­ eeing which, old Nasib, beaming with joy, in his superstitious belief cried out with delight, “Ah! look at that good omen! Now our journey will be sure to be prosperous.” To discount the legitimacy of Nasib’s observation – or to agree with Speke that this was “superstition” – is to miss the very essence of dark matter ­economy.13 The rulers of Ghana knew full well that it was the forest tribes that panned the gold, but in their view the real source was not these tribes but the deity Bida, a fertility and rain god, and the guardian – in the form of a giant snake – who lived in the area around Kumbi Saleh. Bida allowed the Soninke to live on its land and even agreed to provide it with gold descending down with the rainwater in exchange for ritual scarifices.14 Most economic histories would avoid mentioning Bida as a legitimate economic force, but it was precisely this relationship between earth, sky, weather and fertility that define dark matter economies. When things go well, people talk of a “golden age” or at least those p ­ eople who most benefitted from it. In fact, the term “golden age” is used even today by historians to describe particularly affluent moments. The kings of Sriwijaya, for example, ruled from southern Sumatra and northern Java and controlled the lucrative ocean traffic through the Straits of Malacca. A recent book on Indonesian history proudly defines tenth century CE as “Sriwijaya’s Golden Age.”15 Similarly, the reign of Musa is still today sometimes described

32  Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems

as Mali’s “golden age.” And while modern historians should avoid r­ eplicating a history that is clearly a victor’s narrative, there can be no doubt that at ­certain moments in time and in certain places, affluence had an unmistakable profile across the cultural landscape. When things deteriorated, people might say that the chief or clan was weak or that there was a curse or that the gods were no longer favorable. Neighbors invade, populations move and buildings fall into disrepair and disappear. Affluence is like a watch. We know when it works and when it does not, but if we open it up, we might not be able to tell which of the many gears was the cause of the problem. With this as a backdrop, I would like to focus not on a single kingdom or empire, but on how affluence connected to long-distance trade worked across certain regions to tie in huge parts of the globe to the urban-imperial centers, and not just to connect remote parts to each other, but to actually create the world that we would today call global. Notes 1 Corpus, 45. 2 Corpus, 49. The Arab author is not, of course, using an objective economic metric to make this determination, but we should not dismiss the claim as just exaggeration. The fact that he uses this language for a kingdom at the periphery of their world clearly indicates the type of awe with which the kings of Ghana were viewed. 3 Peter N. Stearns, World History in Documents: A Comparative Reader (New York: NYU Press), 142. 4 Philip D. Curtin has studied the imaginary of wealth in the tropics as seen through the European, Enlightenment attempts to theorize it. The wealth of the tropics was thought by some, for example, to have made people lazy and thus naturally susceptible to slavery. Abundance, as we would understand it today, is a cultural construct and its development and maintenance was its own form of labor. Philip D. Curtin, “The Environment beyond Europe and the European Theory of Empire,” Journal of World History 1, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 131–150. 5 George Dalton, “Economic Theory and Primitive Society,” American Anthropologist, New Series 63, no. 1 (February 1961): 10, 11. 6 Ibid., 21. 7 Richard Gray and David Birmingham, “Some Economic and Political Consequences of Trade in central and Eastern Africa in the Pre-Colonial Period,” in Pre-Colonial African Trade, Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa before 1900, (1–19), eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 18. 8 This book does not concern itself with the power relationships that controlled this type of trade, nor does it concern itself with the problem of how long-distance trade helped in the development of individual kingdom polities. Even in the case where there are some texts, such as is the case with the Empire of Mali, there is simply too little evidence to make definitive conclusions. That said, it is often claimed that kingdoms or empires emerge as a result of the intensification of trade, the need to organize food production and distribution, the rise of populations and to better defend against invaders. These arguments rarely take into consideration the wealth of internal sources available in regions, where internal does

Dark Matter Affluence and Sweet Spot Systems  33

not necessarily mean internal to a specific kingdom but internal to a sweet spot. Since my argument is how things moved and not how people were governed, I am going to distinguish quite generally forest polities and hunter-gatherers from palace-based chiefdoms from states where the latter are dependent on agriculture, industry, cities, record keeping and so on. This goes against the grain of contemporary anthropology. Since 1955, when Kalervo Oberg first formulated the concept of “chiefdom,” we have seen a proliferation of terms: headman society, predatory nomads, big man society, simple chiefdom, complex chiefdom, maximum chiefdom, diamorphic chiefdom, corporate chiefdom, “chiefdom ­confederation,” supercomplex chiefdom, pristine chiefdom, secondary chiefdom, segmentary state, kingdom, monarchy and sometimes even empire. For the same cultural group, some scholars use the word chiefdom, others use kingdom and yet others monarchy or even civilization. 9 François G. Richard, “‘Excessive Economies’ and the Logics of Abundance: Genealogies of Wealth, Labor, and Social Power in Pre-Colonial Senegal,” in Abundance: The Archaeology of Plenitude (201–228), ed. Monica L. Smith (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017), 203. 10 David Ali, “War, Servitude and the Imperial Household,” in Slavery and South Asian History (44–62), eds. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 50, 51. 11 Many anthropologists now use the word abundance to counterbalance the ­pejorative and subjective term excess, with its connotations of waste, greed and inequality. See, for example, Monica L. Smith “The Archaeology of Abundance,” in The Archaeology of Plenitude (2–23), ed. Monica L. Smith (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017). Affluence is related to abundance, but I am not talking about an abundance of natural resources which might apply, which is easy and natural to procure. The Sri Lankan chiefdoms may have had plenty of rubies in the centuries before the common era, but it was only in the centuries after it that they began to systematically exploit it. 1 2 Hunwick, Timbuktu, 69, 70. 13 John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1868), 195. 1 4 David Conrad, Great Empires of the Past – Empires of Medieval West Africa (New York: Chelsea Publishers, 2010), 26, 27. 1 5 John Miksic, Indonesian Heritage: Ancient History, ed. John Miksic (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1999), 82.

3 CROSS-ECOLOGICAL DELIVERY ECONOMIES

In the centuries at the beginning of the first millennium CE, there were huge areas of the globe loosely inhabited by hunter-gatherers or by cultures with little limited exchange with their outside world. By the end of the first ­millennium, the balance of power began to change significantly between river valley, agro-based, theocentric civilizations on the one hand and ­forest, desert, steppe, oceanic and savannah peoples on the other. First here and then there, we see a multiplying effect. It was not a localist phenomenon, in the sense that these areas grew organically or linearly from small tribes to major empires. What had been loosely organized, relatively local trade ­systems cohered into larger and more regional zones of which Musa’s “empire” was just one example of several. There were also sweet spot systems in other parts of Africa, in maritime Asia and in Scandinavia, among other places, as discussed later (Figure 1.3.1). Their success is manifested in their architectural outlays. Zimbabweans were building vast palace complexes in southeast Africa; the Javanese were controlling the shipping lanes between India and China; the Polynesians were celebrating huge feasts on elaborately constructed platforms on the island of Nan Madol; the Scandinavians made Gotland, off the cost of Sweden, into one of Europe’s leading entrepôts; the Cham in Vietnam had built an extensive mortuary temple complex known as Mỹ Sơn; and the Khmer were building huge cities and spectacular temples in the forests of Cambodia. The word “trade” does not fully bring to life the nature of the economy that was flowing through these places. There were, of course, all sorts of trade taking place, from the local to the regional. But long-distance trade was a special sort since it involved valuable commodities, specialized transportation networks and, of course, the proverbial traders. But by the time the commodities came into DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-5

Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies  35

FIGURE 1.3.1 

Sweet spot areas toward the end of the first millennium CE.

the hands of traders and merchants, most of the hard work of extraction, sorting, transportation and delivery had been already accomplished. Archaeology, despite its efforts, gives us limited access to the richness of this world of exchange. The once thriving Viking port of Hedeby (eighth to the eleventh centuries CE) on the German border near Denmark has been excavated, but other Viking sites are still unexcavated and many more still not even found. The great market of Cane (first century BCE to eighth ­century CE) in Yemen is covered in sand; Sijilmasa (seventh to thirteenth centuries), a trade entrepôt at the northern edge of the Sahara Desert in Morocco, described in Islamic accounts in glowing terms for its size and opulence, has only a few meters of arbitrary mud brick walls left standing on the desert floor; Mamallapuram’s port (dominant in the eighth to thirteenth centuries) is mostly under the Indian Ocean; and Palembang (sixth to thirteenth centuries), the capital of the Srivijaya kingdom and one of the most important entrepôt centers during the first millennium CE, was not even known to exist until the middle of the twentieth century. Debal, an entrepôt city on the mouth of the Indus River, has only been recently located, and Dvaravati, the capital of a Mon Kingdom spanning five centuries from the sixth to the eleventh centuries and critical in the gem and gold trade, has never even been found. And as for Niani, it is now such an insignificant village that it does not appear on most maps. Shrestapura (Laos, fifth century), Dali (China, eighth century) and Hariharalaya (Cambodia, ninth century) were significant urban

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FIGURE 1.3.2 

The author standing in the unexcavated ruins of Sijilmasa, Morocco.

foundings central to their regional upstream-downstream trade and yet are almost nowhere to be found in our urban histories (Figure 1.3.2). But if we add up all the bits and pieces, it is clear that by the end of the first millennium, luxury item-producing sweet spots in far-flung areas had begun to act in concert with each other, even if indirectly. It is no accident that the Southeast Asian word “margarita” for pearl came to be used as a woman’s name in many parts of the world. Port city Samudera on the north coast of Sumatra was called by the Chinese “Liuqiu,” which means “sulfur ball,” since it was the main supplier of that important element harvested from the nearby volcanoes.1 Sulfur was needed not just for fireworks and copper smelting, but also for its medicinal and magical capacities; it was, for example, smeared on children’s ears and noses as protection against poison on the fifth day of the fifth month.2 The word “camphor” – used for its scent; as an ingredient in cooking (mainly in India); as an embalming fluid; as an aphrodisiac for the high and mighty; and as incense in religious ceremonies – derives from kapur Barus, which means “the chalk of Barus.” This “chalk” did not actually come from Barus, a port on the island of Sumatra. Barus was only where the material was gathered from remote forest tribes in Sumatra and Borneo. We should not use modern assumptions about value. Camphor might today be available in every dime store, but in the first millennium, it was a commodity on the same order as gold. Among the various cross-territorial exchange systems, one must add the famous Silk Route. Beginning to take shape in the first century BCE, it was the principal attractor of cross-Asiatic wealth until about the tenth century, when global warming and other events negatively impacted its effectiveness. In this book, the Silk Route will play a minor role, for the simple reason that it was of a different order than the sweet spots. The Silk Route was defined by a “civilization/nomad” dualism that does not apply to the sweet spots.

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The “civilization/nomad” dualism in the Eurasian context is, of course, as ancient as the first cities. An Akkadian text from 2100 BCE speaks disparagingly of the Amorite pastoralists, who forced themselves into Mesopotamian heartlands: The MAR.TU who know no grain. The MAR.TU who know no house nor town, the boors of the mountains… The MAR.TU who digs up truffles who does not bend his knees (to cultivate the land), who eats raw meat, who has no house during his lifetime, who is not buried after death.3 The author could not anticipate that this was just the beginning of a long and complex history that came to a head with the so-called Barbarian Invasion of Europe in the fourth to sixth centuries, the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain in the fifth century, the Turkish migrations from Inner Asia into Persia and Anatolia between the sixth and eleventh centuries and the Mongolian conquest of China in the thirteenth century, to mention only some of the more obvious ones. Despite the intensity of these events, the endgame of all of them was the same. “Civilization” – if one can use that awkward word – won out. The Mongolians converted to Islam or Buddhism. The Anglo-Saxons self-Romanized as did the Franks. The fearsome Huns, whom the Romans nicknamed “Flagellum Dei” (“Scourge of God”), became farmers and disappeared from the historical record. The Turkish tribes eventually settled in Anatolia and created the Ottoman Empire, and in Egypt, the erstwhile Mongolian captives who served in the military became the Mamluks, known for their beautifully decorated mosques and tombs. Unlike Silk Route cultures that were dependent on nomadic people, the cultures in the sweet spot systems that I discuss were mostly agriculturalists, pastoralists, fishermen, metallurgists, transportation specialists and garden tenders – in some combination. And unlike their Inner Asian cousins, whose lifestyle was always challenged by the agricultural-based states, the societies that operated in the sweet spots maintained and developed the core instrumentalities of an oral-based, communication-rich chieftain worldview throughout the millennium. Yes, there were elites and slaves, but in-between there were a wide range of people and cultures who willingly or not were enmeshed in the broader socioeconomic profile of the region. These zones did not appear out of nowhere. They were the result of an expansionary logic that tended to move away from densely settled areas into areas that were more open to development. The Vikings were on the search for walrus ivory, which in the tenth century fetched huge prices in Paris and as a result they pushed into England, Iceland, Greenland and beyond. In Southeast Asia, the elites were looking for sites that combined a good port, a river valley for rice cultivation and nearby mountains where they could find

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high-priced forest goods. The process is known by scholars as Indianization and lasted from about 400 to 1200 CE. The Bantu expanding along the east coast of Africa were looking for ivory and gold, reaching a particular high point by the eleventh century CE. They pushed aside or assimilated local hunter-gatherer communities. Perhaps instead of talking about migration or expansion, we should be talking about chasing affluence. Once the basic equation had been established and its vectors in a sense predictable, expansions tended to play themselves out in ways that made sense to an internal pattern, whether it was based on the right type of soil, the best waterways, availability of building materials, the best routes across the ocean, the best monasteries and palaces to plunder, the best places to acquire slaves or the best places to hear the voices of the ancestors and their avatars. Each of the great vectors had its own internal and external drivers. The ­internal ones were generated by the necessities of settling down, by the proximity of water, land, resources and trade opportunities. The external ones were generated by the necessities of surplus for trade and status. While this was happening, the large, urban and tax-based societies at the far-distant receiving end of the high-priced goods remained locked into their preference for environments that were suitable for grain and cattle, including sheep and pigs, the preeminent elements of taxable income. These worlds needed their great rivers, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Tiber, the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangzi, and all that was associated with them: broad, fertile valleys, ports, boundaries, walls, irrigation, armies, craft differentiation and bureaucracies along with self-promoting, theocentric elites. To get perspective, one should recall that of the ca. 85 million square kilometers of ­Afro-Eurasia, an astonishing amount, about three-fourths of the total, is taken up by tundra, steppe, desert, savannah, rainforests and mountains. And of the remaining, only about 3 million square kilometers were suitable in the first millennium to large-scale, hegemonically controlled agriculture. Whereas the world’s city- and bureaucracy-based empires had to focus on the small ecological zones that could support grain surplus, chieftain cultures of varying types in the emerging sweet spots had become the masters of large parts of the planet.4 This mastery protected these cultures cumulatively from the military reach of the large agro-urban-based civilizations. Armies need vast amounts of food to sustain long campaigns, which only tightened the relationship between agriculture and state control. In other words, urbanbased societies were forced to stick close to agricultural land in order to maintain their hegemony. Once outside of areas or outside of areas where springtime foraging was possible, their advantage was lost. China had no real answer to the problems of the steppe lands to the north. As Owen Lattimore has noted, “once the northward spread of agriculture had reached the decisive point of diminishing economic returns on cultivated

Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies  39

lands … the ‘steppe problem’ rose up and confronted the Chinese with ­dramatic suddenness.”5 They had equal difficulty with the people in the mountains and forests to the south. In fact, the Chinese word tianxia (天下) that defined the imperial understanding of geography already from its ancient times saw the emperor as inhabiting the densely populated, civilized center of the world that, once one is past the outer fringes of “barbarians,” was enclosed by the four ends of the world where one could find nothing but vast oceans or great deserts.6 It was not a particularly useful point of view, considering that so many of its luxury imports came precisely from these ostensibly empty areas. Similarly, the Romans were spooked by the forests of Germany. And as to the desert peoples to their east, the Romans never really managed to subjugate them despite repeated, costly tries. When it came to the Nabatean traders in Arabia, the Romans eventually realized it was easier – and cheaper – just to make them citizens. In the fifth century, Byzantium, though still a formidable economic power, was, despite some forays into Yemen, more interested in protecting its unruly borders than sending out colonialists. In the ninth century, Islam – once it had crossed the deserts and interlinked urban centers in Europe, Africa and Asia – added some heft to the urban civilization point of view; but by 1200, its advances came with increased difficulty. It was not just Christian Europe and Hindu India that slowed things down. The cultural density of the sub-Saharan chiefdom world was simply too great. Though the elites of Mali and Songhai were Muslim, this was not true at the time for the rest of the population. This means that despite the fact that by the ninth century when the ­kingdoms in India, China and Islam were gorging themselves on imported wealth, they were systemically unable to handle mountains, forests, steppes, deserts and oceans, the natural habitat – and vast it was – for the expansionary, tribal-chieftain world which specialized in nonnormative ecologies. Geographers in the imperial courts of China, Islam and elsewhere took an obvious interest in these remote places. A few even undertook journeys. But the basic fact is that they did not try very hard to understand the complex, cultural dynamics of trade. They inevitably boiled it down to an easy “this for that” – silk for cinnamon, gold for cloth, iron for fur – or to the self-aggrandizing references to “tribute.” Furthermore, their understanding of the outer world was almost solely conditioned by the narrow, impatient perspective of the trader intermediaries who themselves had no access to dark matter economies. By the time things arrived at ports, its mysterious workings had all but disappeared. The deep capacity of people to live in and indeed to become specialists in ecologies that do not fit the normative expectations of agriculture was simply too difficult to understand. It confused Diodorus of Sicily, a Greek historian writing in the first century BCE.

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Why would a person live in the bitter cold of Inner Asia or in the extreme heat of Africa? He ascribes it to a type of laziness: The inhabitants of both the lands which we have mentioned the cold and the hot, far from desiring to escape from the excessive evils which befall them, actually, on the contrary, give up their lives of their own accord simply to avoid being compelled to make trial of a different fare and manner of life. Thus it is that every country to which a man has grown accustomed holds a kind of spell of its own over him, and the length of time which he has spent there from infancy overcomes the hardship which he suffers from its climate.7 What Diodorus did not understand and what even today some people have difficulty comprehending is that the strength of a world that specialized in nonnormative environments. Diodorus’s mistake should not be ours. Let us take agarwood and its foundational role in luxury trade at the end of the first millennium CE. There is a reason it is called the Black Gold of the Forest. In the first millennium, it was indeed the equivalent of gold, and given the proportion of weight to value, it was an extremely profitable commodity. Already in ancient Sanskrit texts, agarwood was identified as a display of wealth, as a tribute and as part of a greeting ceremony. In the first book of Mahābhārata, an epic compiled between the third century BCE and the third century CE, we are told of the people of Khandavaprastha received distant visitors by filling every part of the town “with the sweet scent of burning aloes.”8 In Arabian Nights, written during the Abbasid Caliphate, agarwood features as perfume and as incense, in prayer rituals and trade and even in architecture for the construction of a gate. A ninthcentury inventory of the holdings of the caliphate treasuries in Baghdad lists, among other things, 1,000 baskets of agarwood.9 Around the year

FIGURE 1.3.3 

Author burning agarwood from Vietnam.

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1070, when Emir Abu Bakr, who governed Marrakech, Morocco, gave a royal gift to his cousin; the items included, among others things: 1,000 lengths of linen, 700 mantles, 151 slaves, 20 virgin slave girls and two ratls (ratls = ca. one pound) of his best agarwood.10 The high value of the agarwood is clear from the proportion. Even today, a stick of agarwood a few inches long might cost on the order of USD 15 in the markets of Marrakesh (Figure 1.3.3). We should not see agarwood as an affectation of the super wealthy. It was an essential element of Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu cultures, meaning that the so-called spread of these religions was directly associated with the creation, maintenance and public demonstration of a supply chain that linked religion to both the economy of procurement and to the conspicuousness of its consumption. The tendency to see these religions as purely theological is to exclude the importance of a performative olfactory practice that, in turn, symbolized its geopolitical reach. Burning incense – something akin to “burning money” – was proof of affluence. Buddhists even imagined that the fragrance of agarwood “perfumes all the worlds of the Ten Directions of Space; and all who perceive that odor practice Buddha-deed.”11 Because of its association with spirituality, agarwood is known to have been part of the supplies needed when building a temple. What exactly is agarwood? It is not wood in the conventional sense, but the woody mass that grows inside an aquilaria tree that has been injured by natural disaster, thunder, bacteria or micro creatures. The possibility that an aquilaria tree actually has agarwood in it is very low (only 10% by some estimates) and cannot be determined from external inspection. Furthermore, these trees are to be found randomly in the deep forests and usually in ­difficult-to-reach places.12 As to its origins, by the ninth century, Islamic geographer Ibn Khordadbeh (820–913) gave an itinerary that pointed in the right direction: Sailing from Ma’it [in the Riau Archipelago?] on the left, to the island of Tiyumah [Pulau Tioman]; upon it is Indian aloeswood and camphor. From it to Khmer is a distance of five days, and in Khmer aloeswood and rice. From Khmer to Champa upon the coast is a distance of three days, and in it is Champan aloeswood. It is better than the Khmer because it sinks in water due to its excellence and weight.13 The Chinese, for obvious reasons, had a better sense of its origins. In the third century CE, the chronicle Nan zhou yi wu zhi (Strange things from the South), written by Wa Zhen of the Eastern Wu Dynasty, mentioned agarwood produced in the Rinan commandery, now Central Vietnam, and how the locals collected it in the mountains.14 There is no doubt that the geopolitical role of the Champa highlanders rested heavily on their ability to

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locate agarwood. Because it did not need any agricultural expertise, it was extremely cost-effective. The mountain tribes who did the work of identifying and cutting the trees needed something for their expertise, but we have no idea what that was as it was never recorded.15 It was probably a variety of tangible and intangible goods, maybe a combination of rice, cloth, metal objects, beads and titles. The wealth that agarwood generated enabled the Champa to secure the labor and materials to build the famous Mỹ Sơn mortuary complex for kings of the ruling dynasties. It is one of the foremost Hindu/animist temple complexes in Southeast Asia and was used from the fourth century to the fourteenth century CE. Located about 15 miles west of their capital and port city of Indrapura (assumed to be a few miles south of Da Nang), it was built in a valley encircled by three sacred mountains, as proclaimed on a stele by the fourth century King Bhadravarman who offered the land “as an eternal tribute to the God, with Suhala mount to the East, Mahaparvata [Great Mountain] to the south and Kucaka mount to the west ... together with the people living on it and all of its produce.”16 The particularly prominent Mahaparvata, presumably what is now known as Hon Chau, with its distinctive horned profile, was compared to the holy Mount Meru. A stream which flows through the site from Mahaparvata to merge with the Mahadani River (Thu Bon River}

FIGURE 1.3.4 

My Son, Vietnam. Credit: Sgnpkd/Wikimedia Commons.

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was believed to be an avatar of the goddess Ganga and was directly associated with the theology of wealth. But as is so common with such sites, how it was used in the spiritual and ritual sense has been lost. Where the architects who built it were trained is also not known. And even how the buildings were constructed is something of a mystery, since the bricks were not mortared, but glued together with a still undetermined substance made from forest resins. This special glue, made from a secret recipe of forest plants, was probably itself meant to be seen as a sign of the region’s affluence (Figure 1.3.4). The Champa had more than one advantage in the control of agarwood. Its harvesting did not require a complex system of slaves and roads. Furthermore, the ships that came along the coast to Indrapura were mostly manned by Arab or Malay crews. In essence, the Champa simply injected the agarwood into the flow of trade moving past their front door. They also had the advantage that agarwood could not be easily forged and that the forests seemed to supply a steady stream of the material. Nonetheless, the narrower the basis on which affluence was defined, the more likely the system would go from boom to bust. Silphium is a case in point. The resin of a giant fennel, it was the prime luxury export from the North African city of Cyrene (present-day Shahhat, Libya). Cyrene coins even bore the picture of the plant. According to Pliny, “The juice of this plant is called ‘laser,’ and it is greatly in vogue for medicinal as well as other purposes, being sold at the same rate as silver.”17 It was also used as an edible delicacy, as a perfume, as an aphrodisiac, as an abortifacient and as a repellant of spirits. Plautus, the Greek playwright (died 184 BCE), describes large silphium plantations near Cyrene in his play Rudens, clearly indicating the quasi-agro-industrialization of the plant. Pliny (died 79 CE) also describes the abundance of the plant along the rocky Mediterranean coast near the city. But so intense was the market that by the end of the second century

FIGURE 1.3.5  A

coin from ancient Cyrene. Credit: International Numismatics Club/Wikimedia Commons.

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CE, the plant had become scarce. The impact on the local economy was predictable. Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century describes the city as deserted and at the mercy of regional nomads (Figure 1.3.5).18 In all these cases, even though the initial product – jade from the Taklamakan Desert, gold from the rivers of Senegal and Mali, agarwood from the forest of Cambodia and Vietnam, coral from Sabta and so on – came from nature itself, the materials were not free for the taking in John Locke’s sense, and as sometimes implied in the history of trade, which often assumes that things just “show up” at the docks. Local tribes and chieftains monopolized resources and knew the appropriate natural and spirit world rhythms that allowed acquisition to take place. We have little general knowledge about these types of specialized “know-hows,” given not only their remoteness and secretive nature, but also because of the lack of awareness and even interest by traders. We are fortunate here and there to have some evidence, as a description by an English colonial officer of how the antidote to a scorpion sting was collected and administered by a special caste, Sakuna Paksh: The root should be collected on a new-moon day which falls on a Sunday. On that day, the Sakuna Pakshi bathes, cuts off his loin-string, and goes stark naked to a selected spot, where he gathers the roots.19 Still today, the Malayan tin miner from the island of Bangka believes that the tin he extracts from the ground is under the jurisdiction of a deity who must be treated with great care and delicacy; a deity older than the imported gods of India – Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu; older than the Buddha; older than Allah. Even a reference to Allah while mining is seen as an affront to the deity who may then render the metal invisible. Rituals of propitiation must, therefore, be conducted not by a Muslim holy man but by a Malayan pawang (spirit medium) or by a shaman of one of the groups like the Senoi, called the “original people” who lived in Malaya before the coming of the Malays. Mining itself was preceded by fasting, meditation and acts of worship, in order to make safe the dangerous operation of entering the inviolable earth – the subterranean domain – and disturbing the earth spirits by taking away a part of the earth’s body.20 As for frankincense, Pliny, who was not sure where it came from, wrote: It is never gathered unless with the permission of the god, by whom some suppose Jupiter to be meant; the Æthiopians, however, call him Assabinus. They offer the entrails of forty-four oxen, goats, and rams, when they implore his permission to do so, but after all, they are not allowed to work at it before sunrise or after sunset. A priest divides the branches with

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a spear, and sets aside one portion of them for the god; after which, the dealer stores away the rest in lumps.21 At the saltworks in Kibiro on the western shore of Lake Albert in Uganda, there were two sacred pools in which the spirits who controlled the production of salt dwelt. The king used to send to the spirit that inhabited the pools an annual offering of several cows and a slave woman. The cows were not sacrificed, but were kept by the chief priest for his own use. The woman was given to one of the priest’s servants on the understanding that the firstborn child should belong to the spirit. The child would be taken to one of the sacred pools and its throat cut. The blood poured into the water and the body dropped into the pool to persuade the spirit to grant greater quantities of salt. A sheep would also be sacrificed. These and other ceremonies were observed with great solemnity.22 These rituals not only were integral to the expertise of extraction, but also preserved cultural identities and histories that associated particular groups with a particular place and purpose. Unfortunately, extractional devotionalism is never discussed in histories of global economics of the first millennium CE, except perhaps to comment on local superstition. But one should always assume that only those with specialized access to the gods could have access to the resources, meaning that devotional practices formed a type of proprietary knowledge designed so that outsiders and foreigners could not just enter these systems and understand them. Devotional practices associated with extraction served as a built-in defense mechanism against prying eyes and envious competitors. Locals did their best to mystify the sources of wealth. When Nicolo di Conti, a fifteenth-century Italian merchant who travelled to South India, inquired about the source of the diamonds, he was told that the diamonds came from a mountain requiring a 15-day journey. He was also told that the diamonds lie in inaccessible valleys into which lumps of flesh were thrown. The precious stones adhere to them and these are then carried up to the summits by eagles, which are then driven off and the stones secured. It makes a good story, but it could also be an example of the way locals disguised, mystified and protected the trade secret of extraction.23 And finally, an overemphasis on trade might miss the critical point (that we return to later), namely that extraction and craft often overlapped and sometimes not. Some goods, like agarwood, cinnamon, camphor, sulfur and other forest products needed no fundamental alteration – apart from sorting and packing – before they arrived at the remote palaces of China. But other commodities underwent some form of crafting or refinement, taking place mostly far downstream. After all, the fine crafting of valuable commodities required protection, accountability and bureaucracy. Ivory, at least in the

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FIGURE 1.3.6  Crown

Top or Usnisha Cover for the head of the Buddha, Java, 650–1000.  Gold sheet and gold wire with a crystal finial. Credit: Yale University Art Gallery.

first millennium CE, was not carved in Kenya, but in Cairo or Byzantium. Gold was not fashioned into jewelry in Borneo where it was panned, but by palace craftsmen in Java, where it received the misnomer “Javanese gold.” Amber was mostly not carved into amulets by the Germans, but by craftsmen in Venice. The kingfisher feathers of Cambodia were not crafted into elegant broaches in Cambodia, but by palace craft specialists in China (Figure 1.3.6). The separation of the normative, Holocenic environments from the nonnormative must therefore be overlaid with the separation of the skill/craft horizon from the extraction horizon (discussed later on). That separation was a critical element in the efficacy of the delivery system and would have serious – and ultimately tragic – consequences with the arrival of European colonialists who could easily see the people of the “remote” chieftain world as unskilled or as simply living in a much theorized “state of nature.” Before the modern breakdown of the luxury exchange network, the urban and tax-based societies were dependent on the remote chieftain supply chain, not just for materials but to sustain a wide range of their own craft-based economies. But no matter how hard the urban and tax-based societies tried to abolish the border between resource acquisition and trade-specific export production, they were never able to make the two ends meet in any sustainable and hegemonic way before the era of modernization. And this meant that as long as there was a luxury market for the exotic, the large, urbanbased empires were inevitably chained to the geopolitics of over-the-horizon exchanges and all its associated troubles and uncertainties. The efficiency of the sweet spot, chieftain world in mastering nonnormative ecologies and its associated wealth in combination with the inefficiency of the urban-based empires to extend their reach in that direction, defines the global economy of the end of the first millennium (Figure 1.3.7).

Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies  47

FIGURE 1.3.7 The

Extraction and Invisiblity Horizons at the end of the first millennium CE.

Notes 1 Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1405–1433 (New York: Simon Shuster, 1994), 139. 2 Wolfram Eberhard, The Local Cultures of South and East China, trans. Alide Eberhard (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 158. 3 Edward Chiera, Sumerian Epics and Myths (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 58, 112. 4 As Hopkins and Wallerstein argued, “The predominant current procedure is to trace primarily the economic flows between states (that is, across frontiers) such as trade, migration or capital investment…. Such efforts do not, however, and for the most part cannot, show the totality of the flows of movements that reveal the real division, and this integration, of labor in complex production processes.” Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Commodity Chains in

48  Cross-Ecological Delivery Economies

the World-Economy Prior to 1800,” Review 10, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 160. Jane Schneider objected to Wallerstein’s contention that the exchange of “preciosities” did not constitute a world system and that only exchanges of bulk goods could do so. Her main point was that even trade in luxury goods or preciosities often produced important transformative changes in precapitalist societies. Many others have pursued this criticism. See Jane Schneider, “Was There a Pre-Capitalist World-System?” Peasant Studies 6, no. 1 (1977): 20–29. 5 Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History, Collected Papers 1928–1958 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 145. 6 Chishen Chang and Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Tracking Tianxia: On Intellectual SelfPositioning,” in Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (267–292), ed. Ban Wang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 291, 292. 7 Diodorus, Diodorus Siculus: The Library of History, Vol. 2, trans. Charles Henry Oldfather (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1935), Book 3.34. 8 Mahābhārata, Book 1, Section CCXXIII; https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/ book/the-mahabharata-mohan/d/doc4298.html. For discussion, see Arlene LópezSampson and Tony Page, “History of Use and Trade of Agarwood,” Economic Botany 72 (2018): 107–129. 9 Anya H. King, Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 286, 287. For discussion, see Dinah Jung, “The Cultural Biography of Agarwood – Perfumery in Eastern Asia and the Asian Neighbourhood,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 1, (January 2013), 103–125. 1 0 Corpus, 315, 316. 1 1 Lafcadio Hearn, In Ghostly Japan and Other Stories (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co, 1899), 29–31. 12 The term “agarwood” derives, in fact, from Sanskrit agāru (“non-floating wood”). See James Innes Miller, The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 B.C. to A.D. 641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 35. 13 Quoted in and partially condensed from: King, Scent from the Garden of Paradise, 64, 78. 14 Hui-Lin Li, trans., Nan-fang cao mu chuang – A fourth century flora of Southeast Asia (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1979), 88. 15 In Borneo, the practice of collecting the wood was studied by Isamu Yamada in 1995. Isamu Yamada. “Aloeswood Forest and the Maritime World,” Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 3 (Dec. 1995): 181–186. 16 Andrew Hardy, Mauro Cucarzi, and Patricia Zolese, Champa and the Archaeology of Mỹ Sơn, Vietnam (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 206. 1 7 Pliny, Natural History 19.15, trans. John Bostock, H. T. Riley, and B. A ( London: Taylor and Francis, 1855). 18 Ken Parajko, “Pliny the Elder’s Silphium: First Recorded Species Extinction,” Conservation Biology 17, no. 3 (2003): 926. 19 Edgard Thurston, K. Rangachari, Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 6 (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 416, 417. 20 Judith Becker, “Earth, Fire, Śakti, and the Javanese Gamelan,” Ethnomusicology 32, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 386. See also Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible: The Origins and Structure of Alchemy, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper, 1962), 55. 2 1 Pliny, Natural History 12, 42. 2 2 John Roscoe, The Soul of Central Africa: A General Account of the Mackie Ethnological Expedition (London: Cassell and Co., 1922), 161, 162. 2 3 Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1900), 127.

PART 2

By the first century of the first millennium, trade routes had begun to connect the Roman Empire with China. Maps will show long lines stretching from the Mediterranean to the coast of China. But we should be careful to not see this through modern eyes as if these were some sort of global shipping lanes. Most items did not ‘go’ from China to Rome or vice versa. Instead, goods were injected into the system in ports along the way. Furthermore, the goods that were injected were mostly luxury items with high profit margins. And if we were to ask where those goods then came from, it becomes clear that for the first time in history areas that we in our civilization-centric histories might consider as hinterlands had become key participants in the dynamics of wealth-making. It also becomes clear that those who were well-positioned to play a role in that dynamics saw not just the escalation of this type of wealth-making, but also the extension of its capillary systems of extraction into non-normative ecological zones. In this part of the book, I will look at the various emerging sweet spots so as to come to terms with their foundational role in establishing luxury trade networks. The following diagram will serve as a guide (Figure 2.0.1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-6

FIGURE 2.0.1 

-#

The major sweet spots and some associated cities of buildings.

1 “THE MOST OUTLYING LANDS”

Though Afro-Eurasian trade had been in play for thousands of years, the world had never seen anything like the economic system that had emerged in the second half of the first millennium CE. Already in the ninth and tenth centuries, Baghdad was described as “the Frontier of India.”1 Not too far away was Jeddah on the coast of the Red Sea. By the eleventh century, Kontoskalion, the port of Constantinople, as well as Suakin, off the coast of Sudan, and Mombasa, even further to the south, had become prosperous in their own right. From there, ships set sail carrying ivory, slaves, coffee and gold2: A key port in the middle of all of this was known as Siraf located on the eastern coast of the Persian Gulf.3 In the fifteenth century, when trade routes shifted to the Red Sea, Siraf fell into disuse. But Ibn al-Balkhi, writing around 1100, recalls that Siraf used to be a great city, very populous and full of merchandise, being an entrepot [with] caravans and ships. Thus, in the days of the [Abbasid] caliphs it was a great emporium, for could be found stores of attar of roses [rose oil] and aromatics such as camphor, aloes, sandalwood, the like. Immense fortunes could be made here. And so matters stood until the last days of Buyid supremacy.4 Off the southern coast of Iran there was Kish; when Benjamin of Tudela ­visited it ca. 1170, he described it as the place to which the Indian merchants bring their commodities, while the traders from Iraq, Yemen and Fars bring silk, purple cloth, flax, cotton, hemp, mash (a type of pulse), wheat, barley, rye and all other sorts of foodstuffs and pulses, along with “great quantities of spices.”5 Some ports were known for particular commodities. Uraiyur in DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-7

52  “The Most Outlying Lands”

Southern India was the place, for a while at least, where the pearls of the region were collected and prepared for trade; Puhar, also in South India, for a while at least, was where pepper, harvested in the Pandian highlands, was brought by canoes and skiffs to the awaiting ships.6 Dārin on Tārūt, an island in the Persian Gulf, had a large market dedicated to aromatics, which was so important that Arabic poetry used the word Dārin as a reference to musk.7 Qana, in modern-day Yemen, frequented by ships that crossed from India to the Red Sea, was where the frankincense trade was centralized. Mosylon was a prominent emporium on the Red Sea coast that handled the bulk of the ­cinnamon trade coming from India. As for the ports in the south of India, they were extolled in the various Tamil epic poems that were written in the first centuries of the millennium. The Purananuru, a collection of 400 poems on the subject of kings, wars and public life and dated from between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE, lauds the west-facing port of Muziris – the place where Roman gold was exchanged for pepper – in the following words: With its streets, its houses, its covered fishing boats, where they sell fish, where they pile up rice – with the shifting and mingling crowd of a boisterous river-bank where the sacks of pepper are heaped up – with its gold deliveries, carried by the ocean-going ships and brought to the river bank by local boats, the city of the gold-collared Kuttuvan (Chera chief), the city that bestows wealth to its visitors indiscriminately, and the merchants of the mountains, and the merchants of the sea, the city where liquor abounds, yes, this Muciri, where the rumbling ocean roars, is given to me like a marvel, a treasure.8 In Periya Tirumoli – a composition of hymns illustrating the greatness of Vaishnava shrines and their presiding deity – we read that at Mahabalipuram on the east-facing coast, ships “rode at anchor bent to the point of breaking laden as they were with wealth, big trunked elephants and gems of nine varieties in heaps.”9 And at Puhar, an east-facing port at the mouth of Kaveri River in South India – as described in Cilappatikāram (The Tale of an Anklet), composed about fifth or sixth century CE – silks, coral, sandalwood and eaglewood, perfect pearls, gems, gold and jewels were all available in “immeasurable quantities.”10 At Madurai (capital of the Pandya kingdom), on the banks of the river Vaigai, the sounds coming from the market in the evening “were as loud as when a festival was being celebrated.” The more precious commodities – pearls, emeralds, corals, rubies – had assigned streets each marked by a distinctive flag. In one street, a visitor would have found: flawless diamonds with all the five major attributes as decreed in the ancient texts glowed like the rainbow in white, red, green and dark colors identifying each variety.11

“The Most Outlying Lands”  53

The poem also mentions that the scent of sandalwood, aloeswood and musk emanating from the city could be detected by travelers from a distance away: The south wind From Madurai blows here. Feel it. It is redolent of the divinely fragrant, thin, soft mix Of the eaglewood paste, the aroma of saffron, The civet, the goddess of sandalwood paste, And musk blended together. On its way it hovers Near the wreaths if pollen-laden, red water lilies.12 The author of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a first-century document that describes ports in Africa, Arabia and India, describes Muza (al Mokha, Yemen) as “the whole place teams with Arabs – shipowners or charters or sailors – and is astir with commercial activity.”13 Many of those shipowners probably hailed from the Indian port of Kozhikode. Their ships were specially designed without decks, but rather with divisions in which: they used to stow much pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, long pepper, sandal and brazil wood, lac, cardamoms, myrobalan, tamarinds, bamboos, and all sorts of jewels and pearls, musk, amber, rhubarb, aloes-wood, many fine cotton stuffs, and much porcelain. And in this manner ten or twelve ships laden with these goods sailed every year in the month of February, and made their voyage to the Red Sea. They returned laden with copper, quicksilver, vermilion, coral, saffron, colored cloths, gold and silver.14 Because of the wealth coming from trade across the seas, it is perhaps not farfetched to see why ancient Hindu texts equate the seas with profit. The Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns, known as the Rig Veda, states: “From every side, O Soma (the mythological ocean), for our profit,

FIGURE 2.1.1 Balijatra

festival in Cuttack. Credit: Kamalakanta 777/Wikimedia Commons.

54  “The Most Outlying Lands”

pour thou forth four seas filled with a thousand-fold riches (9.33.6).” This cross-oceanic trade was so important to the Satavahanas – who controlled the central parts of the subcontinent at the beginning of the millennium – that they had ships on their coins. At Cuttack, on the eastern coast of India, so many ships were departing from the port for the inlands of Southeast Asia that the joyous send-off ceremony is still performed, even though today no ships make that formerly perilous but rewarding journey. During the ceremony, known as Baliyatra, locals float toy boats made from paper or banana leaves out in the sea accompanied by the blowing of conchs and bursts of firecrackers (Figure 2.1.1). Today, the age of the chaotic port with all its strange people, noise, smells, charms and dangers is a thing of the past. Ports are designed as industrial zones and are placed far from city centers, off-limits to all but those with special permission. Furthermore, the great network of ports that reached from Dublin (Ireland) to Incheon (the Republic of Korea) is lost. Almería, one of the principal ports of Islamic Spain and one of the most important trading hubs in the Mediterranean with ships laden with silk, copper, oil, silver ingots, dyes, brocades and African slaves, was already by the fifteenth century just a shell of its former self. Al Mokha has a population of a few hundred with the port being used by local fishermen and smugglers. Mosylon was somewhere in the vicinity of Bosaso, Somalia, no one knows where. Kayal, the great emporium on the south of India and visited by Marco Polo, has passed into obscurity. Arikamedu on the east coast of India is now forgotten and overgrown. Godavaya, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, is now under rice paddies. Mahabalipuram still exists, but is no longer a port. The ports in Java have also mostly disappeared into the turf. Oc Eo in Vietnam is now a small village some 23 kilometers from the ocean, the land between it and the shore having long since silted over. One of the few places where one can still experience a port with all its genuine hustle and bustle is at Mbandaka (Democratic Republic of Congo) and the confluence of the Congo and Ruki rivers or at

FIGURE 2.1.2 

River port near Mopti, Mali. Credit: David Forman/Alamy.

“The Most Outlying Lands”  55

Mopti (Mali) along the Bani River, a few hundred meters upstream of the confluence of the Bani with the Niger River (Figure 2.1.2). In what follows, I do not focus on port cities and on their already wellestablished position in trade history. Instead, I want to look back across the seas to distant shores, forests and mountains that were the source of many of the goods that were piled on the docks and stored in warehouses. Herodotus, back in the fourth century BCE, already diagrammed the basic worldview in which Greece – as he imagined it – may have been at the center of the so-called known world; but many of the items that the Greeks desired came from far away: The most outlying lands,…as they enclose and wholly surround all the rest of the world, are likely to have those things which we think the finest and the rarest. [3.116] It was a basic truth that resonated until the colonial age, and is in a sense the leitmotif of this book. Take, for example, an ivory cosmetic box covered with vegetal designs from the workshop of Madinat al-Zahra – a city in Spain founded in the tenth century by the new Arab Caliphate of Córdoba. It carries the following inscription (Figure 2.1.3):

FIGURE 2.1.3 An

example of an ivory chest, engraved silver made in Cordoba in the tenth century/agefotostock.

56  “The Most Outlying Lands”

The sight I offer is the fairest, the firm breast of a delicate girl. Beauty has invested me with splendid raiment, which makes a display of jewels. I am a receptacle of musk, camphor and ambergris.15 In the next pages, I explore the geo-economics of the box’s contents. The first question that comes to the fore is: where did these things come from? The answer is obvious. No one knows. But that should not be the end of the conversation. The ivory, though probably worked in Córdoba, probably came from the savannahs of Africa; the jewels probably came from various sources in India or Sri Lanka; the musk, which was seen as having almost mystical properties – if genuine, for it was already being falsified – probably came from the mountain slopes of the Himalayas; the ambergris came from the Indian ocean, probably from the Maldives; the camphor – used as an aphrodisiac by the rich – from the even more remote rain forests of Borneo or Sumatra, some 7,500 miles away! From the perspective of Spain, these were indeed the most outlying lands. But there is another story that is implied by this box, especially since the world of Herodotus was vastly different from the world as defined by the cosmetic box. These items were not arbitrary luxury items for elites; they were the drivers of the emerging globality of the world economy. In other words, they were not the “excess” of taste, but the foundations of early capitalist systems. At the most fundamental level, the box is a celebration of Islamic trade networks, for Islamic traders had done what the sailors from Greece, Rome or for that matter India and certainly China had not, that is, secure for themselves in one way or another a place along the entire trade network from China to Spain. The Arabs were accomplished traders well before the ninth century, but history books so often emphasize the desert that we can forget that they also plied the oceans between the Persian Gulf, the Arab peninsula and the western ports of India. The Azd ‘Uman, for example, were a particularly dominant Arab merchant group working out of Oman and strongly involved in the trade with India.16 Their ships had made it even to China.17 But with their general conversion to Islam and the expansion of Islam into Spain in one direction and into the Indian Ocean in the other, these and other Islamicized Arabs became the premier mercantile forces in trans-geographic exchanges in the second half of the first millennium, and would remain dominant in that respect until the colonial period. The advantage of becoming the first monotheistic religion that spanned Europe, Africa and Asia was immense. Though not all Arab ship captains played by the rules, for piracy was a nondenominational phenomenon, Islamic traders were bound by a moral code that radically reduced the complexity of negotiation across ethnic cultures. Arabs were also favored because they could bring their military knowledge to bear in their negotiations, supplying horses, cavalry and slaves as well as mercenaries or oarsmen.

“The Most Outlying Lands”  57

FIGURE 2.1.4 

Established Arab/Islamic communities by the eleventh century.

The shift of the caliphate to Baghdad, the increased economic prosperity of the Islamic world and the political stability of the ‘Abbasid age resulted in the ninth century in a type of “golden age” for the Persian Gulf/Islamic traders and merchants.18 And yet, maps that show the Islamic world in this period will often fail to acknowledge Islam’s maritime presence. In fact, during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Muslim Arabs in China more or less controlled the import/export industry with the Indian Ocean. The Song office of Director General of Shipping was even generally held by a Muslim.19 Meanwhile, in India, the Hindu kingdoms like Rashtrakutas, a dynasty that controlled large parts of west India between the sixth and tenth centuries; the Kakatiyas, a South Indian dynasty whose capital was Orugallu (Warangal); the Hoysalas, a prominent Southern Indian empire between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries; and the Pandyans (a Tamil dynasty), all encouraged the settlements of the Muslim traders in their dominions offering special concessions and inducements. Among the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is the seventh century Cheramaan Perumal Juma Mosque in Methala, not far from the port of Kochi along the Malabar Coast. Islamic traders were active in Sumatra, where their first official foothold was the Samudera Pasai Sultanate founded in 1267 (Figure 2.1.4). The ivory box and its contents demonstrate something more than just the newly emerging reach of Islamic traders. Nothing came from China, implying that the true index of remoteness was not China. Furthermore, most of the things in the box had only recently made the shift from esoteric luxury items to global commodities. Only in the sixth century did musk, for example, appear in Byzantium.20 By the eighth century, Islam had magnified the desire economy for musk a thousandfold. Islamic literature, as studied by Anya H. King, is filled with a vast variety of uses: to enhance beauty, looks, prestige, and even sexuality. It had medicinal and spiritual properties, and was even used as a breath freshener. Substances were also combined in various

58  “The Most Outlying Lands”

ways, as indicated by an eighth-century poem that has a line “Strong musk and ambergris with camphor diffuse from her breast.”21 But it was not just all about the person smelling well. We categorize musk as an aromatic, but in that time period, the boundaries between aromatics, perfumes, incense, medicine and “spiritual potency” were nonexistent. In Buddhism, perfume offerings often consisted of water perfumed with saffron, sandalwood, musk, camphor and nutmeg.22 The use of musk did not just develop linearly over time. Because Prophet Muhammed, as described in the Koran, perfumed himself with musk, it was common for men – if they could afford it – to rub their beards with musk before prayer. In other words, what had been a rather esoteric commodity with little cross-global reach was suddenly – beginning in the eighth ­century – highly sought-after by people some 9,000 kilometers from its source! Rubbing musk into one’s beard was not just a sign of status. It carried with it the imprimatur of Islam’s cross-territorial universalism. Inventories of the caliphal treasuries in Baghdad from the early ninth-­ century list 100,000 mithqāls of musk (almost 1,000 pounds) and the same for ambergris as well as 1,000 baskets of aloeswood and 1,000 pots of various perfumes as well as porcelain jars of camphor.23 Just as most of the royal stash

FIGURE 2.1.5 

Musk and other aromatics in a shop in the market in Fes, Morocco.

“The Most Outlying Lands”  59

was accumulated as gifts and tribute, with little of it acquired in the market, the caliph, apart from using this in his court to enhance his prestige, would give musk as a gift or as part of a package accompanying treatises, marriages or alliances. The Spanish ivory box thus represented in miniature the very idea of Islamic sociopolitical, elite-hood. Though musk today is made from chemical engineering, it is still available in Islamic countries (Figure 2.1.5). As to the sourcing of the musk, late ninth-century Baghdad geographer al-Ya’qubi at least knew that musk came from the mountains of Tibet, adding that: Traders set up a structure resembling a minaret the length of a cubit. When this animal from whose navel musk originates comes, it rubs its navel on that minaret and the navel falls off there. The traders come to it at a time of the year which they know and the gather it freely. When they bring it to Tibet, one tenth of its value is taken from them.24 The description is, however, not accurate, since the musk was not collected by traders, but by local hunters who captured the deer in snares and cut the musk out. They then brought the goods down to the valley to make the exchange with traders. This exchange occurred even into the nineteenth century, when musk was brought down by the Lolo People who live in the mountains of Yunan province in south China.25 But what exactly did the musk collectors get for their efforts in all of this? What techniques of exchange and language were used? How did they express their newfound affluence? Published records of the time give us no insight into these types of questions since they focus on the downstream, acquisition-centered world.26 We do know however that the hunting of musk deer was a specialized activity associated with a specific set of taboos and spiritual world requirements. The deity of the hunt, Drabla Meme, had to be propitiated through gifts and rituals. In addition, a secret language was used for the hunt, presumably so that the deer would not be able to understand the conversation of the hunters.27 The need for a special language deterred poachers who would worry about receiving an evil spell. Ambergris was another substance that grew in value as the millennium progressed. It is even today a precious commodity. A recent headline from the BBC read: “Yemen fishermen find $1.5m of ambergris in the belly of a whale.”28 Documents from the Ming Dynasty record that ambergris – hung sien hiang (dragon’s saliva perfume) – was one among many articles sent as tribute by Sumatra and that Sumatra was itself a busy center in ambergris trade.29 Moving in the opposite direction, Islamic sea captains brought it along the Indian coast to Basara on the Persian Gulf for distribution.30 And in the first half of the sixteenth century, Leo Africanus, a Berber Andalusian diplomat and author of Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa),

60  “The Most Outlying Lands”

FIGURE 2.1.6  The

author standing with Hi’ham Madi in his shop, Herboriste Avicenne, after buying a piece of ambergris, Marrakesh, Morocco.

records the following gifts made by the Sultan of Fez to an unnamed mountain chief: 15 men slaves and 15 women slaves, 16 civet cats and 1 pound of ambergris.31 It can be purchased still today in the markets of Fes, though today it is simply a pricey aromatic, not an instrument in geopolitical negotiations (Figure 2.1.6). From Marco Polo, traveling in the thirteenth century, we know that along the northeastern coast of Africa, the inhabitants made it a business to kill the whales with harpoons and drag them ashore and “extract the ambergris from the bellies and from their head they procure casks of [spermaceti] oil.”32 A ninth-century account of the Maldives from an Arab merchant-traveler gives a bit more detail: The third of the Seas we have to mention, is the Sea of Harkand. Between this Sea and that of Delarowi, are many Islands, to the Number, as they say, of 1900. They, in some sort, part these two Seas from each other, and are governed by a queen. Among these Islands, they find Ambergreese in Lumps of extraordinary bigness.33 François Pyrard de Laval, a French navigator who was wrecked on the Maldives in 1602 and who spent five years in the islands, records in his memoirs that Sumatran merchants frequented the islands to barter their wares for tortoiseshell and ambergris.34 One of the commodities the Maldivians wanted was rice, since it does not grow on the island. Rice was more than just a food. It was a sacred commodity associated with the grandezza of the ruling queen (later the king) and indeed, with the very principle of the island’s affluence. In September, for two days there is a vast communal rice cooking and feeding celebration. Even the king will have a large quantity of it cooked and mixed with honey and coco milk; this is then carried about the island in large tubs.

“The Most Outlying Lands”  61

Its handlers ladle it out to all they meet, and no one declines, be he beggar or lord. Everyone does the same; even the poorest must cook some rice and send it to his neighbors.35 Though much has been written about getting ambergris from the island, there are no sources that describe where the Islamic traders got the rice or how that rather complex part of the trade system was organized. But they probably got it from the nearest source in South India and Sri Lanka, meaning that the rice that was grown there was not just “food,” but produced because of its role in the geopolitics of commodity extraction. We have a better sense of how these exchanges worked when we turn to the third element in the box, camphor. Irrelevant today as a global commodity (as it is now made artificially), camphor had an astonishingly wide range of medicinal, spiritual and especially aphrodisiacal properties. Still today, among the medicines used in the hills of India is a concoction of camphor, fruit, betel and rice cooked with honey that is fed to a deity to avert illness.36 But in earlier times, camphor was no folk medicine. Already in the centuries before the Common Era, it was valued as a gift worthy of sovereigns and more expensive even than gold; it figures, for example, among the items sent by the emperor of China to Alexander. The treasure house at Ctesiphon included 100 sacks of camphor, a royal fortune (Figure 2.1.7)!37

FIGURE 2.1.7 Grand camphor tree of Noin, Oyamazumi Shrine, Ōmishima Island,

Japan. Credit: そらみみ/Wikimedia Commons.

62  “The Most Outlying Lands”

There is no way to know where that camphor came from, but the name that the Indian merchants had for Borneo was Karpuradvipa (Camphor Island).38 Even in 1911, the Chinese would buy a pound and half of crystallized camphor from Borneo for USD 50.39 One can only imagine its “palace value cost” in China at that time. Camphor was so precious that in the early eighteenth century, camphor trees in Formosa – now Taiwan – were owned by the Chinese state and the penalty for chopping one of them down was death.40 Insight into its sourcing comes from the nineteenth century. One scholar, who studied Chinese texts, notes this about Borneo: The inhabitants go into the forest in parties of ten men each, carrying fabrics woven from fibers. They carry provisions with them in the form of a sago [Chinese, sha-hu]. After separating from each other, in order to search in different direction, they halt at places where they find camphor trees and fell about ten trees. The trunks are cut transversely and sawn into thin boards which are split up by wedge, driven into the board and thus they obtain camphor. Chao Iu-kua explains all the different sorts of camphor which in his time came into the market of Ch’oenohou-fu. The best consisted of pure crystals and was, on account of its purity, called plum-flower-camphor; the second sort which probably also consisted of entire crystals, but such as were not quite white, was called gold-feet-camphor; camphor in small, broken pieces, was called rice-camphor.41 What the author did not realize was that camphor was a spirit, and because the tree knows in advance what the camphor hunters – belonging to a huntergatherer tribe in Borneo – are after, it can punish them in any number of ways. As a result, the camphor extractors had to take great precautions to not mention the word “camphor,” and instead use the phrase “the thing that smells.”42 If the hunt went well, the workers could find a hollow trunk with several feet of crystallized camphor, a veritable fortune. If something went wrong with their communications with the spirit world, all they would find was a trunk with liquid gum at the bottom, which was quite useless apart from the lumber.43 These trees were not a dime a dozen. They were hundreds of years old, meaning that a failed decision meant one less camphor tree in the forest. Though the traders would simply move on to another village, the consequences for the locals were immense. The Borneo tribes who collected camphor – a specialized activity that later on the English would quickly learn that they could not master – could easily survive without that activity, but once incorporated into their cultural identities, the harvesting of camphor modified and enhanced their world. The camphor trade did not broaden their world; the trade made it more intense as it added extra spirit world obligations and extra status in the ancestral firmament.

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When adding all this up, it is clear that the box and its contents were designed as a demonstration piece of Islam’s newfound global reach into the remote hinterlands of the earth. It was a set piece – indeed a celebration – of the indirect nature of that reach. The box was also hardly a one-off, but one of the many hundreds that were made in some variation that advertised the “upstream” globality of Islam. The box makes it clear that the history of religion, especially when it comes to the expansion of both Islam and Buddhism in the first millennium CE, was integrally tied to history of aromatics which, in turn, was integrally tied to the global expansion of trade between forest and palace. Stated more directly, the processes of “globalization” in the first millennium – by which I mean connectivity through trade – have the trade in aromatics as one of its central elements. The princess who came to own the box was well aware of the special place that musk, ambergris and camphor had as luxury items, but neither she nor anyone in Spain would have had the slightest understanding of the complex spirit world negotiations that took place at its remote origins. The absence of awareness of the spirit world component of extraction becomes even more problematic in modern trade histories, where it is often assumed not to exist at all! In acknowledging the bilateral nature of exchange systems, we should not forget that there existed the wide range of exchanges within a community, especially the closer we come to the ports. We would have to include bulk items such as grain and lumber, and indeed large-scale urban societies were dependent on such items.44 The production of surplus in these domains has led some scholars to see in port-based economies the prelude to capitalism. But we can easily get caught up in the hustle and bustle of the ports and see items like camphor, ambergris and musk as nothing but “aromatics” intended for the high and mighty. The real difference is between items that are part of the quotidian and those that are part of luxury exchanges; the latter required cross-polity, cross-cultural, cross-ecological systems of exchange. By focusing on this set of luxury goods, we come to terms with true “globality” of trade in the first millennium, one in which small and remote players – often considered culturally insignificant or anthropologically remote – served as a critical part of the story. By the end of the first millennium CE, things from far-distant places were no longer just exotic but an integral part of an economy, in which far-­distant peoples were inextricably interlocked as never before. China, India and the world of Islam had made this relationship the very foundation of their cultural and civilizational existence. In other words, luxury should not be understood as something fueled simply by the arbitrary extravagances of the elite. Yes, rice, grain, lumber and stones, the heavy, cumbersome building blocks of urban societies, were being transported from here to there, but just as importantly, greasing the entire system was the dynamic flow of luxury items coming from shores far distant from their eventual destination.

64  “The Most Outlying Lands”

Notes 1 Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 265. 2 Condensed from: Himanshu Prabha Ray, “Early Maritime Contacts between South and Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (March 1989): 42–54 (especially 43, 45, 46). 3 Homa Sarshar, Terua: The History of Contemporary Iranian Jews (Beverly Hills, CA: Center for Iranian Jewish Oral History, 1996), 223; See also David Whitehouse, “Siraf, a Legendary Ancient Port,” https://web.archive.org/ web/20070820061341/http://www.chnpress.com/news/?section=2&id=5938 4 Adapted from Guy Le Strange, Description of the Province of Fars in Persia (London: Asiatic Society Monograph 14, 1912), quoted in David Whitehouse, “Maritime Trade in the Gulf: The 11th and 12th Centuries,” World Archaeology 14, no. 3 (February 1983), 328. 5 Arnold Talbot Wilson, The Persian Gulf, 3rd imprint (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959), 98, 99. 6 Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 181. 7 Ibid. 8 Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (New York: Continuum, 2010), 48–50. 9 N. S. Ramaswami, 2000 Years of Mamallapuram (New Delhi: Navrang, 1989), 292, 293. 10 Silappadikaram, I,v, lines 18–20, translated by Kanakalatha Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: Evolution of Merchant Capitalism in the Coromandel (Chennai: Orient Longman, 1999), 19. 11 Mudaliyar C. Rasanayagam, Ancient Jaffna: Being a Research into the History of Jaffna from Very Early Times to the Portuguese Period (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 2003), 109, 110. 12 Ilango Adigal, The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India, trans. R. Pathasarathy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135, 136. 13 Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 63. 14 Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Translated from the Spanish by Henry E. J. Stanley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), 147. 15 John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (New York: Grove Press, 2010), 51. 16 E. C. Ross, “The Annals of Oman, from Early Times to the year 1728 AD. From an Arabic MS by Sheykh Sirhan bin Sa-id bin Sirhan bin Muhammad, of the Banu Ali tribe of Oman,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 1 (1874): 119, 120. 17 George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 41. See also V. K. Jain, “The Role of the Arab Trades in Western India During Early Medieval Period,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 39, no. 1 (1978): 285–295; Angela Schottenhammer and 蕭婦, China’s Gate to the Indian Ocean: Iranian and Arab Long-Distance Traders,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 76, no. 1/2 (June–Dec. 2016): 135–179. 18 Thomas M. Ricks, “Persian Gulf Seafaring and East Africa: Ninth-Twelfth Centuries,” African Historical Studies 3, no. 2 (1970): 339–357, 343. 19 Dawood C. M. Ting, “Islamic Culture in China,” in Islam – The Straight Path: Islam Interpreted by Muslims, ed. W. Kenneth, 234–274 (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1958), 346. 20 Anya H. King, Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 141.

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21 Ibid., 297. 22 Nathalie Bazin, “Fragrant Ritual Offerings in the Art of Tibetan Buddhism,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 1 (January 2013), 33. 23 Ibid., 286, 287. 24 Ibid., 162. 25 “How Musk Is Made,” The China Review 9, no. 4 (1881): 253, 254. 26 For discussion, see Victor Lieberman, “Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, ca. 1350-ca.1830,” Modern Asian Studies, 27, no. 3 (July 1993): 475–572. 27 Corneille Jest, “Valeurs d’échange en Himalaya et au Tibet: Le amber et le musc,” De la voûte céleste au terroir, du jardin au foyer: Mosaïque sociographique: textes offerts à Lucien Bernot (Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1987), 231. 28 “Yemen fishermen find $1.5m of ambergris in the belly of a whale” BBC 1 June 2021. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-57288265 29 T.M. Scrinivasan, “Ambergis in Perfumery in the Past and Present Indian Context and the Western World,” Indian Journal of History of Science 50, no. 2 (2015): 311. 30 Ibid., 308. 31 E. B. Bovill, Caravans of the Old Sahara (London: Routledge, 1933), 26. 32 The travels of Marco Polo Translated by William Marsden (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 425. 33 Abū Zayd Ḥasan ibn Yazīd Sīrāfī, Sulaymān al-Tājir, Ancient Accounts of India and China, translated from the Arabic by Eusebius Renaudot (London, 1733: AES Reprint 1995), 3: 1–2. The text is thought to date to 851 and is ascribed to Soleiman al-Tajir, Soloman the Merchant, who seems to have been a citizen of Siraf. See Suhanna Shafiq, Seafarers of the Seven Seas: The Maritime Culture in the Kitāb ‘Ajā’ib al-Hind (The book of the marvels of India) by Buzurg Ibn Shahriyār (d. 399/1009) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2013), 23, 24. 34 Francois Pyard, The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, v.1 (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1887), 273. For simplification, I rounded the figures. 35 Ibid., 145. 36 Fred W. Clothey, The Many Faces of Murukan: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God (New Delhi: Pvt Ltd., 1978), 37. 37 Masʿudi, Moruj al-ḏahab wa maʿāden al-jawhar, ed. and trans. Barbier de Menard and Pavet de Courteille as Les prairies d’or, 9 vols. Paris 1861–1877, tr. revised by Charles Pellat I, 308 par. 623. 38 Jan O. M. Broek, “Place Names in 16th and 17th Century Borneo,” Imago Mundi 16 (1962): 130. 39 Edwin Herbert Gomes, Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo: A Record of Intimate Association with the Natives of the Bornean Jungles (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1911), 239. 40 “The Camphor Industry,” Meyer Brothers Druggist 22, no. 2 (1901): 51. 41 Friedrich Hirth, “Contribution to the History of the Oriental Trade During the Middle Ages,” The China Review 18 (1889–1890): 318. 42 Gomes, Seventeen Years Among the Sea Dyaks of Borneo, 238. 43 Ibid. 44 Chase-Dunn and Hall develop a schema for spatially bounding regional world systems, in which smaller bulk goods networks (BGNs) are contained within larger political-military networks (PMNs) that involve prestige goods networks (PGNs) and information networks (INs). They also posit the hypothetical pulsation of BGNs, PMNs, PGNs and INs. By this, they mean that the spatial scale of interaction increases and then decreases at each of these network levels. See Christopher Chase-Dunn, E. Susan Manning, and Thomas D. Hall, “Rise and Fall: East-West Synchronicity and Indic Exceptionalism Reexamined,” Social Science History 24, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 729.

2 THE SRI LANKA WEALTH RUSH

The Islamic Arabs of the eighth century did not create the economic sweet spot that they came to control. They were riding the coattails of an earlier formation, one that had its origins in South India and Sri Lanka. Compared to the urbanization of the Ganges Plain, which has roots that date back 3,000 years and is even linked to the great early cities of the Indus Valley civilization that date to the sixth millennium BCE, the economic and urban development of South India and of Sri Lanka is a story that only starts at the beginning of the long first millennium CE. Because it comes so late to the so-called “history of cities,” books that deal with that history often do not mention South India at all.1 And yet, it is in this part of the world that we see the first expansive and dynamic sweet spot system and so it is here that the history of the “global” world really begins. It is no coincidence that the earliest ruling families in the south or “crowned kings” (Vendar), as they are described in early Tamil literature, emerged in the context of the fertile agricultural tracts of the major river valleys.2 But there was a difference between north India and South India. The civilizations of the Ganges, with the nearby Himalayan forests, were rich in lumber, stone and copper. Rice and sugarcane were grown along the Ganges and cotton in the black soils of the areas to the south of the Ganges. These crops were foundational to the kingdoms that controlled their production, such as the Chalukas, the Gupta and others. South India had a very different profile. The lush tropical evergreen forests of India’s southwest coast – the Malabar Coast – was the natural habitat of black pepper. Unlike rice, cotton and sugar, pepper trees required almost no farming and no complicated postharvesting production. Stated simply, rice, cotton and sugar required a vast overhead of expenditure, a complex set of craft industries and protections; pepper, almost none. DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-8

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FIGURE 2.2.1 

Cinnamonum verum. Credit: H.Zell/Wikimedia Commons.

Sri Lanka, in particular, was the center of easy money. Take, for example, cinnamon, the bark of a tree that grows on the slopes of Sri Lankan mountains. Today, cinnamon is so cheap that one can forget that it was one of several luxury items that were worth much more than gold. It was used not just in cooking but also in Hindu rituals, and had been brought up into Vedic heartlands for such purposes already in the first millennium BCE. There is a reason Sri Lankan cinnamon is still called Cinnamomum verum, true cinnamon, to differentiate it from all the pretenders that carry the name. In the markets of Rome, according to Pliny, writing at the start of the first century CE, frankincense sold from between three and six denarii a pound; myrrh at 16 denarii for a pound; a pound of long pepper for 15; and an astonishing 1,500 denarii for a pound of cinnamon!3 If a denarius would pay for a skilled laborer for one day, a single pound of cinnamon would pay for the construction of a small house in the countryside!4 According to Pliny (Figure 2.2.1): The Emperor Vespasianus Augustus was the first to dedicate in the temples of the Capitol and the goddess Peace chaplets of cinnamon inserted in embossed gold. I, myself, once saw in the temple of the Palatium, which his wife Augusta dedicated to her husband the late emperor Augustus, a root of cinnamon of great weight, placed in a patera of gold: from it drops used to distil every year, which congealed in hard grains. It remained there until the temple was accidentally destroyed by fire.5 Cinnamon was only one item in a long list on Sri Lanka’s export portfolio. From river deposits that are still mined today, one finds sapphires, rubies, cat’s-eyes, spinels, garnets, beryls, tourmalines, topaz and quartz in gravels that the locals call illam. Ibn Battuta, visiting Sri Lanka in the fourteenth century, describes a lake near the mountain town of Gampola that was called the Lake of Rubies, “because rubies are found in it.”6 It is unlikely that they

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FIGURE 2.2.2 

Gem mining in contemporary Sri Lanka.

would be found in the lake itself, but rather along the shores of the streams leading into it, as is still done today. Another mineral that is found in the Sri Lankan highlands is the hard red mineral known as corundum. It was not just used as a gem, but also on construction sites and by artisans as an abrasive to polish granite and other stones. Add to that, pearls from Sri Lanka’s western shores – thought to be the best in all of Southeast Asia – and it is clear that Sri Lanka in the early part of the first millennium CE was a place like none other on the planet (Figure 2.2.2)! When the Buddhists arrived in Sri Lanka in the third century BCE with great fanfare, it was not simply because they were looking for a safe haven to practice their religion. They brought with them an entire technologicalcivilizational package intent on mastering and managing the island’s wealth potential. The island was, however, not uninhabited. On the contrary, it was the site of several ancient chieftain cultures who were already busy developing the trade economy. But it was certainly not controlled by a hegemony.7 The new arrivals changed that. Like the colonialists arriving in New England, who came not just with the necessary tools to manage the land, but also with table settings, furniture, pictures and, of course, religion, the new arrivals in Sri Lanka brought a similarly expansive package, including a sacred sapling from the original Bodhi tree. It was ceremoniously installed at Anuradhapura, the new capital city. It was not a city in the modern sense, but an expansive palace monastery enclave. It was where the economic and theological were brought into magical unity (Figure 2.2.3). All that was needed was a rice cultivation zone which could be placed in the flatter, northern part of the island. The problem was that this area had no major rivers and was arid because the mountains to the south diverted the winds. Agriculture was, therefore, not natural to the land. Legions of ­engineers – not to mention enslaved or indentured locals as laborers helped by the convenient exploitation of native elephants – set to work to lay out complex water management systems, in which small rivers were dammed

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FIGURE 2.2.3 Jaya

Sri Maha Bodhi, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka. Credit: Balou46/ Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 2.2.4 

The banks of Tissa Wewa, Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka/Alamy.

to make lakes that, in turn, fed nearby rice paddy zones. The system had already been used at Sanchi and other Buddhist places, and indeed the association between Buddhism, rice cultivation and water management was a long-standing one. But such efforts on the Indian subcontinent paled in comparison to what transpired in Sri Lanka. There, the village tank system was already a well-established feature. But the newcomers took full advantage of the uneven topography of the northern part of the island to close gaps between ridges to dam rivers at higher levels and to direct the water along canals to irrigate fields. They transformed streams into catenated holding

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lakes, each larger than the next. Some of these lakes stretched several kilometers across. They were certainly the largest in the world at the time and are still impressive to this day (Figure 2.2.4). The kingdomization of Sri Lanka was a devotional hydrological enterprise aimed at imposing its will on the land so as to master the extractional potential of the island. That Anuradhapura was located at the very center of this operation is no accident. Its sacred Bodhi tree pronounced it as a cosmological fixed point, as heaven on earth. Every dyke, in fact, was associated with a small stupa. It reinforced the theological equation of rice, engineering and management. Though the new kingdom that was created at Anuradhapura is called a Buddhist one, it was only in more recent centuries that Buddhism began to work its way up into the mountain regions. During the first millennium CE, the Buddhist elites had to live with and negotiate with the animist locals. The situation would have been somewhat similar to what one finds today in Myanmar. There, even today, the further one goes upstream, the more “animist” the world becomes. In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, rice played a critical role in smoothing over that difference. It was not just a food staple, as we might consider it today, but first and foremost a sacred commodity used by the elites to ritually feed the monks. The locals mainly ate easy-to-grow, unirrigated millet. As a valuable spirit world commodity, rice had another purpose. It was used in the upstream trade with the hill people, who were doing the work of extracting the gems from the quick-flowing mountain streams and who incorporated rice into their diet and devotional practices. They held the mountains to be especially sacred, but all we know in that regard is that the mountains were inhabited by a set of “spirits that come and go,” as tersely explained by the seventh-century Buddhist monk and traveler, Hiuen Tsiang, who was obviously more interested in Sri Lankan Buddhism than ancient village animism.8 These spirits certainly needed ritual maintenance for the rubies to be properly accessed. The more rice, the more gems, and the less reliant the hill people were on their traditional, forest-based cuisine. In other words, the elites of Anuradhapura did not need weapons to control the hill people. Rice, trade and prestige-making were the basic instruments of extraction. Ratnapura (“Gem City”) on the western flank of Sri Pada (Adam’s Peak) is still today the center of a major gem mining area. There, one will find a temple dedicated to Saman (“Good Minded”), the guardian deity of the mountain and of the hill country in general. Though this temple (a reconstruction of the one that the Portuguese destroyed) is thought to date to the thirteenth century, textual references link it to the age of Anuradhapura.9 It is not hard to imagine this Buddhification of an ancient animist shrine as marking the alliance between rice producers and forest suppliers. As for the pearls, the issue was not the physical difficulty of diving. It was the sharks. A colonial era English observer noted that divers in Sri Lanka were assisted by two shark-charmers, one on the boat and another on shore.

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FIGURE 2.2.5 A

Sri Lankan pearl merchant, photographed in the nineteenth century (1849, Volume VI).

The man on the shore stays by himself in an enclosed room with a brass basin full of water before him in which there are two silver fish. The one on the boat can take more immediate action if called for.10 Apart from such observations, made to enhance the romance of an alien culture rather than contribute to a deeper understanding, there is remarkably little information. We do know, however, from the chronicles of Hiuen Tsiang that the king went every year to the pearl fisheries to perform special rites “during which the spirits present him with rare and valuable objects” (Figure 2.2.5).11 Perhaps a parallel can be drawn from Indonesia, where until recently pearl divers existed in a drawn-out dependent relationship with the Islamic traders who own the boats as well as the stores in the villages. When the men who dove from the boats returned to the shore, their wives tallied the findings and served as accountant-intermediaries in the trade. The wives demanded sacrifices from their diver-husbands: betel, bits of tobacco and especially storebought white plates. The plates were then given as “gifts” to the sea deities. The pure white plates still lie at the bottom of the sea or in the weather-worn niches that dot the sandstone cliffs on which many villages are built.12 It is hard to know if this system applies to Sri Lanka, but it is certainly in line with ancient practices, meaning that for the whole system to work, there had to be a handy supply of Chinese porcelain, brought by the Arab traders just for that purpose. Another export that developed was the areca nut – not a nut but the seed of the areca palm – which when chewed with betel leaf is known as mild stimulant, causing a warming sensation in the body and slightly heightened alertness. Thought to have originated in the Philippines, it moved its way westward, and by the early first millennium had become common practice among the affluent in India and Sri Lanka. Kings had special attendants whose duty it was to carry a box with all the necessary ingredients for a good chewing session. There was also a custom for lovers to chew areca nut and betel

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leaf together because of its breath-freshening and relaxant properties. The areca nut was seen as representing the male principle and the betel leaf the female principle. It came to be considered an auspicious ingredient not only in Hinduism but also in some schools of Buddhism, much like musk for Islam. Early traders to Sri Lanka noted that it had been a source, but it is not known if it was grown there or if it was a collecting point from eastern traders.13 Just as most of the items in – or transiting – Sri Lanka did not require ­complex outlay of labor, they also did not require complex outlays in transportation infrastructure. This was a critical and underappreciated element to the success of the system. A bag of gems or cinnamon could easily be transported on the backs of local laborers. Pliny the Elder noted that pepper was carried down the rivers in boats hollowed out of a single tree. From the shore, small catamarans (sangara) requiring only a few sailors brought the goods to the larger ports.14 English Colonel W. Campbell wrote in 1864 that (Figure 2.2.6): Of all the extraordinary craft which the ingenuity of man has ever invented, a Madras catamaran is the most extraordinary, the most simple, and yet, in proper hands, the most efficient. It is merely three rough logs of wood, firmly lashed together with ropes formed from the inner bark of the cocoanut tree. Upon this one, two, or three men, according to the size of the catamaran, sit on their heels in a kneeling posture, and, defying wind and weather, make their way through the raging surf which beats upon the coast, and paddle out to sea at times when no other craft can venture to face it.15 The fact that elaborate roads, bridges and docks were not needed meant that these types of infrastructures, often seen as the icons of civilization, were unnecessary. Southeast Asian boats could easily pull up on a sandy beach.

FIGURE 2.2.6 

A Tamil Catamaran. Image courtesy of the British Library/Granger.

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Sri Lankan “ports” were, in fact, mostly convenient sandy beaches. One such port survived into the modern era. It was known as Dobbo, in the Aru archipelago. Approximately 500 traders from all over gathered there annually to set up shop and exchange iron tools and cloth for pearls and feathers of the bird of paradise. Once exchanges were made, the traders bundled up their goods, got into their canoes and boats and departed. Within a week, the entire beach lay deserted again.16 Southeast Asian trade was governed by the swarm effect; the English colonialists called them “mosquito fleets.” There were, of course, larger boats, but even these were far different from a Chinese trade vessel. A bolt of silk weighed 30 pounds. The bronze and porcelain were similarly heavy and bulky. Chinese ships, once they came to be developed, were therefore huge and expensive and needed a complex system of docks and warehouses. Entering the waters of Southeast Asia meant that they had to remain outside the harbors with local skiffs shuttling goods back and forth. Unfortunately, history books tend to focus on the impressive size of the Chinese ships and their technological advancements and so miss the obvious. Southeast Asian extraction and shipping was organized to be nimble. With extraction and transportation costs low, profit margins were huge.17 Putting all of this together is a passage from a sixth-century trader’s account that reads: Sri Lanka “being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by ships from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia, and it likewise sends out many of its own,” noting also: And from the remotest countries, I mean Tzinista and other trading places, it receives silk, aloes, cloves, sandalwood and other products, and these again are passed on to marts on this side, such as Mále, [the Malabar coast] pepper grows, and to Calliana [now Kalyâna, near Bombay] which exports copper and sesame- logs and cloth for making dresses, for it also is a great place of business. And to Sindu also where musk and castor is produced and and ristachys (a kind of spikenard), and to Persia and the Homerite country, and to Adulis. And the island receives imports from all these marts which we have mentioned and passes them on to the remoter ports, while at the same time, exporting its own produce in both directions.18 A commodity of particular importance was elephants, not because of ivory, but the animals themsleves.19 Unlike the animals in North Africa that were eventually slaughtered into oblivion, elephants in India and Sri Lanka were usually afforded protection by royal decree. Some were treated as divine and fed from golden goblets. The penalty for killing one was death. They were an important export from Sri Lanka. Palace elites throughout Southeast Asia used them for ceremonial occasions and royal gifts. Sri Lankan elephants were also considered better as war elephants than those from the mainland.

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FIGURE 2.2.7 

Royal white elephant at the Grand Palace, ca. 1925.

One document tells us that one kingdom in India deployed 60,000 foot ­soldiers, 1,000 horsemen and 700 elephants (Figure 2.2.7).20 Elephants were also used extensively for construction projects. Pasturing, herding and training elephants was an extensive operation. To facilitate their export, Sri Lankans even designed special boats. They also exported trainers, for unlike horses, elephants can be ridden only by specific individuals who nurture their relationship over a lifetime.21 It is impossible to know the impact of elephant sales on the Sri Lankan kingdoms, but it was not negligible. The success of Sri Lanka and of the South Asian economy in general was perfectly timed to embrace the astonishing escalation of demand that came from the Mediterranean world. Admittedly, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and the Roman Republic all had their elites and all participated in the development of luxury networks, but nothing quite compared to the first centuries of the Roman Empire. With the restoration of peace to the Mediterranean by Emperor Augustus (31 BCE to 14 CE), communications were improved, and a general prosperity developed that stimulated an increased demand for foreign-derived luxuries in Rome. In fact, the whole period of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors stretching to the end of the first century CE was a golden age for Greco-Roman commerce. Strabo (63 BCE to c. 24 CE) reports that no fewer than 120 ships were sailing in a single year to India, but that number soon increased, since in the middle of the first century, navigators – who were mostly Greek not Roman – finally figured out the secrets of the monsoon allowing them to cross directly to South India. The Roman annexation of Egypt and of Petra shortened the routes even further. This shrinking of the globe has to be contextualized with the fortuitous rise of a culture of conspicuous consumption in Rome. Pliny famously described a senior member of the Roman nobility, Lollia Paulina, arriving at an event:

The Sri Lanka Wealth Rush  75

covered with emeralds and pearls, which shone in alternate layers upon her head, in her hair, in her wreaths, in her ears, upon her neck, in her bracelets, and on her fingers, and the value of which amounted in all to forty millions of sesterces. To this, he added sarcastically that “she was prepared at once to prove the fact by showing the receipts and acquittances.”22 Pliny the Younger’s fortune was valued at 20 million sesterces, which made him one of the richest men in Rome, so 40 million, even if exaggerated for rhetorical effect, was certainly a considerable amount for a single garment. Though extreme, the display of pearls, diamonds, rubies and ivory was de rigueur among the Roman nobility not only on their person, but in their furniture and architecture. Roman men, who during an earlier era only wore a wedding ring, now sometimes wore gem-studded rings on each knuckle. At play was not just ostentation. The Roman economy was directly tied to the taxes on imports. In fact, an astonishing two-thirds of the treasury of Emperor Tiberius (reigning 14 CE to 37), according to one researcher, derived just from the trade with India.23 The more imports, the more potential revenue for the state, the more could be spent on its army and infrastructure. By way of comparison, tax revenue in China was mainly generated from agriculture, and even though the economy of China was significantly larger than that of Rome, luxury items were not looked upon until later in the millennium as economically foundational. In other words, the Roman empire had a vested interest not just in trade, but in driving the ethos of conspicuous consumption. Ostentatious display of wealth was not just a declaration of social status and power, but also of a person’s or family’s participation in the success and legitimacy of the empire. Another factor influencing Roman-Indian trade was the use of gold mined from eastern Europe and Spain as one of Rome’s primary exchange commodities, which was convenient for India, since India had few native gold resources apart from the Hutti mine near Madras (now Chennai) which seems to have begun to be worked in the first century CE until the sixth century. Gold had a wide variety of pulls – from the spiritual to the monetary. In Hindu mythology, the universe was born from a golden embryo, Hiraṇyagarbha. So much gold was leaving Rome that Pliny famously complained that the Roman Empire was being drained of its currency.24 “India, China and the Arabian Peninsula take one hundred million sesterces from our empire per annum at a conservative estimate: that is what our luxuries and women cost us.”25 Even though the Roman Empire was a huge draw, one should not ­overlook the societies of the Near East, the Sassanian Empire in particular, which themselves had a significant demand for spiced woods and precious stones. They were particularly responsible for the expansion of the taste for sugar.26 Their trade imbalance with India was most often met not with gold but with

76  The Sri Lanka Wealth Rush

silver, mined in the northeastern areas of Iran, in the Pamir Mountains and in the mines of Čāč (Tashkent), often finely worked in vessels and goblets. Taking all of this into consideration helps explain why after only about 200 years from Anuradhapura’s founding, its kings had become possibly some of the richest men in South Asia. Around 140 BCE, King Dutugemunu used his wealth to commission a stupa, the Ruwanweli Maha Seya, in Anuradhapura.27 The building is hardly mentioned in history books. There are after all many stupas the world over. But the ancient stupa at Sanchi in India that it copied had by that time probably fallen into disrepair. There was no site that could claim to be the center of Buddhist spirituality. This stupa was intended to proclaim that – and in no uncertain terms. Nor was it just a copy. It was the largest ever conceived, but more importantly, it was a demonstration piece of extravagance, an example of what we today call the Bilbao Effect. When the Guggenheim Museum brought in Frank Gehry to design a showstopper building with curved titanium skin, it was meant to transform an otherwise unremarkable city into a global destination place. The Ruwanweli Maha Seya had the same purpose. It elevated Anuradhapura into the ultimate “destination spot” for Buddhist devotees. As recorded in the Mahavamsa or “Great Chronicle,” its opening ceremony was one of the great spectacles of the time. In the fifth century CE, a Buddhist monk wrote down descriptions not just of these events, but of the construction as well. Funding, so it is described, appeared in the form of divine gifts emerging directly from the land. Economy and cosmology were intertwined (Figure 2.2.8):

FIGURE 2.2.8 

The Ruwanwelisaya in Sri Lanka/Alamy.

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In a north-easterly direction from the city, at a distance of three yojanas [1 yojana = 12–15 km.], and near Acaravitthigama, on a plain covering sixteen karisas (of land) there appeared nuggets of gold of different sizes; the greatest measured a span, the least were of a finger’s measure. When the dwellers in the village saw the earth full of gold, they put some of it into a gold vessel and went and told the king of this matter. On the east side of the city, at a distance of seven yojanas, on the further bank of the river and near Tambapittha, copper appeared. And the dwellers in the village there put the nuggets of copper into a vessel, and when they had sought the king they told him this matter. In a south-easterly direction from the city, four yojanas distant near the village of Sumanavapi many precious stones appeared. The dwellers in the village put them, mingled with sapphires and rubies, into a vessel and went and showed them to the king.28 Though certainly purposefully mythologized, the point of the narrative was to emphasize the effortlessness of the funding. The building was cosmologically ordained, the earth freely giving up its wealth. The text goes to describe how the designers then used this wealth to procure important building materials from distant places: The fine clay that is to be found on the spot, forever moist, where the ­ eavenly Ganga falls down (upon the earth) (on a space) thirty yojanas h around, is called because of its fineness, `butter-clay.’ Samaneras [a novice male monk] who had overcome the asavas [bodily cravings], brought the clay hither from that place [the Himalayas]. The king commanded that the clay be spread over the layer of stones and that bricks then be laid over the clay, over these a rough cement and over this cinnabar, and over this a network of iron, and over this sweet-scented marimba (a type of sand) that was brought by the samaneras from the Himalaya. Over this did the lord of the land command them to lay mountain-crystal. Over the layer of mountain-crystal he had stones spread; everywhere throughout the work did the clay called butter-clay serve (as cement). With resin of the kapittha tree [Limonia acidissima] dissolved in sweetened water, the lord of chariots laid over the stones a sheet of copper eight inches thick, and over this, with arsenic dissolved in sesamum-oil, (he laid) a sheet of silver seven inches thick.29 The exotic sands and clays were brought from the Himalayas on ships by monks who also probably brought the arsenic; the rock crystals were probably imported from the Chola who controlled the Kaveri River in South India, which was home to rock crystal mines in the highland areas of the modernday Erode district. The silver was also imported, perhaps from Persia. All that just for the foundations that no one will ever see.

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One should not assume that this is all some hyperbole. Even if it were half true, the point is that the wealth of Sri Lanka which derived from among other things its gem, pearl and cinnamon export is directly tied to the symbolic and spiritual meaning of the building. The Sri Lankan elites advertised thus by recording the history of the building. The text is one of the most significant descriptions of a building and its construction in the history of architecture and certainly has few equals until the modern age. The designers did not even hesitate to use the building itself to advertise the source of their wealth, placing a rather imposingly sized ruby on top of the stupa. Why not?: In this island they have many temples, and on one, which stands on an eminence, there is a hyacinth [ruby] as large as a great pine-cone, fiery red, and when seen flashing from a distance, especially if the sun’s rays are playing round it, a matchless sight.30 The seventh-century Chinese voyager, Hiuen Tsang (Xuanzang), confirms this when he arrived at Charitra port on the eastern coast of India on his way to Sri Lanka. The red lights that could be seen glimmering in the evening sky of the coast were explained in this way: In the still night, looking far off, we see the surmounting precious stone of the tooth-stupa of Buddha brilliantly shining and scintillating as a bright torch burning in the air.31 The Ruwanweli Maha Seya was designed as a show-off piece and was the first building in the South and Southeast Asia by an upstart kingdom with that purpose in mind. Compare Anuradhapura with its extensive stupa landscape, extravagant palaces and water tank systems with Pataliputra, the capital city of the Maurya Empire that controlled the vast wealth of the Ganges plain, considered to be one of the “golden age” of Indian history. Its rulers were successful conquerors and patrons of the arts, education and philosophy. But Pataliputra was built almost completely out of wood and thatch. Nothing at all remains, except some post holes discovered in the suburbs of modern-day Patna. The Gupta did, of course, invest in architecture, as in the exquisite, rock-cut cave shrines and Buddhist stupas, but these were remote from the capital; and so when it came to the singular, bold gesture that put theology, politics, economy and engineering all in one place, nothing could compare anywhere in Southeast Asia to the efforts of the newly rich kingdom of Anuradhapura. Sri Lankan affluence had always been the stuff of legends. In the famous Ramayana, an ancient Hindu mythological story, Rama, the ruler of the universe, tries to win back his wife who was abducted by the king of Lanka, assumed to be Sri Lanka. The island is described as prosperous and wealthy.

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Gold, silver, gems and pearls are abundant. Even the ramparts and archways are golden, along with the columns of the palaces and chairs and vessels. The palaces are ornamented with pearls and gemstones. An entire passage is dedicated to the abundance of precious stones. The rulers of Anduradhapura certainly reveled in their mythological status. Architecture as part of a culture of conspicuous expenditure was still going strong in the fifth century CE, when Kashyapa I (ruled 477 to 495 CE), following a period of political turmoil, built a palace to protect himself from a possible invasion. Known as Sigiriya, it was certainly extravagant. It was built on top of a 180 meters high rock that was about 200 meters long and about 70 meters wide. There were an assortment of pleasure pools, residences and audience chambers. Around the rock on the valley floor were extensive gardens with fountains, paths and artificial islands, and in the valley itself, vast stretches of specially constructed, well-irrigated rice paddies. The sides of the rock face were stuccoed white and decorated with colorful frescoes showing several hundred, joyful topless women showering flowers upon the people below. Probably celestial nymphs, they were visible from the valley far and wide, meaning that what one saw from afar was the physical embodiment of a cloud/mountain abode of divine beings. The whole was inspired by and grounded in the mythological place called Alakamanda, an imagined Buddhist city of great wealth situated in the clouds. Sigiriya was nothing less than Alakamanda as a real/fictional place, designed from the start as a showstopper. Nothing could compare in its scale, in the ingenuity of its placement, in the integration of gardens and in the display of wealth to anything built anywhere in the world at that time. Today, the stucco is mostly gone and as for the celestial nymphs, only a few square meters of this once awe-inducing sight have survived, covered by a modesty wall that was constructed by the Buddhists who took over the site when it was abandoned (Figures 2.2.9 and 2.2.10).

FIGURE 2.2.9 

Sigiriya, Sri Lanka. Credit: Wrobell/Wikimedia Commons.

80  The Sri Lanka Wealth Rush

FIGURE 2.2.10 

Sigiriya fresco. Credit: hadynyah/iStock.com.

Notes 1 There is no mention, for example, in Aidan Southall, The City in Time and Space (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 In South India, the first cities were port cities associated with riverine chiefdoms that developed largely because of maritime trade. The processes are usually seen as spanning the period from 600 BCE to 300 CE, but this depends greatly not just on location, but also on what is meant by the word urbanization. In this book, I am not interested in when the first cities appeared, since one can easily fall into the trap that “urbanization” was a one-way street to modernity. In all sweet spots, one found a complex intertwining of palaces, “cities,” villages and hamlets, sacred landscapes of various dimensions, not to mention a complex interblending of forest people with agriculturalists and power elites. We should be talking less about when urbanization begins than about when palace-based elites begin to form. There is no adequate scholarly concept to describe this. 3 Pliny, Natural History, 12. 4 A common soldier under Augustus and Tiberius (ca. 15 AD) made about 10 asses per day, which was a bit less than one denarius. 5 Pliny, Natural History, 42. 6 Ibn Battúta, The Travels, 152. 7 Sri Lanka’s early chiefdoms were obviously trading with Indian merchants from early on, as a horse burial from the fourth century BCE proves. Horses would have constituted as a prestige gift to a local chief. See M. Prickett-Fernando, “Sri Lanka’s Foreign Trade before CE 600: Archaeological Evidence,” Asian Panorama: Essays in Asian History, Past and Present (151–180), (New Deli, Vikas Publication, 1990), 163. 8 Si-Yu-Ki Buddhist Records of the Western World, Translated from the Chinee of Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 629), Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1884), 251. 9 The Portuguese landed in Sri Lanka in 1505 and destroyed and looted several temples, including Delgamuwa Raja Maha Viharaya, Ratnapura Maha Saman Devalaya. Later, King Keerthi Sri Rajasinghe (1747–1781) of Kandyan Kingdom recaptured Ratnapura, destroyed the church and the Portuguese Fort at Ratnapura and built the current temple on the site. 10 Anonymous, The Cinnamon Island and Its Captives (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1885), 23. 11 Si-Yu-Ki Buddhist Records, Ibid. 12 Patricia Spyer, “The Eroticism of Debt: Pearl Divers, Traders, and Sea Wives in the Aru Islands, Eastern Indonesia,” American Ethnologist 24, no. 3 (August 1997): 524, 525.

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13 Thomas J. Zumbroich, “The Origin and Diffusion of Betel Chewing: A Synthesis of Evidence from South Asia, Southeast Asia and Beyond,” eJournal of Indian Medicine 1 (2007–2008): 117. 14 William Vincent, The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean 2 (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1807), 717. 15 Edgar Thurston, “Castes and Tribes of Southern India,” Vol. 6, 278. 16 A. R. Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (London: Macmillan, 1869), 335, 336. 17 Even into the nineteenth century, cinnamon for the European market was “collected in the woods by the natives employed in the Dutch service” and only recently planted in plantations closer to the shores. See William Vincent, The Commerce and Navigation of the Ancients in the Indian Ocean, Vol. 2 (1807), 715. 18 Cosmas Indicopleustes, Christian Topography, trans. J. W. McCrindle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 336. There is some debate as to whether this describes Sri Lanka or not. I am relying on Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500–1000 (Cairo: The American University of Cairo Press, 2012), 59. 19 Ivory was important as well, but was not a major export commodity to Rome. In the third century, so much ivory was coming into that city from north African herds that Emperor Diocletian (ca. 245–312 CE) sought to curb its inflation with his Edict of Maximum Prices in 301 CE, which fixed ivory at one-fortieth the price per weight of silver (pure silk was 24 times pricier!). 20 Megasthenes fragm. LVI. in Pliny Historia Naturae VI. 21. 8–23. 11. 21 Randi Haaland, “The Meroitic Empire: Trade and Cultural Influences in an Indian Ocean Context,” The African Archaeological Review 31, no. 4 (December 2014): 662. 22 Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturae, 9.58. For a discussion of conspicuous consumption by the Roman elite, see Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 179. 23 C. G. F. Simkin, The Traditional Trade of Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 45. 24 George F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 28, 29. 25 Pliny, Historia Naturae 12.41.84. 26 A. M Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 160 (note 11). 27 The original stupa was somewhat smaller than what we see today. Subsequent ­rulers added new layers, so that it now has a circumference of 290 meters (951 feet) and a height of about 90 meters. 28 Mahavamsa: The Obtaining of the Wherewithal to build the Great Thupa, Translated from Pali by Wilhelm Geiger (Colombo, Ceylon Government Information Dept., 1912). http://lakdiva.org/mahavamsa/chap028.htm. 29 Mahavamsa: The Beginning of the Great Thupa. http://lakdiva.org/mahavamsa/ chap029.html. 30 Ibid. Marco Polo relates that the king of Ceylon was reputed to have the ­grandest ruby that ever was seen – one that was flawless and brilliant beyond description. “It is most probable,” says Tennent, “that the stone described by Marco Polo was not a ruby but an amethyst, which is found in large crystals in Ceylon, and which modern mineralogists believe to be the ‘hyacinth’ of the ancients.” See James Emerson Tennent, Ceylon, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1859), 543, 544. 31 Si-Yu-Ki Buddhist Records of the Western World, Translated from the Chinee of Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 629), Vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 1884), 206.

3 SOUTH INDIAN EMERGENCE

The transformation of Sri Lanka into a theologically grounded, luxury ­commodity extraction economy went hand in hand with the parallel emergence of chiefdoms in South India. Together, they formed the world’s first expansive and durable economic sweet spot. South India was governed by its own unique geography. There were five major rivers flowing east, each about 200 or so kilometers apart, with one flowing west. Unlike the Ganges River, which stretches some 700 miles inland with an alluvial plane some 200 miles across, these rivers have alluvial planes that stretch inland for only 50 miles or so before they meet the hills and mountains. This means that the relationship between the world of agriculture and the world of the hills is direct and intimate. Whereas in Sri Lanka the relationship of river and hill – which translates into a relationship between agriculture and extraction – had to be artificially created and maintained, here it came more easily, so to speak, in the form of small geographical increments where each river developed its own dynastic culture.1 From north to south these were the Andhra along the Krishna River, the Ceras along the Periyar River, the Chola along the Kaveri, the Pandyas along the Vaigai and Tamraparni and the Chera along the west flowing Periyar (Figures 2.3.1 and 2.3.2). Unlike the Ganges, which is rich in alluvial soils, most of South India is covered by red soils with high iron content. Though one can grow rice in red soil with the proper addition of fertilizer, it is best for red gram (pigeon pea), native to South India; flax, a winter crop that flourishes well in the peninsular region; castor seed, a hardy crop – which survives in a wide range of ­ecologies – which was brought to South India from East Africa at an early date; as well as jack, coconut, palm, areca and plantain trees. The advantage of these crops was that they have high nutritional value and are relatively DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-9

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FIGURE 2.3.1  Krishna

River, India. Credit: Rajaraman Sundaram/Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 2.3.2 

South India – Sri Lanka Sweet Spot.

easy to grow and process compared to rice. For that reason, the kingdoms in the south developed rice only in small areas and used it for specialized purposes, mainly ritual and trade, with the other crops serving more quotidian usages. Unlike in the Ganges, where rice was a surplus economy, rice in South India in the first millennium CE was a specialized commodity. The Krishna River, controlled by the Vakatakas and later by the Vengi, was probably the first to be developed as it was India’s prime source of diamonds. Though documents about mining along the Indian rivers from the first millennium are nonexistent, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, a seventeenth-­ century French gem merchant, traveled to India to research the mines and visited the famous works at Kollur in the great gorge cut by the river in the south of the former kingdom of Golconda, now part of the State of Hyderabad. He reported that there were 60,000 men, women and children at work on the banks of the river.2 Though the locations of the mines changed over the centuries, there can be no doubt that similarly scaled efforts were conducted

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in preceding centuries. Still today, after rainfalls, locals go to the shore in the hopes of finding something. On the west coast, the all-important pepper trade was controlled by the Chera chiefdoms. They, together with the Cholas to the east, made a fortune as middlemen to the goods from Sri Lanka, for down to the third quarter of the first century CE there was little direct communication between Rome and Sri Lanka. Instead of rounding Cape Comorin, the Romans – using ships captained mostly by Greeks – preferred the overland route from west to east from the Chera-dominated port of Kodungallur (then known as Muziris; Tamil: Muchiri), up the Periyar River, through the Palakkad Gap and down the Noyyal and Kaveri Rivers leading to a host of ports on the shore that brought in foreign goods like those of Sri Lanka (Figures 2.3.3 and 2.3.4).3 An important commodity was the conch which was extracted from the ocean bottom along the shores of South India. In ancient times, the Pandyan rulers who dominated the mouth of the Tamraparni River with their capital called Korkai controlled that trade. In the eighth century, because of silting, the capital was moved to Kayal. Though pearls might today be a more universally recognized luxury, this was no less true for conches in the premodern era. Among Hindus, the conch shell (Turbinella rapa) is said to bring all manner of blessings, particularly material wealth. It was – and still is – used as a musical instrument and is found in almost every Hindu temple. Associated with Vishnu and/or the goddess Lakshmi, in some village ceremonies its sound was associated with omens.4 It was used extensively in mortuary rituals and blown by a special class of musicians known as Sanku.5 Farmers used it as a protective ornament by suspending it around the necks of bullocks, and in Bengal in far-off north India, there was a particularly profitable trade in it since it was used as a lover’s gift.6 The shells were identified by their location of procurement and clients were highly knowledgeable

FIGURE 2.3.3 Unripened black pepper growing on a farm in Kerala, India. Credit:

Parin Parmar|Dreamstime.com.

South Indian Emergence  85

FIGURE 2.3.4 

The Chera/Chola interaction zone.

FIGURE 2.3.5 A Sadhu holy man blowing a conch shell on the banks of the Ganges

River. Credit: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

about which shell came from where and how they were to be valued. The rare right-handed shell – mirroring the motion of the sun, moon, planets and stars across the sky – was specially valued and was known in older times to cost “its weight in gold.”7 The shells appear on the coat of arms of the Raja of Cochin on the Malabar Coast in Kerala and on the coins of Travancore in southwest India (Figure 2.3.5).8

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The people responsible for conch harvesting were known as Parawa, which literally means “dwellers on seacoast.” They moved between different maritime occupations – fishing, pearling, conch shell diving and crewing in coastal trading craft depending on the season. Despite their humbleness, their value was known to the kings of Pandya.9 The Parawa were exempted from taxation and allowed to more or less govern themselves as subordinates in return for the produce extracted. Some Parawa rose to become important shippers and dealers in their own right.10 A good deal of the Chola wealth also came from its hinterland, the Colanadu. These “hilly areas” (kurinji tinai) were rich in pepper, aromatic woods and gems.11 Kodumanal, located 11 miles east of Tiruppur along the Noyyal River, a tributary of the Kaveri River, was not only a source of rock crystal that was exported to Rome and elsewhere, but also a bead-making center, specializing in beads from the locally mined quartz that were needed in particular for barter with the various hill tribes that traders encountered in their journeys. Padiyur, a few kilometers to the south, was known for beryl with a peculiar sea green tint that the Romans seemed to have valued. Sapphire was found in the hillocks of Sivannalai, a few miles then to the east with nearby Kangeyam serving as the cutting and processing center. Archaeologists in recent decades have begun to take a closer look at this and, indeed, excavations revealed an extensive regional industry.12 Furthermore, just to the north of the river, was an iron ore extraction site of special importance. Discovered only some 20 years ago, this particular ore possessed a unique impurity, vanadium, which is extremely rare in iron ores that changes the smelting process in such a way that it produced the strongest steel anywhere in the world until the modern era. Known as Wootz steel, or ferum indicum by the Romans, there are several ancient Tamil, Greek, Chinese and Roman literary references to high carbon Tamil steel. (The secret of Wootz steel was somehow taken by the Islamic Arabs who created similar forges in Damascus, where it came to be known in the European medieval period as Damascus steel.) The Chola also facilitated the North-South trade, becoming ­intermediaries, for example, with malabathrum – an ingredient in the fragrant oil called Oleum Malabathr. The Romans used it in large quantities for making unguents and as a flavoring for wine.13 Though the Romans knew that it originated in India, they did not know precisely where it came from or that it was the leaf of the particular type of cinnamon tree, its origin kept secret by its Indian intermediaries; not even the author of The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea knew its precise origins. We now know that the leaves (called tej patta in Nepali) were picked by a Tibeto-Burman mountain tribe, who once every year took the bundles of leaves in large packs to a trading post near the modern Gangtok in the Indian state of Sikkim. They left the bundles on mats, whereupon the leaves were silently taken up by another group, the Kirata, living in the southwest of Sikkim, who then prepared the leaves into

South Indian Emergence  87

balls of standard sizes and brought them down the Ganges to Tamralipti, a port at the mouth of the river (near modern-day Kolkata) for shipment. Tamralipti was an extremely busy place as it was one of the main ports where silk, pearls, nards and muslins were collected and transferred onto ships of various sizes. Intermixed with this cargo, the malabathrum was brought to the southern ports and acquired by foreign merchants, mainly Greeks, who then brought the leaves to Egypt, where they were made into oil and sold by imperial authority by merchants with special rights.14 During their most powerful period (ca. 1010–ca. 1150), the Chola u ­ nified the pepper and gem regions in the uplands with the conch regions to the south with the pearl fisheries in Sri Lanka with the trans-regional ­North-South, East-West trade. It is difficult to imagine the extraordinarily complexity of all this, much less to reconstruct the depth of the oral culture with all its ­powerful determinants that stabilized and mobilized the system. It was, of course, not without its military history. Chola King Parantaka I (907–955) is said to have “destroyed the Pandya king [to his south] together with his whole army, took all his wealth, and burnt his capital Madurai.”15 In 933, the Chola invaded Sri Lanka and for a while at least – controlling it for about 100 years – incorporated Anuradhapura into its kingdom.16 Uraiyur – the capital of the Chola and Mutharaiyar – 125 kilometers upstream from the coast along the Kaveri River was now where Sri Lanka pearls were ­collected and prepared for trade.17 As a way to integrate all of this into its territorial thinking – and in essence to shorten the distance between port and hill – the Chola developed an ­aggressive campaign to build cities and temples. The Panchanadisvara t­ emple in the city of Thirubuvanai is just one of the dozens of temples that were built. These temple cities became the backbone of land development, uniting theology with agriculture and political control, producing a shift from the ancient diffuse, localist animist traditions to an organized, state-sponsored religion that we today call Hinduism (Figure 2.3.6).

FIGURE 2.3.6  The

Panchanadisvara Temple, Thirubuvanai, India. Credit: Jayaseerlourdhuraj/Wikimedia Commons.

88  South Indian Emergence

Though we might assume that temples and cities belong together, this was an innovation. In India, prior to the eighth century, most sacred areas were in the hills and along streams, namely not in the urban centers. Thirunelli Temple in the rugged mountains of Kerela is an example. The site celebrates the Papanasini, a holy mountain stream. Still today, pilgrims bathe there as they consider its waters to be sacred with powers to absolve one’s sins. Further to the north, there is Ajanta, created from the second century BCE to about 480 CE, and known for its various temples made by a sophisticated rock-cut technique. Just as the ancient Greeks made the transition from wood to stone in the sixth century BCE, the kingdoms of South India made the transition in the eighth century CE. A famous competition, known as Pancha Rathas or Five Rathas, was even held in Mahabalipuram to determine which form to use. The five proposals were carved whole from a rock outcropping of pink granite! The Five Rathas represent the diversity of temple architecture at the time and were clearly modeled on palaces and shrines of wood. Of the five, one was apparently chosen and became the prototype of the famous Shore Temple (ca. 725 CE) that was built nearby. Bringing temples into the city was more than just expanding the reach of religion. Just like the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, where a stupa landscape, irrigation systems and rice cultivation were

FIGURE 2.3.7  Bhima

Ratha, one of the five rathas at Mahabalipuram, India. Credit: Destination8infinity/Wikimedia Commons.

South Indian Emergence  89

FIGURE 2.3.8  Shore

Temple, Mamallapuram. Credit: Swarna1311/Wikimedia Commons.

coterminous, the South Indian kingdoms used the institution of the temple as a political and economic instrument of extraction, stability and authority (Figures 2.3.7 and 2.3.8). Before this transformation, visiting the shrines and their associated f­ orest monasteries was not something that was “open to the public.” Only the elites, the rich merchants or the otherwise powerful could take the time to do that, much less travel there in safety. These places were not for ordinary farmers, who might never have even stepped foot outside their village. The new temples changed all that; they were wondrously “accessible” and not tucked away in remote valleys, but placed on exhibit at the valley rising triumphantly into the heights for all to see. Placed at the literal center of town complexes (tirumadaivilagam: literally “temple square”), they controlled vast areas of territory serving as commercial and/or administrative centers.18 Srirangam, for example, is located on an island in the middle of the Kaveri River. At its center is the sprawling Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. It was begun in the ninth century CE and expanded and improved over the centuries into one of the largest temple compounds in India. It is not the temple as such that was important, but the city that surrounds it and extends the compound out into the four directions. Craftspeople were settled in these areas, goldsmiths, jewelry makers, weavers, sculptors and so on. It is literally an attempt to imprint Chola authority on the ground (Figure 2.3.9).19 These temple cities, which come in sizes from small to large, dot the Chola agricultural world. The Panchanadisvara temple (Tiru Vadagudi Paramesvara) that is near the modern village of Thiruvandarkoil has, for example, an inscription from the eleventh century that confirms the authority of a chief called Ohai Udaiyan Kari Udaiyan as an officer in charge of the reorganization of the local administration. Along the Kaveri River, there is another early Chola temple, Vata Tirthanathar Temple (Tiru Alandurai

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FIGURE 2.3.9 

Srirangam and the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple, India.

Mahadevar), with an inscription that explains that the structure was built by the local chief, Sembiyan Irukkuvel, who obtained the permission to do this from the king through a petition since he would also gift nearby land to the temple. The royal officer in charge of the transfer was named as Araiyan Virasolan.20 It is impossible to separate the economy of the region from an increasingly politically enhanced, sacred geography. For example, there quickly came to be five sites where Shiva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, in the form of Nataraja, the great cosmic dancer is said to have danced; there are the temples dedicated to the elements: earth, air, fire, water and ether as well as the six temples devoted to Murukan, a son of Shiva, and made sacred by association with the lives of the Tamil poet saints, who between the sixth and ninth centuries sang the love of Shiva or Vishnu in specific places.21 The elites of the great port of Mahabalipuram were so confident in their position in the world that they redesigned a notable but otherwise unremarkable hill overlooking the harbor into a complex representation of the Hindu world, creating an entire “Ganges River” from its apex down to the docklands. The “river” sprang seemingly miraculously from an artesian spring at the top of hill. The “river” was replete with beautiful rock-cut temples, canals, sculptures and a fantastic waterfall (now dried out) at its lower terminus, featuring dancing deities, water shrines and happy elephants. The Ganges – the real one in north India – in other words was miniaturized, modeled and in essence reimagined and replaced. This new “Ganges” proclaimed itself a spiritual destination and departure point in its own right. A Hindu answer to Anuradhapura, it was a cosmological model of the ideology of affluence (Figure 2.3.10). Devotional gifts to the temples that were being built quickly became normative practice. These gifts are known as punyam (Sanskrit: cirtue, purifying, holy) and enhance religious merit. Kings and merchants competed with

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FIGURE 2.3.10 Descent of the Ganges, Mamallapuram, India. Credit: McKay Savage.

each other not only to gain punyam, but also to acquire legitimacy in the eyes of the community. Temples used the precious metal to make jewelry for the idol deities. Donations were also used to support the temple, its various priests, musicians, dancing girls, cooks and servants. The money also served to restore and build the temple itself. And finally, it also served as loans for merchants and landowners. Though by today the wealth of many of these temples had been looted during one war or another, the vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, originally built in the sixth century CE and subsequently expanded, is today estimated to possess USD 22 billion worth of gold and jewels. The Padmanabhaswamy Temple is an extreme case, but it is hardly an isolated example and emphasizes the cultural relationship between punyam and luxury exchange systems. It is safe to say that a good portion of what we call luxury economy was in reality a devotional economy (Figure 2.3.11). With so much wealth flowing through these areas, regional military hegemony was practically impossible. The close proximity of the rivers and their associated political entities made it difficult to sustain meta-regional polities. As a result, none of the kingdoms, apart from a historical flash here and there, ever became what we would call a state with a durable bureaucracy and military organization. The list of kingdoms vying for control makes for

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FIGURE 2.3.11  The

Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, India. Credit: T M Cyriac/Wikimedia Commons.

dizzying reading in the realm of political history. Unlike the somewhat more stable world of north India, the south seems beset by tensions. And yet there was just enough strength in one or the other of its kingdoms to protect it from intrusions from the north. South India was never under the control of northern hegemonies until more modern times. Within the span of a few centuries, Sri Lanka and the entire Indian ­subcontinent established itself as the center of a massive geopolitical vortex as mediators between the forest and port, a situation that was unique in the world. The two events – the rapid “wealth-rush” kingdomization of South India and Sri Lanka and the dramatic increase of the Mediterranean desire economy – played into each other’s hands. Affluence was not based on delivering food fundamentals, as there was food enough from the forests, shores and rice paddies. It was not based on the primacy of metal ores or stone or even on fabricated objects (though such did exist), but on mostly lightweight forest-, river- or shore-extracted luxuries that cumulatively were driving regional and global economies, producing a domino effect across Southeast Asia (Figure 2.3.12). The lightweightness of many of these goods has escaped scholarly notice. But it meant that there was no need for expensive infrastructure of transportation. Roads did not need to be paved and bridges could be rudimentary in nature.Still today, young men in Vietnam deliver cinnamon leaves piled high on the back of their motorbikes. Once larger packs had been assembled, they could be taken by cart or boat to collection centers where warehouses would, of course, be set up. From our modern perspective, this part of the world came to look “undeveloped,” but back in the first millennium, one of the reasons for the success of these sweet spot regions was that even though transportation of goods had to be monitored and protected, the “cost” of transportation was often quite minimal, contributing, once again, to the excellent profit margins.

South Indian Emergence  93

FIGURE 2.3.12 

South India and Sri Lanka in the Long Millenium.

NOTE ABOUT THE DIAGRAM: These and subsequent charts are ­ iagrams. In other words, they are not empirical. They are intended to p d ­ ortray the ups and downs of regional affluence, not that of any particular kingdom or chiefdom. I include the names of the some of the more ­important players in that economy. I use the admittedly awkward phrase Chieftain Affluence to remind ourselves that the story of dark matter economy was not just related to these kingdoms and chiefdoms but reached up into the hills or into other nonnormative ecologies. Notes 1 For a discussion of water landscapes in South India, see Kathleen D. Morrison, “Archaeologies of Flow: Water and the Landscapes of Southern India Past, Present, and Future,” Journal of Field Archaeology (September 2015): 1–21. See also N. Subrahamanian, Sangam Polity (Bombay: Asia Publication House, 1968), 235–238. Benefitting the situation was that Tamil animist religious practices were not yet touched by the Brahminism of the north. Brahminism, because of its value of purity, threw a dim eye on some aspects of trade. The early character of Tamil religion embodied an aura of sacral immanence, sensing the sacred in the ­vegetation, fertility and color of the land. Sangam poems mention several kinds of temples, some at the outskirts of a city, some on top of a hill, some with a garden and designed for ritual bathing and some in a city. See S. Gopalakrishnan, Early Pandyan Iconometry (New Delhi: Sharada, 2005), 19. 2 John Baptista Tavernier, The six voyages of John Baptista Tavernier. Translated from the French by John Philips (London: printer not indicated, 1678), 138. 3 Vimala Begley, “Arikamedu Reconsidered,” American Journal of Archaeology 87, no. 4 (October 1983): 479.

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4 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 6 (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 46. 5 Ibid., 96. 6 Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 1, 597. 7 Ibid., 599. Whereas most shell collectors refer to the reversed shell as ­“left-handed” or “sinistral turbinella pyrum,” Indians call the same shell “valampuri” or “righthanded,” because they orient the shell with the apical spire downwards and the aperture or siphon (mouth) uppermost, and consequently, on the right side of the shell. 8 Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 6, 458. 9 The Sri Lankan pearl fishery and the Indian pearl fishery on either side of the Gulf of Mannar were conducted as separate fisheries from ancient times, though the same people such as the Parawas, Arabs and others were involved in the exploitation of the resources. During some periods, however, the two fisheries came under the jurisdiction of the same authorities, such as by the Cholas on the Indian side or during the period of the early Jaffna kingdom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the Sri Lanka side. 10 S. B. Kaufmann, “A Christian Caste in Hindu Society: Religious Leadership and Social Conflict among the Paravas of Southern Tamilnadu,” Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 2 (1981): 206. Given their early conversion to Christianity in the sixteenth century as a consequence of contact with Portuguese who took control of the fisheries, much of their older religious and cultural institutions no longer exist. See also Patrick Roche, Fishermen of the Coromandel. A Social Study of the Paravas of the Coromandel (New Delhi, 1984). 11 See, for example, Geoff Wade, “An Early Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia, 900– 1300 CE,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 2 (June 2009): 221–265. 12 K. Rajan and N. Athiyaman, “Traditional Gemstone Cutting Technology of Kongu Region in Tamil Nadu,” Indian Journal of History of Science 39, no. 4 (2004): 396; K. Rajan, “Situating the Beginning of Early Historic Times in Tamil Nadu: Some Issues and Reflections,” Social Scientist 36, no. 1/2 (January to February 2008), 46. 13 Malabathrum is sometimes misidentified as “Indian bay leaves,” though the bay leaf is from the bay laurel, a tree of Mediterranean origin, and the appearance and aroma of the two are quite different. It was also used medicinally in various ways, and in Sri Lanka, apparently even to make candles that were solely to be used by the kings. William Woodville, Medical Botany 1 (London: William Phillips, 1810), 673. 14 E. H. Warmington, Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India (Delhi: Vikas, 1928), 189, 190. 15 S. R. Balasubrahmanyam, “Introduction,” Early Chola Temples (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1971), 1. 16 On the Chola invasion, see George W. Spencer, “The Politics of Plunder: The Cholas in Eleventh-Century Ceylon,” Journal of Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (1976), 405–419. 17 Mudaliyar C. Rasanayagam, Ancient Jaffna: Being a Research into the History of Jaffna from Very Early Times to the Portuguese Period (New Delhi: Asian Educational Service, 2003), 110. 18 Vijaya Ramaswamy, “Vishwakarma Craftsmen in Early Medieval Peninsular India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 47, no. 4 (2004): 557. 19 Vijaya Ramaswamy, “The Genesis and Historical Role of the Master Weavers in South Indian Textile Production,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28, no. 3 (1985): 294. 20 S. R. Balasubrahmanyam, “Temples in Allur,” (1960), Footnote 1: https://www. wisdomlib.org/south-asia/book/early-chola-temples/d/doc210248.html. 21 Crispin Branfoot, “Imperial Frontiers: Building Sacred Space in Sixteenth-Century South India,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 2 (June 2008): 183.

4 THE CENTRAL ROLE OF BORNEO

In the early eighth century on the island of Java, the architects of the Shailendra Dynasty of the Mataram Kingdom built a temple known as Borobudur. It was an artificially constructed mandala mountain. Making mandalas out of sand had become a devotional practice in Tibet in the previous centuries, and at some moment, it carried over into spatial practice such as at Samye (at Tsetang, Tibet), a monastery complex of the late eighth century. When seen from above, the elements of the mandala were the buildings and their arrangements. Around the same time, the architects experimented with the idea of making a mandala in the shape of an actual man-made mountain, for example, the Kesariya Stupa in northern India. Borobudur may thus not have been the first mandala mountain, but it was certainly the most extravagant. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids that are a pile of stones, this one used a natural outcrop of a hill that was chopped down to the correct size and then in essence “fitted” with a layer of stones on the outside. One can imagine it as a stupa carved from the hilltop that had been crowned like a tooth. The design consisted of nine stacked platforms – six squares and three circular – rising about 100 feet. It was decorated with 2,672 relief panels and 504 Buddha statues, with a central stupa surrounded by 72 other stupas. Its peak was nothing less than a physical representation of nirvana. We have no way of knowing who or even how it was all accessed or which monks or kings were permitted on the upper terrace with its specially designed stupas, each “inhabited” by a statue of a monk that one can see through slots on the surface of the stupas. The whole was more than just a temple, but designed as a type of force field, blessing the rice paddy landscape in the surrounding valley that was overshadowed by towering, active volcanoes. At the time, it was the largest and most complex piece of architecture DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-10

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FIGURE 2.4.1 

Borobudur Temple, Indonesia. Credit: Kartika Sari Henry.

in Southeast Asia – designed specifically as a destination piece and even today it ranks as a marvel (Figure 2.4.1). That an extremely small upstart island kingdom could afford such a showstopper, bring in the designers, engineers, builders and masons, not to mention move the two million stone blocks that were needed to its construction, is testament to its central place in global luxury trade in the ninth century. Unfortunately, the culture that built the monument, by the tenth century came on hard times. Some historians point to an eruption by Merapi, others to epidemics or to economic problems. Maybe malaria set in. Whatever the cause, the population moved to East Java in a mass exodus. The monastic complex and the city that surrounded the building were abandoned and have long since disappeared, meaning that Borobudur’s use and meaning are lost in time. One of the panels depicts a scene where a king, trying to access a fig tree, is beset by its protective monkeys. The king has his hand raised and may be giving the command to stop the assault. More is being portrayed, since the blowpipes are typical of Borneo forest cultures and the monkeys seem to be the long-tailed monkeys (Semnopithecus pruinosus) that were hunted on Borneo to extract their gall bladders known as bezoar stones. The tribals did not hunt monkeys themselves, but as part of an offshore, trade network demands. This means that even though the image corresponds to stories having to do with Buddha’s life, it is composed of elements that point specifically to Borneo. Carl Bock, a late nineteenth-century Norwegian explorer, noted (Figure 2.4.2): A curious industry is the collection of galiga, or bezoar stones, which are also mostly secured by the Orang Poonan [Borneo’s forest tribes] These galiga are highly prized for medicinal purposes, and are sold at fabulous prices to the Boegis [Celebe traders from Sulawesi who settled in Koetei], who resell them to the Chinese.1

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FIGURE 2.4.2  The

attack on the monkeys, Level 1, Balustrade at Borobudur: XXVII: 102.  Credit: Anandajoti Bhikkhu.

FIGURE 2.4.3 

Bezoar stone with case and stand.

It might have been a curious industry for Bock, but it was most certainly not for the Javanese who made a killing on bezoar stones. What was portrayed at Borobudur was nothing less than a visualization – almost like an ­advertisement – of the geopolitical reach of ninth-century Javanese rulers, showing off their connections, not to some distant potentate but to forest tribal communities (Figure 2.4.3). And bezoar stones were one of an astonishing list of exports from Borneo. In fact, in the early centuries of the millennium, long before the Javanese even existed as a polity, it was becoming clear to Indian Ocean traders that Borneo – even more so than Sri Lanka – held a unique place in the world. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, Western sources of gold dried up. As George Coedes has speculated, Indian elites had to find alternative sources to the east.2 It was not a matter of wealth as such that was at play for we are dealing here with a spirit-world commodity. In the Vedas, gold was associated with immortality.3 The ancient Hindu scriptures known as the Vedas

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mention its source as a place called Suvaṇṇabhumī which means “Golden Land,” and it is described as “an island in the ocean, the furthest extremity towards the east of the inhabited world, lying under the rising sun itself.”4 Whether this was Borneo or Sumatra, where gold was also found, cannot be ascertained, but as with musk for Islam some centuries later or agarwood for Buddhists in Japan, gold for the Vedics required accessing material from the furthest most reaches of the world. The great advantage of gold from Borneo was that it did not involve extensive mining. A nineteenth-century English geologist, who analyzed Borneo’s gold deposits, wrote that “so much gold is reported to occur in this country, that when a stick smeared with gum is pushed into the ground, it comes out covered with gold-dust.”5 Even today, a lucky hiker can find nuggets along a river edge.6 But the locals were not particular interested in its transcontinental value, a fact that the early traders from India noticed (just like the later-day English). Naturalist A. H. Everett wrote in the early nineteenth century that: None of the savage tribes of this [northern] part of Borneo seem ever to have made use of this metal, notwithstanding their intercourse with the Malays, and in a less degree with the Chinese… I have never known an instance of a Sea Dayak or Land Dayak, a Kyan or Bakatan, seeking gold of his own account, and manufacturing it into any description of ornament, however rude.7 This means that unlike the gold that came from the Romans who understood its value and mined it with great difficulty and with great cost militarily and who even swallowed the cost of shipping, the gold from Borneo was by comparison practically free. But if the Southeast Asian traders wanted gold from Borneo, they would have to go get it themselves; not that easy, given that Borneo was 4,000 kilometers away. Then there were diamonds that were extracted from the riverbeds in the southwest part of the island. It is not known when diamonds were first discovered on Borneo, but the name that the Javanese gave the island was Puradvipa or Diamond Island. The only other important source of diamonds was back in India, mostly along the Krishna River, and it makes sense that once diamonds were found in Borneo that their acquisition and control was of major geopolitical importance. Another valuable commodity was cinnabar ore, out of which mercury is made. It came from the mines in Bau in northwest Borneo.8 It was used for medicine, goldsmithing and lacquer. Once again, there is no way of knowing when cinnabar was first mined, but when Magellan’s boats arrived in Borneo in 1521, they reported that the King of Brunei ingested mercury, considered to be key to longevity. Cinnabar ore was certainly exported to India, which had no local sources, from early on.9 In fact, Borneo remained an exporter of these goods well into the modern age.

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The profits that accrued to the Borneo Company, formed in 1856, were enormous. Between 1870 and 1916, the company’s antimony export was valued at USD 1,905,031, with Borneo at that time the leading exporter of antimony and quicksilver to the European markets.10 Borneo’s portfolio of offerings also included camphor, discussed in an ­earlier chapter; tortoiseshells (used by the Chinese as oracle bones); hornbill ivory (which the Chinese value above true ivory or even jade to make belt buckles for high officials); rhinoceros horn (used to treat fever, rheumatism, gout and other disorders); crane crest (used to make dagger crane crest scabbards and rings); lakawood (a scented heartwood and root wood of a thick liana, Dalbergia parviflora); and Dragon’s Blood, a resin produced from the rattan palms of the genus Daemonorops, gathered by breaking off the layer of red resin encasing the unripe fruit of the rattan. Rolled into balls, it was used for Hindu ceremonies in India, and in China, especially during the Ming Dynasty, as red varnish for wooden furniture and almost everywhere as a cure-all. The rubber of the gutta-percha tree was an important medicinal commodity exported to China.11 Honey and wax were other prized commodities. Honey was used not just as food, but as medicine since its antibacterial property in the treatment of wounds was well known. Last but not least, there were the edible bird’s nests, something that the Chinese emperor and his elites had a particular fondness for.12 They were collected with death-defying scaffolding reaching high into

FIGURE 2.4.4  Locals

harvesting bird’s nests on Borneo. Credit: saiko3p/ Shutterstock.com.

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the caves 13 These nests are still today among the world’s most expensive food.14 English naturalist H. Wilfrid Walker described his arduous voyage into the highlands to witness the harvesting of the nests.15 Standing knee-deep in guano at the bottom of the cave, he mused to himself that if only he had the courage to dangle on the flimsy ropes to get a nest or two, he “might have come away a wealthy man” (Figure 2.4.4).16 These various items were essential aspects of medicinal cultures throughout Asia; some were associated with sexuality, others with ritual obligations and still others were used as tribute to the high and mighty. As late as 1727, the king of Sulu, a once-independent archipelago that is now in southwestern Philippines, sent messengers to the court of China “with a letter and articles of tribute, consisting of pearls, tortoiseshell, manufactured cloth of various kinds, bird’s nests, knives, etc. – 12 articles in all.”17 The main issue in the early part of the millennium was getting to Borneo. At first, the traders from India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia applied the same rules that they had used in the rest of Southeast Asia, producing distinct palacebased chiefdom polities defined around rice, irrigation, ports, upstream wealth extraction and the construction of a spiritualized landscape. Newcomer trading families intermarried with local elites, who adopted Indianized names and lifestyles. The term that scholars give to this is “Indianization.” George Coedes coined the term in Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extrême-Orient (1944) to define the development in Southeast Asia of the various kingdoms that grounded their identities on Hindu or Buddhist mythologies and practices. At play was not just religion but the interblended relationship of religion, trade networks, rice production, ancestral relationships and risk management. The system was easily transportable, and it could start small, promising further wealth as it grew. We have already seen it at play in Sri Lanka, but in the early centuries of the millennium, we see affluent states appearing in the Irrawaddy River (Pyu) – the source of gold and rubies – and then in Mekong Delta controlled by the Funan. In the third century CE, Chinese documents state that it had “walled villages, palaces, and dwellings” and that “they like to engrave ornaments and chisel. Many of their eating utensils are silver. Taxes are paid in gold, silver, pearls, perfumes.”18 By the fifth century, we see Indianized places in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Java and Bali. In some places, the process was identified with Hindu elites, in other places with Buddhists. The system worked everywhere in Southeast Asia – except in Borneo. In the fourth century, or perhaps already in the third, a group of unknown origin tried to colonize Borneo on the southern flank of the island in the typical manner, but it failed. All we know of the erstwhile Kingdom of Kutai Martadipur (not its original name, which is unknown) comes from a few steles that were found in some rice paddies. Nothing else remains. Did the colonizers not find a good spot for rice? Did they succumb to disease? Did they mismanage relations with the locals? No one knows. So irrelevant was

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Kutai Martadipur to the great story of Southeast Asia that Borneo is barely mentioned in Coedés foundational book The Making of South East Asia or even in the more recent The Indian Ocean in World History.19 Perhaps there was also the basic problem of its geography. The seaside is crowded with trees and swamps. The mouths of the rivers are packed with sandbars and have very low levels in the dry season, yet flood in the monsoons.20 Tides are strong and squalls often turn the sea into a nasty chop. Traders looking for a secured, fixed port would be hard-pressed. What if we imagine Borneo differently? After all, the Borobudur depiction of Borneo tribals shows that they were not the fearsome, far-off headhunters as they were portrayed by Westerners in the nineteenth century, but rather worked in concert with foreign traders. The failure of Kutai Martadipur turned out to be a success in a different key, for traders realized that they could simply land on the beach and negotiate from there. Though Indianization, as the word implies, was a process that extended outward from India, it was paralleled by an economic “pull” toward Borneo. As more and more commodities became accessible, one can imagine a Borneoification of Southeast Asian trade economy. Had Borneo and the Spice Islands to its east been closer to India or China, the entire complex network of exchange and its associated geopolitics would certainly not have been necessary and the entire history of Southeast Asia would have been significantly less dramatic. This means that the absence of Borneo in history books is an oversight. It is just as central to the global history of the first millennium as China. The reader of this book should by now already anticipate that extracting items from the forest was not a simple or direct sort of thing. Everything was seen as having a spirit. Even collecting honey required “a sacrifice to the genius of the place.”21 Camphor, as discussed earlier, was a spirit that had to be negotiated with, and so too was gold, which was buried in the earth near rice paddies to invigorate its productivity.22 The same was true for collecting bird’s nests. Though guards lived in the cave to protect the nests, their work was made much easier by the fact that the caves were watched over “by an army of ghosts,” so fearsome that the porters who brought Walker to see the nests would not venture near.23 The harvesting was done only after “a good omen in the shape of a good dream [came] to one of the chief owners of the caves.”24 At the apex of the spirit world were the ancestors, who also needed their share of gifts, and to understand this part of the equation, it is important to realize that the Borneo River cultures do not see themselves as living on an island in a vast sea. The sea – even for the so-called Sea Dayak, one of the native groups who mediated between inland tribes and shore-arriving ­merchants – was nothing but a widening of a river mouth, and the particular river on which they lived was seen as a tributary.25 The global imaginary – if one could phrase it thus – would be drawn not as a globe but in the form of

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an ever-widening river, with the Malay, the Chinese and the others living at the widest part. At the upper reaches of this river, there were the sacred landscapes of mountains hills, and areas where the ancestors lived.26 And since these departed spirits demanded their share of wealth, one could say that the economic story, from the point of view of the Borneo people, is driven by their ancestors in the mountains just as much as by the traders on the shores. Imagine boats arriving at the shores of Borneo with jars filled with beads and salt, with other boats adding iron, textiles and other commodities to the mix. From the shore, the goods make their way upriver under the control of various Borneo/Chinese or Borneo/Malay intermediaries. Where the river became impassable, there is a trading post and the goods are unloaded. A description of the goods is sent out to the nearby villages in a four- to five-day journey’s radius. The men of the village arrive to take the goods and disappear with them to the village longhouse “without the slightest article being pilfered,” as the English wrote back in their reports.27 There, the tribe assembles and the goods are inspected. Presents are made to the headman, who takes precedence in choosing what he would like and on down the rank. The price is fixed and an agreement is reached regarding payments in the form of beeswax, camphor, bird’s nests, gold or whatever the local community mines or can procure from the forest. We come to the crux of the matter. The longhouse does not have these goods waiting on the shelves. Instead, men are sent out to the forest to gather them. In the meantime, the trader has to wait and so remains at the longhouse or on his ship at the expense of the community for a month or more until everything is assembled. The goods are then brought to his boat and he leaves to finish the journey back down to the shore.28 The same system was used in the Philippines and recorded by European traders (Figure 2.4.5): Trading vessels anchor in front of the dwelling of the official where the exchange of commodities takes places. When a message is sent on board from the shore, white parasols are first of all distributed as presents for the chiefs. This is done with a view to keep in good humor those who are in power. According to the custom of the place, the savages taking part in the trade assemble on the spot where they take delivery, by means of baskets, of the goods to be sold. They depart with the goods, without for the present paying for them. But there is no danger connected with this practice. For, although the customers are not known to the foreign merchants, not even by sight, and although the goods are for further purposes of barter conveyed to other islands, yet the customers do come back with goods obtained in exchange, though often after an interval of eight to nine months, wherefore the foreign merchant are often detained with their ships at this place long beyond their intended time. This is the reason why, among all the trading ships, those returning from Ma-yi come back last.

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FIGURE 2.4.5 

Longhouse on Borneo. Credit: mypokcik/Shutterstock.com.

The products of the country consist of yellow wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise shell, betel nuts, and a textile fabric called yue-ta. The foreign merchants pay for these products by means of gold, sacrificial vessels of iron, black lead, glass pearls of all colors and sewing needles.29 Goods would be exchanged at particular times, usually around the rice ­harvest.30 In that way, the forest tribes could get rice from the valley communities, without, from their point of view, having to do much work for it. Ethnographers have pointed out that some of the river longhouse groups had their own specialized forest group contacts, thus enhancing their trade capacity: The settled tribesmen of any region find this trade so profitable that they regard the harmless nomads with friendly feelings, learn their language and avoid and reprobate any harsh treatment of them that might drive to leave their district. (C. Hose and W. McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, 1912)31 The exchanges do not always go as easily as outlined here, for the group of men, travelling far from the village, in all likelihood would encounter various types of dangerous spirits. Adherence to omens regarding these spirits would

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inevitably slow the group or even stop them from proceeding until favorable omens were observed. As a rather irritated American “explorer” wrote: I am very sure that [their divinity] saddled them with a dire affliction when he introduced to them the omen-birds; more procrastination, failure of expeditions, and exasperation of soul can be laid to the score of these birds than to anything else on earth. There is hardly an undertaking, however slight, that can be begun without first consulting these wretched birds. Yet it is hardly to be wondered at, that all tribes should hold the birds to be little prophets of the jungle, dashing across man’s path, at critical moments, to bless or to ban.… Once our whole party of eight or ten boats had to pull up at the bank and walk through the jungle for a quarter of a mile or so to make a bothersome white-headed hawk think that he had mistaken the object of our expedition. (Furness III, Folklore in Borneo, 1899)32 An impatient 21-year-old English ornithologist recalled during an expedition in 1932: All the local tribes are very superstitious. Good and bad omens can i­ nterfere with the best-laid plans, especially when an unpleasant or difficult job is on hand. Our first week in the Base Camp was completely disorganized by an unfortunate omen snake, which was finally placated with much ­ceremony – hens, eggs and borak rice-spirit. Spider-hunters (Aracnotherea, which are perhaps the commonest bird in the rain-forest, are the main omens. Normally, no particular notice is taken of them, but on an expedition into new country or up an unclimbed mountain, where the natives are unwilling to go, bad omens are always available.33 From the longhouse point of view, the men had to work in concert with the birds and animal spirits in order to gain proper access to forest products, which were often under the control of other tribes. The Penans, for example, were generally considered expert in locating camphor, and so groups requiring camphor would have to deal with them. And even then, they could do so only after a favorable dream. Odoardo Beccari, an Italian naturalist who visited the island in the 1870s, noted that his guide, Kam-Uan, “was of opinion that this tree ought to be now rich in camphor, judging by the smell given off by the chips of its wood.” But Kam-Uan would not let Beccari chop the tree down. The guide promised that “he would return to look for it as soon as he had dreamt a favourable dream.” It was, Beccari wrote somewhat sarcastically, only “the fortunate one who has dreamt the dream of good omen begins to tap the chosen trunk.” The camphor hunters, he added:

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must only talk of women and erotic subjects; they must wear no article of dress besides the jawat. The priok – the vessel for cooking rice – must not be used; and they must not indulge either in siri or tobacco. This is saying a good deal, for the Kayans, like the Dyaks, prefer going without rice to depriving themselves of tobacco.34 To prove to his guides the absurdity of their procedures, Beccari opened up a tree that he thought had camphor, only to find a useless goo at the bottom. In other words, the rules of engagement in a spirit-saturated economy were complex, time-consuming and not to be trifled with. The whole process of exchange was conducted without markets, which only appeared in downstream areas with the Muslims and Chinese who were generally loath to travel upstream.35 The process was also conducted without warehouses or any particular preplanning and storage of goods. For the shore cultures, who played both sides of the game, knowing how it all worked combined with a good sense of patience lay at the heart of a successful extraction policy. Knowing the forest was not just being an “animist,” as we might phrase it today. It was a form of knowing in its own right. The longhouses were not extracting material from the forest but from the spirit world, a distinction that is usually lost in the discussion of trade. Notes 1 Carl Bock, The Head Hunters of Borneo: A Narrative of Travel Up the Mahakkam and Down the Barito; also, Journeyings in Sumatra, 2nd ed. (London: Sampson Low, 1881), 205. 2 Anna T. N. Bennett, “Gold in Early Southeast Asia,” ArcheoSciences 33 (2009): 99–107. 3 Jan Gonda, The Functions and Significance of Gold in the Veda (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 22. 4 Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1989), 91. The actual location of this land has preoccupied many scholars and may indeed include Borneo, but for me, this conversation is irrelevant. The main point is that it was extremely far away. ­ ythological fanSuvaṇṇabhumī should, therefore, not be seen as the product of m tasy, but as a significant and real element in the blueprint of a maritime-­oriented devotional practice that was foundational to the Vedic worldview. 5 Tivadar Posewitz, Borneo: Its Geology and Mineral Resources, trans. Frederick H. Hatch (London: Edward Stanford, 1892), 323. Another report notes that it took about two hours to pan for quarter of an ounce of gold. See Rodney Mundy, Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebe, Down to the Occupation of Labuan 2 (London: John Murray, 1848), 385. 6 Tom Harrisson, Gold and Megalithic Activity in Prehistoric and Recent West Borneo (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1970), 27. 7 Alfred Hart Everett, “Notes on the Distribution of the Useful Minerals in Sarawak,” Journal Straits Asiatic Society 1 (1878): 19. 8 Charles Strachan Hutchison, Geology of North-west Borneo: Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 156.

106  The Central Role of Borneo

9 An Occurrence of Cinnabar in Rasarnavakalpa (Hyderabad: Geological Survey of India, 1978), 1. Cinnabar remained a major export well into the nineteenth century. See Tivadar Posewitz, Borneo: Its Geology and Mineral Resources, trans. Frederick H. Hatch (London: Edward Stanford, 1892), 419–425. 10 Amarjit Kaur, “The Babbling Brookes: Economic Change in Sarawak 1841– 1941,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 1 (February 1995): 76. 11 Eucommia bark of the tree Eucommia ulmoides is commonly called the gutta-­ percha tree. The Chinese name for the bark is Du Zhong. This name refers to a Taoist monk who was said to be immortal, suggesting that the herb provides long life, good health and vitality. The tree is a member of the rubber family and is native to the mountainous regions of China. The outer bark is peeled away and the smooth inner bark is dried. The bark has been used in traditional Chinese herbalism for over 3,000 years. The tree does not grow widely outside China, but it grows in Borneo and thus the trade. Once again, it is impossible to know if this trade dates back to the era BCE or was a consequence of more recent postfourteenth-century contact with Chinese traders. 12 See Mohamed Yusoff Ismail, “Sacred Food from the Ancestors, Edible Bird Nest Harvesting among the Idohan,” in The Globalization of Chinese Food, eds. David Y. H. Wu and Sidney C. H. Cheung (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43–55. 13 For a modern-day film that covers the bird’s nest extraction, see The Punan tribe: the hunters at peace with nature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6ayZA4_qk. 14 William Marsden, The History of Sumatra, Containing an Account of The Government, Laws, Customs and Manners of The Native Inhabitants (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1811). 15 Walker, Wanderings, 231–242. 16 Ibid., 241; Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H. M. S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy: with Extracts from the Journal of James Brooke, Esq., of Sarawak (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 75. 17 “The Tributary Nations of China,” The China Review 12 (1883–1884): 103. 18 Quoted in Lynda Norene Shaffe, Maritime Southeast Asia to 500 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 23, 24. 19 Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 20 Mary Heidhues, Golddiggers, Farmers, and Traders in the “Chinese Districts” of  West  Kalimantan, Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 2003), 17. 21 As noted by John Bowring, an English political economist and the fourth governor of Hong Kong who recorded his travels through Cambodia. The Kingdom and People of Siam: With a Narrative of the Mission to that Country in 1855 (London: John W. Parker and Sons, 1857), 54. 22 J. H. Walker, Power and Prowess, The Origin of Brooke Kingship in Sarawak (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002), 65. 23 Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis, Quer Durch Borneo, Ergebnisse seiner Reisen in den Jahren 1894, 1896–97 und 1898–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 1904), 218, 219. 24 The relationship between man and bird was pointed out to Walker by the locals, “We were told that if they missed one season’s nest collecting, most of the birds would forsake these caves, possibly because there would be so little room for them to build again.…The white kind [of nest] build their first nests about March, and the black kind in May, and, as these nests are all collected before they have time to hatch their eggs, there are no young birds till later in the year, when the nests are not disturbed, but the old nests are collected with the new ones the following year…. It made one quite giddy even to watch the men descending these frail swaying ladders with over five hundred feet. of space below them,” quoted in Walker, Wanderings, 231, 232.

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25 Charles Hose and William McDougall, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, Vol. 2. (London: Macmillan and Co. 1912) 213. 26 William Henry Furness III, Folklore in Borneo, A Sketch (Wallingford, PA: 1899), 18. Furness (1866–1920) was a US physician and ethnographer. 27 Henry Ling Roth and Hugh Brooke Low, The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo (London: Truslove & Hanson, 1896), 232. 28 The trade more or less remained identical even with the arrival of the English. Keppel lists the items that he would like to get from Singapore to trade with the Dayak. They include salt, cotton, brass wire and iron pans, cloth, Chinese crockery, Java tobacco, candy, biscuits silk and “little things” such as Venetian beads. In exchange, he planned to get timber, rattan bird’s nests, gold, tin and bees wax. Henry Keppel, The Expedition to Borneo of H. M. S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy: With Extracts from the Journal of James Brooke, Esq., of Sarawak (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 75. 29 Friedrich Hirth, “Contribution to the History of the Oriental Trade during the Middle Ages,” The China Review 18 (1889/1890): 318. 30 Quer Durch Borneo, 256. 31 The Pagan Tribes of Borneo, 178. 32 Furness III, Folklore, 22. 33 Tom Harrison, “Remembered Jungle,” Borneo Jungle: An Account of the Oxford University Expedition of 1932, ed. Tom Harrison (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54, 55. Tom Harnett Harrison (1911–1976) was a British ornithologist, explorer, journalist, broadcaster, soldier, archaeologist and documentarian. 34 Odoardo Beccari, Wanderings in the Great Forest of Borneo (Nelle Foreste di Borneo. Viaggi e ricerche di un naturalista) (Florence: S. Landi, 1902)], trans. Enrico H. Giglioli (London: Archibald Constable, 1904), 272, 274. Beccari (1843–1920) was an Italian naturalist who spent 13 years from 1865 to 1878 undertaking research Borneo, Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. 35 The Pagans of North Borneo, 132–134.

5 THE INDONESIAN SEAWAY

Borneo was the gift that kept on giving. It worked so well because it did not need a particularly heavy touch from those exploiting its wealth and because it was protected from the rather formidable over-the-horizon interests by the geography of the Indonesian Seaway, a vast and complicated overlapping of oceans, rivers, shores, valleys, inlets and harbors. Maps tend to show trade routes moving through all of this as a set of lines as if the main purpose of trade was to link India and China. But the Indonesian Seaway was not just the throughway between China and India; it was, more importantly, the source of tremendous wealth, internal and external. From the eighth century or so to the colonial period, the Indonesian Seaway system held most of South and Southeast Asia together. And like most sweet spots it was hegemony adverse. The goods flowing through the area and the goods being injected into it locally created a staggeringly long list. But it worked only because there were so many players. Some kingdoms managed to control parts of it, making it hum the more smoothly. But it was a tall order, especially once the desire economy coming out of China began to heat up at the end of the millennium (Figures 2.5.1 and 2.5.2). Sung shu, written around 500 CE, detailed some of the marvels – “gems made of rhinoceros [horns],” “kingfishers’ stones” (thought to be chrysoprase), “serpent pearls,” asbestos the “wondrous fire cloth” and other “innumerable varieties of these curiosities” that came up from the south.1 Pearls would be customarily placed in the mouths of the dead, and specimens from India and the Persian Gulf were thought to have mysterious or magical qualities and considered to be particularly special. They were known as “luminous moon pearls” or “night-shining pearls” that could be obtained, it was said, from a magical “pearl tree.”2 So important was the acquisition of DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-11

The Indonesian Seaway  109

FIGURE 2.5.1 

Indonesian Seaway Sweet Spot.

FIGURE 2.5.2 

Diagram of the Indonesian Seaway.

110  The Indonesian Seaway

such items that imperial envoys were instructed to offer fine silks and gold in exchange for “bright pearls, glass, rare stones, and strange things.”3 The salaries of officials and soldiers were sometimes paid in imported sapanwood and p ­ epper instead of cash.4 The problem was that at the outset of the millennium, the Chinese ­dynasties did not control the southern ports. Ships, once past the Vietnamese coast, arrived at an area controlled by the Yüeh, who occupied the vast coastal provinces from around the modern city of Guangzhou to the Gulf of Tonkin. They were not a single political entity, but a complex series of small trader chiefdoms, nicknamed by the Chinese as Baiye or The Hundred Yüeh. It was they who already by the first century BCE were delivering the Moluccan spices, aromatic herbs and precious treasures “piled up like mountains” to the Chinese court.5 To get rid of the middleman, Qin Shi Huang (259–210 BCE), the famous First Emperor, is said of have sent a half million troops divided into five armies to conquer them. Chao T’o, the Yüeh general of the consolidated Yüeh chiefdoms, tussled with the Chinese in a series of battles. The Qin did not have an easy time of it. A passage from Huai nan tzu describes the problems the Qin faced: The Yue fled into the depth of the mountains and forests, and it was not possible to fight them. The soldiers were kept in garrisons to watch over the abandoned territories. This went on for a long time, and the soldiers went weary. They the Yue went out and attacked: the Chi’n (Qin) soldiers suffered a great defeat.6 There was a lot at stake as demonstrated by the litany of items that went into the tribute that Chao T’o sent in 179 BCE when he finally accepted the status of vassal: a pair of white jades 1,000 kingfisher feathers [from Cambodia] ten rhinoceros horns [probably from Borneo or Java] 500 purple-stripped cowries [probably from the Maldives] a vessel of cinnamon-insects [a delicacy eaten after being soaked in honey] forty pairs of live kingfishers [from Cambodia] two pairs of peacocks. [Probably from Sri Lanka or south India.]7 Needless to say, this is more than just a list of exotica. It maps the reach that the Yue had into the world beyond the horizon. The subsequent Chinese dynasties wanted to make the Yüeh not just a vassal state, but to take control of the south in a more permanent way, which they eventually did. And so, by the second century CE, Guangzhou had become a secure part of the imperial domain. In fact, Wang Gungwu has recently argued that once the Chinese came to appreciate the quality of pearls coming from Sri Lanka compared to

The Indonesian Seaway  111

the more local ones coming from the deltas of Hanoi, they had an ­incentive to develop the sea trade.8 The problem was that the Chinese cultural ambivalence to trading left them at a clear disadvantage. They were content to leave the hard work of commodity exchange in the hands of others. Jianzhen (688–763), a Chinese monk who helped to propagate Buddhism in Japan, noted that at the port of Guangzhou, “there were boats of Indian, Persian and Malay [origin] in countless numbers… There was a coming and going of white and red barbarians from [places like] Sri Lanka, Arabia or Nha-trang [in Indochina] and [people from] many different races were living [in the city].”9 Third-century Chinese documents about Langkasuka, a polity that crossed the Malay Peninsula from the early millennium onward, notes that every day, more than 10,000 traders from east and west meet there!10 Inevitably, Chinese trade was wrapped up in the nitty-gritty, sometimes brutal interplay, between imperial policy and foreign merchants, but its escalation in the twelfth century under the Southern Song Dynasty is unmistakable. It has been estimated that 20% of the Song national income came from taxes levied on incoming trade.11 Equally important was the radical escalation of Buddhist spiritual economy. In China, as Buddhism began to spread by the middle of the millennium, so too did its wealth demands. Whereas back in India the ancient Brahman tradition, on account of its beginnings in agrarian settlements, was suspicious of those who lived in cities and objected on principle to the investment of wealth and the earning of interest on investment, the ideologies of Buddhism in China welcomed the accumulation and reinvestment of wealth. Buddhist sources eulogized the setthi (wealthy merchant) and even encouraged usury. Throughout the region, temples became customers not just for metal, ceramics and building materials, but also for costly items, like aromatics and pearls, all of which advertised their overseas reach.12 The use in Buddhist architecture of pearls, needed because of their magical properties, has left little archaeological record, but a Chinese description of the famous Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, part of the former Great Bao’en Temple that was built in the fifteenth century, makes it known that apart from its shimmering porcelain, golden crown and numerous lamps hanging from its eaves, there was one string of “night-illuminating pearls,” one string of “fire-repelling pearls” and a string of “water-repelling pearls.”13 There were other factors that intensified the wealth going through the Indonesian Seaway, including the emergence of Japan as a fledgling ­imperial power. Its new capitals, first Fujiwara-kyō (藤原京, capital from 694 to 710) and then the even more impressive Heijō-kyō (平城京, capital from 710 to 740 and from 745 to 784) were modeled on the Chinese capitals and indeed were meant to demonstrate Japanese entry into the world of “international” sophistication. Buddhism was included in this package, once again, because of its ready-made economic connections with the first temple complexes appearing in the sixth century. Agarwood, camphor and musk were now

112  The Indonesian Seaway

being shipped in vast quantities; even lemons from India and Sri Lanka, packed in salt, made their way to eastern ports.14 The most important aspect that undergirded the rise of the Indonesian Seaway was the general collapse of the trans-Asiatic Silk Route in the ninth century. Regional conflict played a role, but so too a period of global warming that dried out the streams around the Taklamakan Desert. The Buddhist monasteries that had sprung up around these streams formed a chain of rest stops around the northern and southern flanks of the 1,000-kilometer-long desert. The warming conditions made the passage increasingly difficult. In 880, the great city of Chang’an, once one of the largest and grandest cities on the planet, was sacked by rebels and eventually abandoned. Trade across the steppe did not cease altogether, but it was now considerably weakened. The movement of goods through the Indonesian Seaway, despite its own complexities, now seemed a better alternative. Navigating the Straits of Malacca posed two main difficulties. The first was technical. The rigging of ships was not designed for rapid tacking from side to side that was required to sail the strait. Second, there was the problem of piracy. Traveling between two shores for a long duration exposed boats to small, faster skiffs. The first problem was solved in the sixth century with new types of rigging. The second problem was solved, at least as well as could be, with the emergence of the Srivijaya Empire, whose capital was at Palembang. Srivijaya was a well-chosen name, meaning “splendid triumph” or “prosperous victor.” Palembang was a floating city, built on stilts at the river mouth, which makes sense since its entire raison d’être was controlling the shipping lanes and keeping them free of competitors and pirates. A thirteenth-century Chinese account states that: The wall of the (capital) city is built of bricks and measures several tens of li around…People either live scattered about outside the city, or on the water on rafts of boards covered over with reeds, and these are exempt from taxation. The author also explains that there is a Buddha image: called ‘Hill of Gold and Silver, and that it is cast in gold. Each succeeding king before ascending the throne has cast a golden image to represent his person, and they are most particular to make offerings of golden vessels to these images. The king is reported to have a high crown of gold, “set with hundreds of jewels and very heavy.” The text also explains that tortoiseshell, camphor and varieties of teak wood are “exclusive of the native products,” and these

The Indonesian Seaway  113

FIGURE 2.5.3  Brunei,

Borneo, the former capital of the Brunei Sultanate, as depicted in 1881.  Engraving by Bernardo Rico.

are blended in with products brought in by Arab traders such as cardamoms, pearls, frankincense, rose water, myrrh, aloe, ivory, coral, cat’s-eyes, amber, cotton and blades.15 Archaeology has been limited for obvious reasons, but it would have been a much-expanded version of the water town capital of Brunei, Borneo, the former capital of the Brunei Sultanate, as depicted in 1881 or its modern-day survival, the Ayer water village on the Brunei River (Figure 2.5.3). In the seventh through to the ninth centuries, the Srivarya sent out ­military expeditions to better control the eastern flank of Java, Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Further to the south, on Java there were other kingdoms: the Tarumanagara (ca. fifth to seventh centuries) with strong connections to South Indian Pallava Dynasty; Sunda (seventh to tenth centuries) and the Medang (eighth to eleventh), the latter being particularly wealthy and the patrons of Borobudur. But the elites did not neglect architecture. To the north of Palembang along the Batanghari River there is a temple complex of some 80 structures on the northern bank of the river and dedicated to a Buddhist community that lived there during the seventh to thirteenth centuries CE. Built by the Malayu Kingdom that was “absorbed” by Srivijaya in the seventh century, it is a formidable complex that has not been adequately studied. Things found there include coins from the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), gold bars, boxes of various sorts as well as a bronze gong with Chinese characters, clearly indicting strong connections to China. A tenth-century merchant ship that sank off the coast of Indonesia included 400 Sri Lankan sapphires, thousands of garnets and zircons as well as vast quantities of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and quartz from various sources. In addition, there were close to 11,000 pearls. The pearls had been drilled indicating they had gone from Sri Lanka to India at some point for processing.16

114  The Indonesian Seaway

With the emergence of Islam trade networks, the Javanese became increasingly dominant in the supply chain. The Arab-Islamic traders, by the end of the millennium, controlled not just the slave trade, but also the porcelain trade coming out of China – which had only recently become a major commodity in Southeast Asia. To address the problem of quantity, the Javanese began to develop large but relatively slow ships, the largest on the seas at the time anywhere in the world. The Portuguese called them junco, a transcription of the Malay jong. Their introduction clearly demonstrates the need for an added scale to shipping that was now needed. Though the history of their construction and development is not yet clear, they are not to be confused with the Chinese “junk,” as has frequently happened. When the Portuguese arrived in Asian waters, they were confronted with these ships, which to their surprise were larger than their own. In 1511, when the fleet of Governor Alfonso de Albuquerque entered the Straits of Malacca, they encountered a junco and engaged it in battle. The event was described by Gaspar Correia, a sixteenth-century Portuguese chronicler: Seeing this, the Governor ordered his own nau to come alongside her [the junco]. This was the Flor de la Mar, which had the highest castles of all. When she managed to board the junco, her aft castle barely reached her bridge. The crew of the junco defended itself so well that they had to sail away from her again.17 Recent studies have shown that that these ships – some taking three years to build – could reach 1,000 tons, though the average was in the 400 tons to the 500 tons range. They were built shell-first with the frame cut to fit afterwards, directly opposite of European techniques. The hulls, made from teak, were not built with nails, but with dowels and bindings made from the fibrous bark of the coconut tree. They had multiple masts, usually from two to four. Scholars have identified two main fabrication points, the northern Javanese coasts around Rembang and Cirebon and the southern coast of Borneo.18 These areas were known for their teak, and it was easier to build a ship on the shore near the supply of lumber than to move the lumber. As to the design, there are affinities to the ship represented in cave number 2 at Ajunta that was drawn in the sixth century CE. It has three high masts and a bowsprit and an intricate steering gear. Pierre-Yves Manguin warns against seeing the Ajunta drawing as an “Indian” ship – as it is often described – since it seems to match what is known about Southeast Asian models as described in a third-century CE document (Figure 2.5.4): The people of foreign parts call ships po. The large ones are more than fifty meters in length and stand out of the water four to five meters. They carry from six to seven hundred persons, with 10,000 bushels of cargo [according to various interpretations, from 250 to 1,000 tons].19

The Indonesian Seaway  115

FIGURE 2.5.4 Teak

forest on the island of Muna, south central Indonesia. Credit: Edward Parker/Alamy.

Quick turnarounds of the ships were impossible; large ocean-going vessels, sometimes carrying many hundreds of men, had to tie up for months in harbor awaiting favorable winds; there they were the focus of port-based life and a magnet for the hundreds of small ships that belonged to the coastal feeder traffic. The Javanese boats were extraction machines. For every ship, there was a proportionally increasing number of canoes, rafts, pack animals and porters moving into remote corners of the region, integrating a system of rivers and trails – including centers, markets, entrepôts and feeder routes – that connected the interior with the coasts, offering inland populations the

FIGURE 2.5.5 

Southeast Asia in the Long Millenium.

116  The Indonesian Seaway

chance to seek the most favorable economic and political conditions for their transactions.20 Because of its complexity, the Indonesian Seaway could never be placed into a hegemonic-oriented imperial box, guaranteeing that it would remain a fuzzy system. But it was precisely this fuzziness that made the system work. With the arrival of the European colonialists and then with the emergence of nation-states, this fuzziness was molded bit by bit into the frameworks of a capitalist system that could be more easily managed and its wealth generation better exploited by a new range of elites. But until then, the Indonesian Seaway lay at the center of the increasingly global world (Figure 2.5.5). Notes 1 Friedrich Hirth, China and the Roman Orient (Leipzig: Georg Hirth, 1885), 46. 2 Robin A. Donkin, Beyond Price: Pearls and Pearl Fishing Origins to the Age of Discoveries (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1998), 68. 3 Hirth, Ibid., 42. 4 Gang Deng, “The Foreign Staple Trade of China in the Pre-Modern Era,” The International History Review 19, no. 2 (May 1997): 257. 5 Guy, Lost Kingdoms, 28. 6 Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 18. 7 Wang Gungwu, “The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 31, no. 2 (1958): 13. 8 Ibid., 21. 9 Marcus Bingenheimer, “A Translation of the Tōdaiwajō tōseiden 唐大和上東 征傳,” (Part 2) The Indian International Journal of Buddhist Studies 5 (2004): 142–181. 10 John Guy, Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 28. 11 Zheng Yangwen, China on the Sea (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 39. 12 Wang Gungwu, “The Nanhai Trade: A Study of the Early History of Chinese Trade in the South China Sea,” Journal of the Malayan Branch Royal Asiatic Society 30, no. 2 (1958): 53. 13 W. Adams, The Modern Voyager and Traveller Through Europe, Asia, Africa and America, Vol. 2 (London: Henry Fischer, 1831): 394. 14 Berthold Laufer, “The Lemon in China and Elsewhere,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 54, no. 2 (June 1934): 147. 15 Chu-fan-chï, Chau Ju-Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911), 60, 61. 16 Sri Lanka Sunday Times (February 22, 2015). https://www.pressreader.com/ sri-lanka/sunday-times-sri-lanka/20150222/284945313467534. 17 As quoted and discussed in Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11, no. 2 (September 1980): 267. 18 A. Cortesao, ed., The Suma Oriental of Tome Pires (London: The Hakluyt S­ ociety, 1944), 183, 189, 195, 226. 19 Manguin, “The Southeast Asian Ship,” 274. 20 Heather Sutherland, “Geography as Destiny? The Role of Water in Southeast Asian History,” A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories (21–70), ed. Peter Boomgaard (Leiden: Brill, 20017), 30.

6 THE SUB-HIMALAYAN – YUNGUI PLATEAU SWEET SPOT

At the end of the fifth century – though the date is not certain – an ­astonishing scene played itself out along the banks of the Mekong River in what is now Loas. A new city was founded. Its houses were one story of sticks and thatch elevated off the ground, as is common in the region. It was, however, not really a city, but a sacred palace complex such as had been created throughout Southeast Asia from the first century CE onward. Even so, this place, known as Shrestapura, was different.1 Whereas other cities had been close to ports and near tracks of land that could be easily converted into rice paddy districts, of which Anuradhapura had been the prototype, this one was in the middle of nowhere, some 630 or so kilometers upstream from the expansive, fertile Mekong Delta that had been developed for rice already in the centuries before the Common Era. The new city was given an auspicious name. Shresta is an Indic name for Lord Vishnu and means perfection. Pura means city. This “Perfect City” was laid out as a square about 2.5 kilometers on a side. The founding ceremony would have been an elaborate and a wellconceived spectacle. The kings of the Chela, who dominated this region, were to make this city their capital. Their priests and oracle interpreters and all their retinue, along with the future inhabitants, would have been on hand. After all, this was no humble village, but a “heaven on earth.” It was sited on the eastern flank of a mountain that was newly proclaimed as an embodiment of the fabled Mt. Meru, the abode of the gods. Known as Lingaparvata (Linga Mountain) (and now known as Phou Khao), it had a distinctive phallic-shaped lingam on its peak. On its flank, there was a sacred spring that hosted an ancient sanctuary, Vat Phu, which had carved depictions of a crocodile and two serpents and that was part of a widespread indigenous animist/ancestor cult that came to be Hinduized in the fifth century and most DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-12

118  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

probably in the context of the creation of the city.2 It was accessed by a processional route. The water that gushed dripped out of the rocks – still venerated by the locals – was nothing less than the liquid form of Vishnu himself, filling the nearby water tanks that, in turn, nurtured the newly created rice paddies set out along the shores of the Mekong River (Figure 2.6.1). There are no documents relating to this event, and archaeology has barely scratched the surface of this place, but one can only assume that the extraction of agarwood and other forest luxury goods, such as feathers, honey and crocodile oil, had made the reward well worth the risk. Crocodiles may have been venerated by Cambodian forest cultures, but that did not stop them from making crocodile oil. Chinese traditional medicine as well as Southeast Asian medicine used crocodile oil from the fat as skin ointment for burns and scalds.3 Still today, crocodile farms in Cambodia sell to buyers in China, Thailand and Vietnam to create oil, leather products and other commodities. Shrestapura was located where the various forest goods could be collected and moved, not just downstream but upstream as well. After all, the city was just some 600 kilometers south of the boundaries with the Kingdom of Nanzhao. The Kingdom of Nanzhao (653–902) and its successor, the Kingdom of Dali (from 930 to ca. 1253), governed large swaths of territory that extended into parts of modern-day Burma, Laos, Vietnam, Tibet and the provinces of Sichuan and Guizhou. Though trade with these parts had been ongoing for centuries, it was only with the emergence of the Kingdom of Nanzhao

FIGURE 2.6.1 

Vat Phu. Credit: Basile Morin/Wikimedia Commons.

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  119

as a regional power that this mountainous area become more organized into a complex system of exchange. Facilitating this was the introduction of Buddhism that came with a ready-made economic/management system that allowed undeveloped regions like these to connect themselves to the wealth generation of global flows. Here, as elsewhere, a small start-up, animist kingdoms allied itself with the large, trans-regional institutional framework of affluence that Buddhism provided. The introduction of Buddhism was perfectlty timed to transform the region’s economy, and give the area strategic importance. At the time, the Chinese dynasties lacked the resources to invade this remote and mountainous territory, so they appealed to local authorities by conferring titles, gifts and military assistance. Over time, these regional powers would become increasingly problematic for the Chinese, but until the thirteenth century, they were in no position to assert their hegemony directly.4 Being on a type of threshold between India and China explains that though the artisans in Nanzhao seem to have come mainly from China, the theological narrative oriented itself to India.5 The much-understudied urban history of the Nanzhao tells a slightly different story. The capital of Nanzhao was a place called Taihe, a compact, triangular town tucked into the protective flank of the north-south oriented Cang Mountain range. Around 780, the kingdom, flush with its wealth, needed a new capital city, one that proclaimed itself as a regional, geopolitical power. It was called Dali and was located about 6 kilometers to the north of Taihe. Like Shrestapura, it was square, about 2.5 kilometers on the side (Figure 2.6.2). Whereas Taihe had grown from a village into a town in the conventional manner, Dali was a city from the start, stamped onto the site in bold and certain terms. Founding a city is no small undertaking, especially in remote forested regions; yet, one would be hard pressed to find either Shrestapura or Dali even mentioned in books on urban history. The theological orientation of Dali may have been Buddhism, but like Shrestapura, the new city followed

FIGURE 2.6.2 Comparison

Laos.

of the site conditions of Dali, China and Shrestapura,

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the basic equation of mandala and water management in a theologically empowered landscape that was typical of Southeast Asia. Dali has two large water control tanks on its eastern flank that collect water from the mountains to irrigate the rice paddies. And rice, we should remember, was not food, but a specialized, sacred plant. In other words, like Shrestapura, Dali was a city of devotionally grounded affluence. The two tanks, like the two tanks at Vat Phu, reference the two famous holy lakes at the base of Mount Kaliash in Tibet, a site that is sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists. Unlike Shrestapura, Dali did survive into the modern era, including, to some extent the outline of the city. Also surviving is the Three Temple complex, named after elegant pagoda towers made of brick and plastered white. The main tower, the almost 70-meter high Qianxun Pagoda, was modeled on the Xiaoyan Pagoda in Xi’an. The reflecting pool that is incorporated into the design was more than just an aesthetic feature, but a show-off piece that demonstrated and symbolized the reengineering of the land for rice cultivation in the immediate area of the city. Nearby is the Chongsheng Temple, the kingdom’s royal temple, which was built in the ninth century and subsequently expanded. It had almost 900 rooms and some 11,400 paintings, three pavilions and seven buildings and was one the largest Buddhist centers in Southeast Asia. What Anuradhapura was in the early part of the first millennium, a Buddhist mega-sanctuary, the Chongsheng Temple, was for the YunGui Plateau area.6 The kingdom would, of course, have been a Buddhist/animist hybrid, as was typical throughout the mountain regions. The Qianxun Pagoda, for example has an inscription – “Forever Control Mountains and Rivers” – intended to magically guard against natural disasters, particularly earthquakes and floods. How the multiple and complex economic/cultural/spiritual world transactions were conducted in Dali was never recorded. The history books tell only the usual story of the struggle for dynastic control, tribal conflict and political uncertainty (Figure 2.6.3).

FIGURE 2.6.3 

The Three Pagodas, Dali, China. Credit: Michelle Burgess/Alamy.

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The rise of the Kingdoms of Nanzhao and Dali coincided with the rapid development of trade exchanges in the entire area that I call the Sub­ Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot. The rugged YunGui Plateau extends from the Himalayas in a southeasterly direction toward Thailand and Laos to effectively cut off China from any direct access toward India. It is the source of a wide array of south flowing rivers: Mekong (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), Irrawaddy (Myanmar), Brahmaputra (India), Choa Phrayia (Thailand), and Red (Vietnam), to name the more prominent ones. Essential to the movement of goods, they formed a complex set of downstream/upstream relationships. The whole had numerous entry and exit points, of which Shrestapura, to the south, was just one of several “feeder” cities. The Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot is sometimes referred to as the Southwest Silk Route. This is a mistake since silk was not one of the primary trade commodities. Furthermore, the word silk emphasizes China rather than the affluent chiefdoms and kingdoms that made it all hum (Figure 2.6.4). One of the earliest feeder states were those along the Irrawaddy River. They are known as the Pyu city-states. One of these was Sri Ksetra, founded perhaps in the second century CE and developed in importance until the ninth century. It is possible that the city had connections to Buddhist Sri Lanka, for Sri Kresta, like Anuradhapura, was in a dry zone that in order to make rice, necessary for sustenance, ritual and trade, required extensive hydro engineering. Much of that engineering still operates today, even though the city has long since disappeared.7 It was designed roughly in the shape of

FIGURE 2.6.4 

Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot.

122  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

an oval. Just like Shrestapura and later Dali, this city – even if there was a ­predecessor ­village – was no village. It was an international trading post created by Buddhist trader elites who aimed to organize the gold and ruby extraction from the areas to the north further up the Irrawaddy. The name Sri Ksetra, which means Field of Fortune, was clearly set to send a message. Because the tendency is to see these places as “between” India and China, we forget the drama of extraction and exchange that made up life in the Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot. Remnants of the once vibrant cross-regional trade still exist. In mid-April, over four or five days are set aside for a fair that draws thousands of people who encamp on the hillside above Dali from all over for several days of buying, selling, and socializing. The commodities that moved in this space were tea, salt, potash, pearls, cowries and rice, and it required several upland and downland/mountain- ocean exchanges – almost all of it conducted, one needs to recall, without writing. A central element in the fair is the horse. Though the history of horse trade is much understudied, both China and India were in constant need of horses for prestige and war. In the first part of the millennium, horses mostly came from Mongolia, but in the third century with the pickup of trade to Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma, horses became essential. Though smaller and shorter than their northern counterparts, they had distinct advantages since they were comfortable in subtropical climates.8 Even into early modern times, northern Vietnam was described as “a land of many horses” (Figure 2.6.5).9 Given that the breeding of these horses was not in the purview of the Chinese emperors, they had to barter with the mountain chiefs using lowland salt. China ruled the lowland areas from 111 BCE to 939 CE, and controlled the salt areas of Đặng Châu and Khoái Châu (in modern Hưng Yên).10 Trade was vigorous. The Song officially opened over a dozen markets in Sichuan and Guangxi during the tenth and eleventh centuries CE. An Office of Horse

FIGURE 2.6.5 The horse market at Bac Ha Market in North West Vietnam. Credit:

Paul Gibson/Alamy.

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  123

Trade was even created, establishing the acquisition of horses as a state-level project. The trade also went to the west with Bengal serving as the terminus. Bengal, which had risen as a regional power in the ninth century, dominated most of the Gangetic Plain and made a concerted effort to develop the horse for its military purposes. A twelfth-century document eulogistically states that the sky became dark with the dust arising from the hoofs of the countless war horses that were presented as tribute to the monarch of the Pala Empire that originated in the region of Bengal and that at that time controlled northern India. Well-trained war horses were the costliest among the 25 articles traded back from Bengal to China. The Pala were eager to make the difficult journey from China to India as conflict-free as possible and sent no fewer than 14 missions to China. The Kingdom of Bagan in the upper Irrawaddy River played a critical role. Its capital, which flourished from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries CE, was in a dry area that was not ideal for agriculture but perfect for the grazing of horses. The Chinese customs official Zhao Rugua (Chao Ju-kua), who compiled information about the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, reported on “a great plenty of horses” ridden in Bagan without a saddle.11 Another commodity that went through this system was potash, a potassiumrich salt, its importance a much unrecognized element of the region’s wealthproducing economy. It was critical in porcelain manufacturing. Because potash has a low surface tension, it is a choice option for ceramic glazes, allowing the glaze to freely flow over the surface of the clay. The Chinese needed potash for their famous glazes, meaning that they were dependent on the potash coming through this system. One of the main sources was Nuodeng in the highlands of the YunGui Plateau, about 80 kilometers to the west of Dali. Though still mined, the industry is now mostly nationalized (Figure 2.6.6).

FIGURE 2.6.6 A

woman, Ayi Yang, pictured in her home with a block of locally harvested salt used for curing Nuodeng ham. Credit: Dave Tacon.

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Yet another element in this exchange system was Assam tea, which was highly prized in China and which is still today produced. It is set in the area of the east/west flowing Brahmaputra River with a unique rainforest-like ­climate. It contains some of the most productive soils in the world. During the first millennium, it was controlled by the Kingdom of Kamarupa (from ca. 350 CE to 1140 CE) that sought to stabilize its various cultural elements. Back then, the tea was compressed into small bricks as these are less susceptible to physical damage incurred during transportation (Figure 2.6.7). The rise of tea here as well as in northern Laos had a good deal to do with the collapse of the silk trade, which had been the imperial monopoly of old and which had been used as a form of money for 1,000 years. But by the thirteenth century, silk was being produced in various places along the Silk Route and even in Damascus, meaning that its price had dropped as accessibility increased. Tea was an excellent alternative, its general popularity spreading in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) when it was often associated with Buddhist monks who drank it during the long hours of prayer and meditation. The fact that the Chinese did not control tea-producing areas – at least not at first – placed tea at the center of geopolitical problem. It meant that the Chinese had to look once again to the south for imperial stability as tea bricks were used as barter money throughout the trade route system. They were even brought up by caravans up to Mongolia and Siberia. The locals

FIGURE 2.6.7  Tea

garden workers returning to their home after morning work at Kalaigaon, 2015.  Credit: Dheerajdeka11/Wikimedia Commons.

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  125

in Siberia, in fact, preferred brick tea money to metallic coins because of its beneficial use as a medicine.12 The Kingdom of Kamarupa was more than just a provider of tea. On the border between India, Bhutan and Myanmar, it regulated the trade between the mountains and the valleys through a series of trade fairs called dooars, located in the outer foothills of the Himalayas. These dooars still exist, though, of course, in a much diminished form, as in the cities of Naharlagun (Arunachal Pradesh, India) and Jalpaiguri (West Bengal, India). With Kunming and Dali at the eastern end of the system and the Kingdom of Kamarupa at the western end, the Kingdom of Bagan (ca. 850–ca. 1300) in-between began to unify the regions in the middle in what would later constitute modern-day Burma (Myanmar). Their elites were not native to the region, but a group had entered from the north to take over the territory along the Irrawaddy that was occupied by the Pyus. Their intent, as at Sri Lanka and elsewhere, was once again to link Buddhism with economic potential. The rubies in the upper hills, the gold along the shores of the Irrawaddy and Chindwin rivers and the horse-breeding plains in-between made for a clear economic profile for any who could master it. During the kingdom’s heyday at the end of the millennium, it was so wealthy that the children of royalty are purported to have played with gold and silver toys. And it was not just gold that Bagan possessed. There were gems in the mountain valley streams and to the south, quartz near the mouth of Tavoy River (Dawei, Myanmar).13 Another precious commodity that the Bagan controlled was amber. The Chinese, though they were familiar with it since the first century CE, developed a particular interest from tenth century onward. It was part of what some scholars have called a scent revolution. Though scent-making had been part of Chinese culture for ages, the rapid influx of scent materials of various types at the end of the first millennium meant it spread to a wide range of uses.14 Exotic Baltic amber arrived as tribute, but large qualities were also imported from Myanmar and more specifically, from Hukawng Valley. Called Burmese amber, it is still mined to this day (Figure 2.6.8).15 The elites of Bagan were in an advantageous position geopolitically. By this time, Anuradhapura had fallen on hard times and was mostly abandoned. Malaria had swept across the northern rice paddies, forcing the replaceming kingdoms to locate their more modest capitals in the mountains. Borobudur had been abandoned as well around 1000 CE. But if Bagan was to take over the mantel as the new Buddhist “heaven on earth,” it would have to compete against sites that by then had already become elevated to the level of the mythological. King Anawrahta (r. 1044–1077), founder of the Bagan Empire, did not disappoint. The pagoda that he commissioned, the Shwezigon and completed in 1102 towered almost 50 meters high. It was gold-plated from top to bottom as a literal advertisement of the kingdom’s affluence. Though technically Buddhist, it has at its base 37 small shrines called Nat Shrines

126  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.6.8  Miners

digging and sorting Burmese amber at Noije Bum in the Hukawng Valley. Credit: Sieghard Ellenberger “Burmese Amber Fossils, Mining, Sales and Profits.” Geoconservation Research, 2020.

dedicated to local animist deities. Subsequent kings added more stupas in the plain surrounding the capital, thousands of them, hundreds of which were also covered in gold leaf. The result was without doubt one of the most impressive Buddhist landscapes on earth (Figures 2.6.9 and 2.6.10). The difficulty of this sweet spot system was that just as the horse ­breeders and horse trainers were outside of the control of the traditional, sedentary powers in India and China, so too was the money used to pay them. The most common exchange mechanism was the cowry shell.16 In the Bengal area, cowry was the chief currency for commercial transactions in most parts of the entire region, and revenue was also collected in cowries.17 Cowries came from the Maldives, some 500 miles southwest of Sri Lanka. Though cowries had not been used in China since the second century BCE, they remained in use in Southeast Asia during the first millennium (and even well into the seventeenth century). The physical quality of cowries plays a part in its ubiquity. They cannot be counterfeited or adulterated, and regardless of how they are kept, whether in hoards in the ground or as ornaments, they do not lose their luster. They are easily transportable and do not easily break or fracture (Figure 2.6.11). The Maldives are by no means easily accessed, but since the Bengal Sultanate, established in 1352, still used cowry shells as legal tender, it was

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  127

FIGURE 2.6.9 The Shwezigon Pagoda, Pagan, Myanmar. Credit: DIMMIS/Wikimedia

Commons.

FIGURE 2.6.10 Temples

and pagodas in Pagan, Myanmar. Credit: Corto Maltese 1999/Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 2.6.11 Comparison

of a cowrie shell from the Maldives (left) with one from the Philippines (right).

128  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

one of the island’s principal trading partners, much to their strategic advantage. Though it is not clear when the Maldives shells in particular began to circulate, it was well before the fourteenth century. According to a ninthcentury Arabic account: The wealth of the inhabitants consists in Shells [Cowries], and even the Queen’s Treasury is full of them. Their Shells they have from the Sea, at times when they rise up to the Surface; at which times the Inhabitants throw Branches of the Coco-nut tree into the Sea, and the Shells stick to them. They call them Kabtaje.18 The shells, according to a fifteenth-century Chinese traveler, were “piled into heaps like mountains.”19 There was more to the process than simply collection. There is clearly a relationship between the mining of the shells, moon worship and the role of women, since the shells were collected by women at full moon. The whole island participated in the auspicious moment. According to a seventeenth-century observer, when a new moon is observed: the king has volleys of cannon and musketry fired; and trumpets, drums, and other instruments are played….Forthwith they say their prayers, and take each other’s hands, giving their ordinary salutation; then put their hands over their eyes, and cover their faces for a long space; and so continue their devotions throughout the following day. They then clean their houses, courtyards and streets: while at the entrances of the mosques, and at all house doors, as well without as within, they place on each side coconut shells cut in half, like wooden bowls, full of white sand, upon which they lay embers, and throughout the night they burn thereon aromatic gums, scented woods, and perfumes, and inside their houses in like manner, at the corners of their beds and elsewhere. On all feast days they daub and decorate their doors and furniture with sandal and other aromatic woods and paste of perfumery; but above all they solemnise four new moons in the year more than the others.20 Once harvested, the shells served as payment by the local communities to the queen who exchanged the shells mainly for rice, which does not grow on the islands. Without this exchange, the islands would, in fact, be uninhabitable. Ibn Batuta, a fourteenth century Arab geographer, was the first to give the values. One dinar of gold would buy some ten barrels, each holding 100,000 cowries. That same amount would be worth over 1,000 dinars in the Sudan.21 A profit of a 1000/1. The reason for the special place for Maldives cowries

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  129

was that they were smaller than the ones found elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and since they were counted by their number and not weight, the Maldive cowries promised huge returns on the investment. It was so lucrative that it was obviously well worth the risk of the extra delivery time. Franqois Peyrard, who was wrecked on the Maldives in 1602, counted 30 or 40 ships sailing back loaded with them with no other cargo.22 The Khmer in Cambodia had a unique position in the Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Interaction Zone. In many respects, they seemed like a conventional Southeast Asian palace-based empire, but they were not. They took over the mantel of regional control from the Chenla and also, so it seems, learned the valuable lesson about city building and placement, moving even further inland 140 miles south to a place called Isanapura or the city of Ishana, a deity associated with Shiva and seen as the nourisher and controller of all living beings. It was positioned along a tributary to the Mekong, the Stung Sen. Greater rice cultivation meant that it could sustain a larger population and that, in turn, meant more temples. A massive amount of wealth was now flowing in. Ma Duanlin, a Chinese historical writer and encyclopedists, described King Ishanavarman’s sumptuous court at Isanapura, with the king wearing a crown “of gold with precious stones, pearl pendants, and attended by five great ministers.”23 In the ninth century, the capital was moved again about 80 kilometers west to Angkor. The name of the new temple city was Hariharalaya (the city of “Vishnu and Shiva”) with the outlines of its vast remains still visible. The experiments at Shrestapura and Isanapura were put to use, but now on a huge scale. It was one of the most ambitious urban foundings in the world at that time. It was roughly square, 4.5 miles on the side. By comparison, Baghdad, which was founded around the same time, had a diameter of only two kilometers. At the center of Hariharalaya, there was a temple called Bakong that rivaled Borobudur in originality and scale. Built a few decades after Borobudur, it is possible that the artisans and engineers who mastered Borobudur had been brought to Angkor to repeat their magic. What we see today is just the dried bones of a building. It was painted in bright colors and the spire was inlaid with precious metal, reflecting in the sun. As the city prospered, new city-­palace compounds were laid out in the region and new, ever larger and evermore extravagant temples were constructed, the largest being the famous Angkor Wat, the largest temple in the world. It was an architectural, artistic and engineering feat of unparalleled proportion (Figure 2.6.12). Angkor was, however, 200 kilometers north and 400 kilometers west of the nearest ports. It was also some 500 kilometers to the south of the SubHimalayan – YunGui Plateau Interaction Zone. The Khmer were, in other words, in an in-between zone, in an area that was only lightly settled prior to their arrival. It was literally a backwater. But it was not disconnected from the world. On the contrary, it was the source for agarwood, crocodile skins

130  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.6.12 

Bakong, Cambodia. Credit: Anandajoti Bhikku.

FIGURE 2.6.13 Chinese

imperial queen’s headdress from the Ming Dynasty with blue tian-tsui decoration.

oils and above all, the feathers of the local kingfisher. The Chinese court had already begun to develop a particular taste for the iridescent blue feathers of the Cambodian kingfisher, using it as a crown ornament or as an adornment in hairpins, headdresses, fans and screens. The art of applying the feathers was called tian-tsui (“dotting with kingfishers”) and was used from hairpins, headdresses and fans to panels and screens. The finest pieces of kingfisher art were reserved for royalty or high-ranking Chinese government officials (Figure 2.6.13). The most expensive, commissioned pieces used a particular species of kingfisher from the shores of the Mekong River. It was only a matter of time before the forest people along the Mekong organized themselves so as to better procure and deliver these and other precious forest goods (Figure 2.6.14). The whole was an extremely risky proposition. Entering the still “virgin” forests of Cambodia was difficult. The Mekong River that flooded the great inland lake Tonle Sap was not the heavy silt-bearing river that flooded the old center of rice growing, the Mekong Delta. The soil was sandy and unsuited

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  131

FIGURE 2.6.14 

Mekong kingfisher. Credit: Barnabas/Shutterstock.

FIGURE 2.6.15 Khmer

bridge, known as Kampong Kdei Bridge, on the road from Angkor to Phnom Chisor. Credit: Robnaw/Adobe Stock.

even for the canals that were necessary to move water from place to place. And yet, despite all of this, the Khmer with great determination, modeling themselves on Anuradhapura, transformed the forest into a rice palace, heaven-on-earth. For the span of three centuries, successive rulers escalated the terms of this engagement, drawing as much out of the land as possible. There was, of course, a problem. The kingdom was particularly in need of metal, one of the essential aspects of military control, not to mention silk from China and cotton from India. Being in a type of no-man’s zone, transportation was key, and so Angkor built one of the most extensive highway systems in Southeast Asia. It consisted of over 1,000 kilometers of raised earthen roads fitted with support infrastructure, masonry bridges, “rest house” temples and water tanks. The roads worked their way north toward the Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Interaction Zone and certainly also southward to the ports (Figure 2.6.15).

132  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.6.16 

West Baray, Angkor, Cambodia. Credit: Dario Severi.

Such extreme effort was not normative among chiefdoms, but where opportunity presents itself, who was not to give it a try. Clearly, the market for rice, along with luxury forest commodities, including agarwood, was driving the whole operation, but the Khmer had no idea what was controlling the market. On the surface, they grew rice not as “agriculture” but as a deity. The more that was grown, the more the deities favored them. There was, therefore, no holding back this expansionary equation. For the project to work, the engineers even developed a new technology, the baray, itself a Khmer word. A baray is basically a man-made water tank made by burning up the edges. When it was filled, the elevation of the water over the surrounding fields allowed the water to be used to irrigate nearby rice fields. The larger the tank, the more square feet of paddies. The last tank they built at Angkor was enormous, 8 by 2.1 kilometers, the largest man-made water system in the world until the modern era (Figure 2.6.16). To offset their remoteness, the Khmer defeated the Champa and other ­neighbors to destroy the competition, and for a while at least the Khmer were the kings of rice; they could hire the best architects and build some of the most fantastic buildings on the planet, showstoppers of pretense, but there was no resilience. Like Gary, Indiana, the steel town, the economy was not a diversified one, and the one attribute to the survivability of any civilization is its capacity for diversification.24 The Khmer was from the start in a boomto-bust situation. Let me summarize. The Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot was far-flung in nature. We have to imagine the entry and exit points at Kamarupa and Dali with Bagan and the kingdoms in Thailand and Laos as gears that enhance the flow of goods and materials. The unusual element was the addition of Angkor, a high-risk economy that could only have sustained itself in the context the preexisting Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau interactions, producing a complex interconnected transcontinental system that defined

The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot  133

the uphill trade between China and India. It combined horse breeding zones of the Vietnamese highlands with potash collecting in the YunGui Plateau, with the gem and gold mining in Burma, with tea growing in Assam, agarwood from Cambodia and Vietnam and feathers and crockodile oil from the Mekong River. Greasing the system were the cowries from the Maldives. This entire zone existed without any centralizing authority and even without any attempt to centralize or organize it. As all sweet spot zones, it was vulnerable on several scores. The collapse of the Angkor civilization and then of Bagan brought the system down to a more normative level that made over-the-top expenditures on architecture no longer possible. Temples and palaces continued to be built in Thailand and Vietnam, but they were no longer pitched at the scale of the grand narrative.

Notes 1 It is now known as Vat Phou after a ruined Khmer Hindu temple complex c­ entered on a sacred spring. 2 For an exhaustive study, see Joachim Gabel, “Earliest Khmer Stone Architecture and its Origins, A Case Study of Megalithic Remains and Spirit Belief at the Site of Vat Phu,” Journal of Global Archaeology 3–130. 3 Sanders Richard, “Chinese Ecological Agriculture: Shengtai nongye,” in Prospects for Sustainable Development in the Chinese Countryside (Lonon: Routledge, 2018), 66–76. 4 Megan Bryson, “Nation Founder and Universal Saviour: Guanyin and Buddhist Networks in the Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms,” in Buddhist Encounters and Identities Across East Asia (81–107), eds. Ann Heirman, Carmen Meinert, and Christoph Anderl (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 86. 5 Ibid., 97. 6 It was not unsimilar to the new Champa city of Shrestaupra on the Mekong, though it was designed as a Hindu city. But how have this and many of the other urban foundings in the region has not been adequately studied? 7 Condensed from Janice Stargardt, “Sri Ksetra, 3rd Century BCE to 6th Century CE: Indianization, Synergies, Creation,” in Primary Sources and Asian Pasts (220–265), eds., Peter C. Bisschop and Elizabeth A. Cecil (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 229. 8 Keith W. Taylor. The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 50. 9 Thanh Nha Nguyen, Tableau Économique du Vietnam aux XVIIe et XVIIIe Siec̀ les (Paris: Bibliothèque Bich-Thanh-Thu. 1965), 141, 142. 10 John Whitmore, “The Rise of the Coast: Trade, State and Culture in Early Dąi Viét,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (2007): 109. 11 Ju Kua Chao (Zhao Rugua), Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-Fan-Chï. Trans. and annotated Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911), 58. 12 Wolfgang Bertsch, “The Use of Tea Bricks as Currency among the Tibetans,” The Tibet Journal 34, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 54. 13 Edward Balford, The Cyclopædia of India and of Eastern and Southern Asia in Three Volumes, Vol. 3 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1885), 917.

134  The Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot

14 Olivia Milburn, “Aromas, Scents, and Spices: Olfactory Culture in China before the Arrival of Buddhism,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 136, no. 3 (July to September 2016): 459. 15 Jenny F. So, “Scented Trails: Amber as Aromatic in Medieval China,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 23, no. 1 (January 2013): 85–101, 86. 16 See: Peter Boomgaard, “Early Globalization, Cowries as Currency, 600 BCE– 1900,” in Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History, eds. Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV, 2008), 13–22. 17 In the Bengal area, cowry was the chief currency for commercial transactions in most parts of the entire region, and revenue was also collected in cowries. Sun Laichen, “Ming- Southeast Asian Overland Interactions, 1368–1644,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000. See also Hans Ulrich Vogel, “Cowry Trade and Its Role in the Economy of Yunnan: From the Ninth to the Mid-Seventeenth Century, Part V,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36, no. 3 (1993): 212–252. 18 Abū Zayd Ḥasan ibn Yazīd Sīrāfī, Sulaymān al-Tājir, Ancient Accounts of India and China, trans. Eusebius Renaudot (London, 1733: AES Reprint 1995), 3, 1–2. The text is thought to date to 851 and is ascribed to Soleiman al-Tajir, Soloman the merchant, who seems to have been a citizen of Siraf. See Suhanna Shafiq, Seafarers of the Seven Seas: the maritime culture in the Kitāb ʻAjāʼib al-Hind (The book of the marvels of India) by Buzurg Ibn Shahriyār (d. 399/1009) (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2013), 23, 24. 19 Ma Huan, Yingya Shenglan, The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores (1433), trans. from the Chinese texts, ed. Feng Chengjun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970), 150. Ma Huan was the Muslim interpreter of the famous Cheng Ho, commander of the Chinese Fleet. His descriptions are based on personal observation of 20 countries from Champa (Central Vietnam) in the East to Mecca in the West. 20 Francois Pyard, The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, v.1 (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1887), 134, 135. 21 Ibid., 273. (For simplification, I rounded the figures.) 22 The voyage of Francois Pyrard, Ibid., 273. 23 George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Translated by Susan Brown Cowing (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1968), 74–76. 24 Timothy Earle, “The Evolution of Chiefdoms,” Current Anthropology 30, no. 1 (1989): 85.

7 THE EAST AFRICAN COASTAL SWEET SPOT

The heady mix of gold, iron, ivory, tortoiseshell, frankincense, myrrh, slaves, ostrich feathers, hides, skins and exotic animals, all in close proximity to the vibrant flow of trade along the Red Sea meant that the Horn of Africa was destined to become a sweet spot of considerable magnitude. This was true already in the time of the ancient Egyptians when the Kingdom of Kush at Meroë rose to prominence. Its soldiers served as part of the royal guard, and in the eighth century BCE, its ruler even lorded over all of Egypt. Eager to demonstrate their connections to Egypt and indeed “borrow” some of its history, their tombs featured mini pyramids. It was a tomb form that had not been used in Egypt since the end of the Old Kingdom around 2200 BC but that was used here to signify a type of return to tradition, even if instituted by non-Egyptian rulers (Figure 2.7.1). Meroë was a boom to bust world. Its outward-oriented economy was based on iron production supplemented by exports of ivory and exotic animals. It connected Egypt and the Mediterranean with India and was described by Herodotus as “a great city … said to be the mother city of the other Ethiopian cities.”1 The immense remains of ancient iron production found at Meroë not only testify to the significant quantities of iron produced, but also indicate the vast quantities of labor and raw materials required to support such a level of production. The ore was not hard to come by, and was surface-mined from the hills not even a mile to the east and north of their famous tombs.2 But iron needed massive amounts of charcoal for its kilns; archaeological evidence shows that the charcoal came from acacia trees which are native to the region. That none of these trees currently exists in this area indicates that the acacia-rich wooded landscape of the area was blighted by the production.3 The work also required extensive slave labor, DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-13

136  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.7.1 

Pyramids of Meroë, Sudan. Credit: mbrand85.

meaning that military expeditions were mounted to neighboring territories; when wood was no longer available and too expensive to import or when slaves were too difficult to acquire or all of this in some combination with other unknown external factors, the system disintegrated. The population moved elsewhere, most into the orbit of the rising Aksumite Kingdom, some 400 miles southeast. In 330 CE, the Aksumites sacked Meroë and took its remaining inhabitant as slaves. Aksum had distinct advantages over Meroë. Whereas Meroë was mostly a mono-economy of metal augmented by trade, Aksum was a trade-and-craft economy augmented by a metal economy. The slag from its former kilns still coats the site about a kilometer north of the modern city. Aksum had the advantage of a cereal crop known as teff that grows only in Ethiopia and does not require much rainfall. Another important crop was flax, which was not just a food source but also used for sails, and was thus important commodity for the passing ships. Aksum was also close to the goldfields of Asmera, Eritrea, 70 miles to the northeast.4 Though not on the shore, Aksum controlled Red Sea ports and became a hub in the trade from the African interior.5 And then there was ivory, as mentioned in the first-century CE Periplus of the Erythraean Sea: On this part of the coast, opposite Oreine, 20 stades in from the sea is Adulis, a fair-sized village. From Adulis it is a journey of three days to Koloc, an inland city that is the first trading post for ivory, and from there another five days to the metropolis itself, which is called Axomitcs [Axumj]; into it is brought all the ivory from beyond the Nile through what is called Kyeneion [modern southern Egypt and Sudan], and from there down to Adulis. The mass of elephants and rhinoceroses that are slaughtered all inhabit the upland regions, although on rare occasions they are also seen along the shore around Adulis itself.6

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  137

That the Aksumite became a center for ivory trade is easily explained, since by the fifth century, the North African elephant, the Loxodonta africana pharaohensis, had been hunted to extinction, and for a period ivory was indeed a rare commodity.7 Furthermore, because elephants in India and Sri Lanka were more valuable alive than dead, ivory could not be easily sourced from there. It was only a matter of time before hunters zeroed in on the southern African savannah elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). Their habitat is the wide range of savannah that circles the rain forests from south Sudan to Zimbabwe. The Aksumites were the leading organizers of this ivory trade, largely because there was at the time little organized competition from further south. In the first millennium, the main importer was not Europe – or not yet, at least – but China. To dominate that export, the Aksumites controlled the Gulf of Aden – charging port fees and protecting boats from the local pirates – and in this, it was somewhat similar to the Srivijaya Empire that controlled the Straits of Malacca as these two straits formed comparable bottlenecks, one the gateway to China and the other the gateway to the Mediterranean. Both of these were intense compression points (Figures 2.7.2 and 2.7.3). The success of the Aksumite sweet spot was related to its layered and diversified economy. It was able to integrate local wealth-producing products like frankincense with imports like ivory with trade exchanges, all the while supplying the locals with a steady food economy and luxury imports of cloth and metal. Even in the early seventeenth century, when the Portuguese Jesuit Ma de Almeida visited the court of Emperor Susneyos, he observed that: nobles put on their necks their gold chains which are like what we call skeins with many turns of yarn wound round them. On their arms they put bracelets of the same and their swords which are very large have scabbards

FIGURE 2.7.2  A

reconstruction of Dungur Palace, Axum, Ethiopia – Musée national d’Addis Abeba. Credit: Zheim/Wikimedia Commons.

138  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.7.3 

View of stele in Axum, Ethiopia.

covered with silver. They wear girdles or sashes of very big pieces of gold and so the court, when it is in festival, is brilliant and sumptuous enough.8 Aksum’s decline in the seventh and eighth centuries CE has been attributed to climate change, to the Plague of Justinian (541–549 CE), to a defeat at the hands of Judith, a legendary Jewish queen, as well as to any number of other things, including the rise of the Rashidun Caliphate, which with the support of the Yemenis, took control of the Strait of Hormuz. As usual with dark matter economies it is relatively useless to try to identify a cause in such situations since so many unknowns and intangibles are at play. One possible element in the demise of Aksum was the loss of the ivory trade, for by the tenth century the sources were now coming from more southernly ports. In very real terms, Aksum was inconvenient for the ivory trade. At Zanzibar and points south, elephants lived closer to the shore. Arab geographer alMasudi wrote: It is from this country [Zanzibar] that come tusks weighing fifty pounds and more. They usually go to Oman, and from there are sent to China and India. This is the chief route, and if it were not so, ivory would be common in Muslim lands.9 In reality, the Islamic courts were well on the way to becoming main ­consumers themselves, with Córdoba by the tenth century already a wellknown center for ivory carving. The most unusual new kingdom in the east African sweet spot was the one created by King Lalibela in the thirteenth century. Not only was it a Christian Kingdom, but the king commissioned the construction of 11 rockcut churches arranged in such a way that they form a type of “map” of Jerusalem, of which the one dedicated to St. Georg is the most famous. How

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  139

FIGURE 2.7.4  Bet

Giyorgis (Church of St. George), Lalibela, Ethiopia. Credit: Jon Bratt/Getty Images.

Christianity worked as one moved away from Lalibela and into the surrounding villages is not known, but initially, at least, it is likely that Christianity like Buddhism in Southeast Asia was primarily an attribute of the elites symbolizing their connections, economic and imagined, to the world over the horizon (Figure 2.7.4). The advent of the rock-cut technique in this region is not known, but since it was a well-established tradition in India, dating back 1,000 years, it is quite likely that input came from there, especially given the strong mercantile links to India. Furthermore, Hindu sites were often “maps” of sacred ­geographies. Mahabalipuram, as we have seen, has several shrines and temples located along an artificially created “Ganges River.” Since rock-cut temples were being phased out in India beginning in the eighth and ninth centuries, it is likely that groups of skilled contractors had left seeking employment ­elsewhere, arriving, for example, in Africa maybe already around that time, since there are examples of rock-cut in Ethiopia from that time. But the churches in Lalibela, carved out of the local volcanic tuff, are magnificent. Why are the various churches different? Were the churches devotional gifts from different clans or families? In what sequence were they carved? Some like Biete Emanuel are clearly modeled on palace buildings made of stone, mud and wood.

140  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

Water played a pivotal role, as it emerges from artesian springs that are located in the rocks at various places. Since Lalibela is not in a valley but on a prominent hilltop, water’s appearance on this hilltop site is all the more magical. The difficulties of integrating the carving of the buildings with the ­hydrological requirements meant that this was no ordinary work. Great sophistication was needed to incorporate these springs into the design of the churches, with each one having a well near its entrance. The engineers had to calibrate the pressure in these wells before construction, otherwise some would be too deep, others too shallow for the planned churches. These wells, ­according to the priests I talked to, not only had healing powers, but r­epresented the Nile River and referenced the life of Moses. They were also used by women who were having difficulty conceiving (Figure 2.7.5). Apart from managing the cross-continental trade to the Straits of Hormuz, the nature of Lalibela’s economy is not fully known. It is quite likely that it sustained itself in part on a devotional economy, bringing in devotees from distant places. Still today, Ethiopians will pilgrimage to Lalibela across the deserts for Easter and other celebrations. (With the demise of the Zagwe dynasty that ruled from Lalibela, subsequent rulers adopted a system of a mobile capital that was moved from place to place leaving little trace in the archaeological record.) An underappreciated element in this sweet spot was rock crystal ­(transparent quartz) that was brought to the Mediterranean from southern Africa. The network needed centuries to develop and to find the right balance, one can say, for it to be fully cost-effective for all the numerous players. In Europe, the surviving pieces from before the tenth century are often cloudy and imperfect, but in the tenth century, the crystal-carving industry was transformed with high-quality crystal coming from the workshops of Egypt. The earliest examples stem from about 975, and over the next 60

FIGURE 2.7.5 

The water basin of Biet Marian, Lalibela, Ethiopia.

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  141

years production was so great that more than 100 surviving objects can be attributed to these workshops. The features of these fine pieces are their great size and the clarity and perfection of the crystal. The source, as determined by Richard Wilding of the National Museums of Kenya, was the inhospitable Chew Bahir Basin in southwest Ethiopia. The crystal areas were, however, in the control of local herders, who may have been relatives of the modern Borana who still inhabit the region. Since they were mobile, they had a keen interest in manufactured items that were not available in their own territory, and it was they who probably collected the crystal which was then quite probably brought along the Rift Valley to Lalibela some 800 kilometers northeast for processing and shipping (Figure 2.7.6). In Cairo, rock crystal was fashioned into ewers as show-off pieces for the elites during the Fatimid period (969–1171). Inscriptions on some of the ewers named specific rulers. Great skill was required to hollow out the raw rock crystal without breaking it and to carve the delicate, shallow ­decorations. In fact, their fabrication was such a well-guarded secret that no one is quite sure even today how the craftsmen achieved a thickness of less than two millimeters on the undecorated parts. They were not just items of opulence, since cups of crystal are mentioned repeatedly in the Qur’an as

FIGURE 2.7.6 

High altitude view of Chew Bahir Basin, Ethiopia.

142  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.7.7 

Eleventh-century rock crystal ewer at the Louvre Museum.

one of the many items the Believer has to look forward to in Paradise; for example (Figure 2.7.7): Round will be passed to them a cup from a clear-flowing fountain, c­ rystal-white, of a taste delicious to those who drink (thereof), free from headiness; nor will they suffer intoxication therefrom. (37, 45, 46) When Imam al-Mustansir was forced to open his treasury in 1068, the ­looters of the palace “brought out of the Treasury of Precious Objects 36,000 pieces of rock crystal.”10 So few have survived that these ewers are now considered among the rarest and most valuable objects in the entire sphere of Islamic art. It was only as good as it lasted. Apparently by the eleventh century, the surface rocks had been picked clean, the trade in Ethiopian crystal stopped and the workshops in Cairo went out of business.11 By that time, the economic center of gravity had begun to shift southward to the east coast of Africa, which had already begun to develop a unique culture that was Islamic in religion, but with a language known as Swahili or Kiswahili that was based on the Bantu language Sabaki blended with Arab and Persian loan words. The principal market towns were from north to south, Mogadishu, Shanga (Pate Island), Mombasa, Zanzibar and Kilwa, each serving as mostly independent trading centers. Unlike the rice-centered kingdoms of Southeast Asia, these cities had little in the way of organized agricultural hinterlands, which helped them focus on maritime trade, and this for the most part helped them avoid conflicts over agricultural land. It was usually local tribes on the mainland that provided sorghum grain, rice, bananas, yams and coconuts. Apart from ivory, the exports of Mozambique were groundnuts, sesame seeds, wax, animal skins, tortoiseshell, gum copal,

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  143

sago and even timber. As Mozambique is an island, trade was conducted on the mainland at a village called Messuril. There, caravans, some with 3,000 men, exchanged ivory and other products like animal skins, tortoiseshell, gum copal and sago for the imported manufactured goods that they desired.12 The emergence of the Swahili city states coincides with the parallel rise of inland Bantu kingdoms who supplied the ports with gold, slaves, metalwork and animal skins. The Bantu were not local, but had arrived there in a slow expansion from the Sahel to the southern savannas of Africa. It has been described as an epic enacted over 1,000 years and ten million square kilometers “by a cast not merely of thousands, but of many millions.”13 The Bantu were pastoralists and so were never going to be forest people, unless stress conditions forced them to. They moved away from the already settled areas of the Sahel and around the great rain forests of Africa. They were looking for a combination of good soil for crops and grasslands for cattle. It was not as easy a combination to find as one might think, but there was enough of it around the great drainage areas of the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers to keep the system going for 1,000 years. The Bantu were not to be denied. On the savannah, where they encountered First Society cultures, they enslaved them, used them as a type of servant class, intermarried to create new clans or pushed them further back into the forests or deserts. The !Kung (San) of the Kalahari Desert, as we see them today, did not live in the desert in the first centuries of the first millennium. They would no more want to live there than anyone else, but with the arrival of the Bantu with their cattle, houses, villages, warriors and self-proclaimed ideology of superiority, they had no choice but to assimilate, as some did, or keep their traditional ways by living in the isolated protection of unwanted areas (Figure 2.7.8). The Bantu, who brought with them their metallurgical skills, moved aggressively to engage the trade along the east coast of Africa, providing inland commodities such as ivory and slaves. The Swahili, in turn, did not travel inland. They relied on local groups or networks who also engaged in the negotiations, consolidating them into reliable inland trading partners. To obtain the goods, they monopolized the acquisition of seashells, particularly cowries and conus shells – some imported from the Maldives – and controlled the preparation of salt from nearby shore-based sources. Among their number were specialists in iron working, who supplied finished products to groups lacking those skills. Cattle and even camels moved down the coast or up into the hills, along with cloth made of African cotton or imported silk. By the end of the millennium, the demand for slaves and ivory had e­ scalated dramatically. One of the emerging ivory collection centers was the Bantuderived polity known as Bambandyanalo (tenth to the eleventh centuries) followed by Mapungubwe Kingdom that flourished from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries just south of the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers. The main economy of Bambandyanalo was cattle herding, but part

144  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.7.8 

East Africa Sweet Spot.

of the wealth was also generated by gold. Gold was panned in the greenstone belt in the present-day West Nicholson area of western Zimbabwe, some 200 kilometers to the northwest. Various rivers drained this gold south into the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, and it was still possible to pan for gold near Shroda some 15 kilometerseast along the Limpopo River even into the modern era.14 There was a strong association between metallurgy, leadership and fertility cults, but archaeological evidence is still insufficient to say whether or not the elites were themselves smelters or smiths.15 Bambandyanalo was also prime elephant hunting territory. The hunters were not freelance individuals, but associated with specific clans and usually paid with cattle and women.16 But how they operated and with what degree of independence are not known. At some moment, Bambandyanalo was abandoned and its inhabitants, probably under new leadership, moved a kilometer away to Mapungubwe Hill.17 It seems that by this time, wealth was almost solely derived from gold and ivory trade.18 But as in Ghana and Mali, though the basic, regional economic equation was set, subtle changes in trade relationships, climate and a whole host of unknown events led to a shift of power to Zimbabwe, some 250 kilometers to the north (Figure 2.7.9).

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  145

FIGURE 2.7.9 

Mapungubwe, South Africa. Credit: Laura SA/Alamy.

A possible reason for the shift to Zimbabwe is that ivory trade brings with it dramatic regional disruptions. The many thousands of tusks that were brought to the docks required the slaughter of entire herds, meaning that hunters had to move ever further field. Furthermore, the heavy tusks – up to 175 pounds each – were transported by slaves and this meant that any polity that organized ivory trade had to acquire slaves, which, in turn, meant that ivory centers had to engage in extended raiding and warfare into surrounding territories, producing a ripple effect of regional instability. Many of the slaves were used as porters only once, since most of them that arrived at the ports were then sold off to the international market, meaning that new slaves had to be acquired. The cruel paradox was that the better the economy for ivory, the more slaves entered the international markets, the more disruption, violence and depopulation took place in the remote hills of central Africa. We would call these places shatter zones. They are areas where the organizing elements of certain cultures have been strategically dismembered by their more powerful neighboring elites to make them more vulnerable for exploitation, whether politically or economically. Around Bambandyanalo, there would have been an increasingly large shatter zone of communities whose own traditions were in tatters, the victims of Bambandyanalo’s success (Figure 2.7.10). The shift to Zimbabwe might well have been the result of the diminishing return of slave raiding campaigns. It might have been because Zimbabwe was closer to the gold mines. Perhaps it was because of the better connections to the port at Sofala. Unlike their predecessors at Bambandyanalo, whose buildings, though certainly spectacular, were made of thatch and mud and so have long since disappeared, the Zimbabwe built their palaces using a dry wall stone construction. These structures were designed to be not just the homes of the elites, but to be, as we have seen in so many similar instances, magical in their own right, magnifying the power of the sacred rocks and landscape of the region. The Zimbabwean palace-shrine compounds were so astonishing that when the Europeans first saw them, they thought that they could hardly

146  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

FIGURE 2.7.10  A photograph

from ca. 1908 of a caravan on its way to the East Coast of Africa fording a river in Uganda. Illustration for The Graphic, January 14, 1899.

have been built by local builders. In what way they marked out the affluence of the Zimbabwe is not known. The economic system, with its requirement of slave acquisition was inherently unstable over the long run, and by the fifteenth century, Zimbabwe came to be abandoned and replaced by the Mutapa Kingdom further north. Olfert Dapper, a Dutch historian, used reports by Jesuit missionaries and Dutch explorers to compile a dramatic portrait of the Mutapa kingdom. He describes a mammoth palace with four grand gateways leading to a succession of halls and chambers. The ceilings were gilt or covered with golden plates. The sumptuous couches and chairs were gilded, colorfully painted and decorated with inlays of enamel. Ivory chandeliers, hanging on silver chains, filled the halls with light. The king was clothed in garments of silk. His table service was of the finest porcelain. Torches of incense flanked him day and night. And when he went outdoors, his head was shielded from the sun by a canopy studded with precious stones.19 Though many things in the description can be out of context and misleading, there is no mistaking that the Mutapa Kingdom, like its predecessors, was able to draw in ­luxury goods from ­distant places as the visual testament of his prestige and standing.

The East African Coastal Sweet Spot  147

FIGURE 2.7.11  Sub-Saharan

Africa in the Long Millenium.

The Swahili-Bantu interaction zone was unique among the various sweet spots that were developing at the end of the first millennium as its primary members were not local. On the one hand, there was an Arab and Muslim maritime culture with connections all the way to Java, and on the other, there was a land-based pastoral culture with its own set of ancient migratory history. But as in all sweet spots, there were winners and losers, and in this case, there were those communities that came to be the target of slave raids. But despite the shifting geographical nodes in the system, the relationship between slavery, ivory transportation and raiding endured well into the nineteenth century. The slaves on the streets of Zanzibar in the nineteenth century that were brought in as transportation muscle, accounted for some two-thirds of the population (Figure 2.7.11). Notes 1 Herodotus, The Histories, ed. Carolyn Dewald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 618. 2 Jane Humphris, Robert Bussert, Fareed Alshishani, and Thomas Scheibnerm, “The Ancient Iron Mines of Meroe,” Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa 53, no. 3 (October 2018): 291–311 (297). 3 For discussion, see R. Haaland, “Iron Production, its Socio-Cultural Context and Ecological Implications,” in African Iron Working, eds. Haaland and P. L. Shinnie (Bergen: Norwegian University Press, 1985), 50–72.

148  The East African Coastal Sweet Spot

4 G. Tringah, “Cenni sulle ona di Asmara e dintorni,” Annales d’Éthiopie 6 (1965): 152. 5 F. J. Simoons, Northwest Ethiopia: Peoples and Economy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 177. 6 Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 53. 7 John Frederick Walker, Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009), 47. 8 Manoel de Almeida, Some Records of Ethiopia 1593–1646, Being Extracts from The History of High Ethiopia or Abassia by Manoel de Almeida together Bahrey’s History of the Galla, trans. and ed. C. F. Beckingham and G. Huntingford (London, 1954), 62. 9 The East African Coast: Select Documents, ed. and trans. G. S. P. FreemanGreeville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 16. 10 The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art & Architecture, Vol 3. ed. Jonathan M. Bloom and Sheila S Blair (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 156. 11 Mark Horton, “The Swahili Corridor,” Scientific American 257, no. 3 (September 1987): 92. 12 Frank Vincent, Actual Africa or The Coming Continent: A Tour of Exploration (London: William Heinemann, 1895), 290. 13 Colin Flight, “Malcolm Guthrie and the Reconstruction of Bantu Prehistory,” History in Africa 7 (1980): 81. Though the expansion began some 3,000 years ago, the massive colonization of the Congo Basin by Bantu farmers started only 2,000 years ago, reaching a peak between 1,900 and 1,600 years ago. 14 Thomas N. Huffman, “Mapungubwe and the Origins of the Zimbabwe Culture,” in African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago, Goodwin Series 8 (December 2000): (14–29), eds. Mary Leslie and T. M. O’C. Maggs (Johannesburg, South Africa: The South African Archaeological Society, 2000), 19. 15 J. A. Calabrese, “Metals, Ideology and Power: The Manufacture and Control of Materialised Ideology in the Area of the Limpopo-Shashe Confluence, c. AD 900 to 1300,” Goodwin Series 8, African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago (December 2000), 109. 16 John Tosh, “The Northern Interlacustrine Region,” in Pre-Colonial-African Trade: Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa Before 1900 (103–118), eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 117. 17 Richard Gray and David Birmingham argued that ivory trading kingdoms and polities that gather forest goods preferred a “nomadic association,” as they tended to spread their influence over wide areas and so did not have “the incentive, the time, nor the skill to evolve state structures of their own.” This implies that it was “their fault” for not becoming a state, or at least that their wealth producing organization was not suitable for statehood. It could well be that it was precisely the flexibility of these kingdoms that guaranteed their economic survival. As I have been trying to emphasize throughout the book, if we measure economic history through a political lens that sees only small kingdoms, we might well see a rise and fall, but if we see the larger regional economy, we see that despite rises and falls, the basic economy maintained itself with remarkable longevity. Richard Gray and David Birmingham, “Some Economic and Political Consequences of Trade in Central and Eastern Africa in the Pre-Colonial Period,” in Pre-Colonial African Trade, Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa before 1900 (1–19), eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 17.

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18 Elin Ivarsson, A Stratigraphical Study of Previous Excavations at Bambandyanalo (K2) (Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, Institutionen för Arkeologi och Antik ­historia, Uppsala Universitet, 2007), 10. 19 Gardner F. Williams Diamond Mines of South Africa: Some Account of Their Rise and Development (New York: MacMillan, 1902), 56–58.

8 THE NORTH SEA LATITUDE SWEET SPOT

Though Southeast Asian and African sweet spot networks were vigorous and complex, and by the end of the millennium, increasingly interconnected, they were similar in structure to the Scandinavian/north European sweet spot. Its history begins with the East-West, cross-border trade that the Romans established for gold and amber. Gold was particularly important to the Romans as that was how the army was paid. At the beginning of the second century CE, the Romans invaded Dacia (Romania) to take the gold mines for themselves. Criton of Heraclea, procurator of the Roman emperor Trajan (98–117) wrote that approximately 500,000 Dacians were enslaved and deported, a portion of whom were transported to Rome to participate in the gladiatorial games that marked the emperor’s triumph.1 The Romans set up client chiefdoms in the area to manage the trade and work in the mines. The event is usually registered in the history books as a great accomplishment of the Romans, who celebrated it on Trajan’s Column in the Roman Forum where soldiers proudly displayed the severed heads of the local chiefs. The depopulation and the loss of Dacia’s inland exchange economy across what is now Eastern Europe placed more emphasis on the amber trade, creating a type of mini-sweet spot that was oriented northward to the Baltic Sea, where amber was harvested along the shores by men with large rakes, as is still done in some places even today. Like so many luxury items that were controlled by chieftain communities, it had the appearance of easy money, except that the locals, the Aesti mostly, were under the control of a regional chieftain, who, in turn, was under the control of more powerful chieftains who, during the Roman period, could deal effectively with the risks

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-14

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associated with long-distance trade. Tacitus, though he never traveled that far, writes that: They worship the Mother of the Gods. As the characteristic of their national superstition, they wear the images of wild boars. This alone serves them for arms, this is the safeguard of all, and by this every worshipper of the Goddess is secured even amidst his foes, adding that that “search the deep, and of all the rest are the only people who gather amber. They call it glesum, and find it amongst the shallows and upon the very shore.”2 Tacitus writes that amber was collected among even on the shore (Figure 2.8.1): With the usual indifference of barbarians, they have not inquired or ascertained from what natural object or by what means it is produced. It long lay disregarded amidst other things thrown up by the sea, till our luxury gave it a name. Useless to them, they gather it in the rough; bring it unwrought; and wonder at the price they receive.3 His typical civilization-centric assumption that the locals were ignorant of the value of amber should not be ours. Though most of the sweet spot

FIGURE 2.8.1  Hunting

Alamy.

for amber along the Black Sea. Credit: Eddie Gerald/

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systems I have been discussing were far distant from the military reach of the metropole, this was obviously much closer, and yet it too was protected by rugged landscape, by a complex set of chiefdom interactions and in this case, by the Roman’s own ambivalence about the forest. For those profiting from the exchange, this was an ideal situation. The amber was brought to coastal towns like Mokhovoye, Russia, which seem at the time to have been called Kaup – cognate to Old Prussian (and Germanic) terms for “­purchase.” Marija Gimbutas describes it as “the gateway for the traffic leading to the east via the lower Nemunas basin into the lands of the Curonians, Lithuanians, and other Baltic tribes.”4 It is clear from graves in the area that what was wanted in return was bronze produced in central Europe or the Mediterranean, glass vases and gold ornaments some of which were imported from sources in Ireland.5 Iron was also imported, so much so that iron objects were commonly used by all peoples, and because trade routes lead to the north to Finland and east to Russia, the Balts became the transmitters of the metal culture. A causeway across the Tollense River, Germany, which was built of timber, stones, turf and sand, and over 100 meters long and certainly linked to others in the area which have not yet been found, clearly demonstrates that the locals were able to develop an infrastructure to assist in the transportation of goods.6 Few ritual sites in this area survived into the modern era, apart perhaps for a place called Erškėtyno in Lithuania some four miles inland that is still today a sacred site, though now nominally Christian. The spring there has been famous for its healing powers since ancient times.7 From the shore-based collection centers, amber was brought down to the River Vistula or sold in at Samland at the mouth of the Nemunas near present-day Klaipėda (Memel) or Tilžė (Tilsit) and possibly in Galindia and Sudovia – places where, unsurprisingly, a great quantity of archaeological finds of Roman origin have been uncovered. It is an impressive list that includes thousands of Roman coins, terra sigillata pots, fibulae, glass beads, bronze vessels, oil lamps, bronze statuettes, fluted glass bowls, beakers and drinking horns.8 The amber was then brought southwards to Biskupin in the territory of what archeologists called the Przeworsk Culture, located in what is now central and southern Poland. There, to better protect their commodities, various tribes formed at some point in time the Lugian Federation. Tacitus notes that it was mostly controlled by the Suebians, living to the north of the Carpathian Mountains. He names five of the most powerful members of the federation: Harii, Helveconae, Manimi, Helisii, and Nahanarvali, but gives a closer description for only two of them. The Harii appear in his account as something of a war band guarding the Amber Trail. Of the Nahanarvali, it is said only that they had a great sanctuary in their land.9 Lugii, a grove dedicated to the twin gods Alcis – postulated to be Mount Ślęża near Sobókta,

The North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot  153

FIGURE 2.8.2 

Map of the amber route during Roman times.

FIGURE 2.8.3  Cult

figure on Mount Sleza, Poland. Credit: Merlin/Wikimedia Commons.

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Poland – might have been such a ritual site where huge distribution feasts were held.10 The mountain has a formidable presence in the landscape and still possesses archaeological evidence of ritual activity at the summit. There is a sacred spring, now called St. James’ Spring, on the northern slope. Later Christian accounts tell of cremation rites, the veneration of holy groves, trees, fields, waters and fire, bloody sacrificial offerings and soothsayings (Figures 2.8.2 and 2.8.3).11 Amber then went through the territory of the Marcomanni and Quadi, some 400 miles to the south, who were clients of Rome, receiving frequent subsidies; and many Roman traders settled in their country. Amber then made it to one of several boundary forts such as Porolissum (Romania) or Carnuntum (Austria), where it was exchanged for gold or other valued ­commodities like wine, bronze vessels and glassware to be shipped back up to the mountains. From there, amber made its way to Aquileia, a center of jewelry making that is today a small town, but that in the second century CE was one of the world’s largest cities in Europe with a population of 100,000. It was then distributed throughout the empire by specialized merchants to be sold or exchanged among the elites (Figure 2.8.4).12 By the time amber made it to Rome, the value of a piece the size of a matchbox was that of a strong slave. Amber, in fact, was even used to buy land. Pliny the Elder notes that some of the litters of the wealthy were decorated with nothing but amber, “a different kind of display being made each day.” The largest piece of amber in Rome was apparently 13 pounds in weight. Pliny, however, struggled to come up with a reason as to why it was so ­popular.13 No one has been able, as yet, he writes, “to devise any justification for the use of it.” Which is not exactly true since the Romans held that amber could help with problems connected to tonsils, mouth and throat as well as mental disorders and bladder problems. Amber was ground and

FIGURE 2.8.4  Roman

era amber rings from the Archaelogical Museum of Udine. Credit: Giovanni dall’Orto.

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mixed with rose oil and honey to treat eye and ear infections. And because it also had protective properties, Romans would carry amber beads with them or rub them in their hands for strength, or, if particularly wealthy, decorate their litters with them.14 The ability to attract lightweight objects such as chaff led to the Persians to call it kahruba or “straw-robber,” which only added to its mystery and allure. The Romans also remarketed amber, since it was prized in the Near East where it became a symbol of royal power and status. In fact, the Latin name ambrum led to the Arab word anbar which, in turn, led to the modern English term. With the collapse of the Roman Empire and the destabilization of Baltic and German areas, the Nors, perhaps in alliance with German tribes who came into Scandinavia, took over the trade and shifted its center of power, developing a “warrior aristocracy” and a warlord economy. One of the primary centers was Vendel in Uppland, Seden, just north of Upsalla. Some of its wealth as probably acquired through the control of mining districts and the production of iron and its connections to the Baltic Sea. Burials in boats were especially magnificent. Men were laid to rest with full armor, including shields, helmets, swords, knives, spears, arrows and undoubtedly bows (which have not survived) and with gifts and possessions such as glass bowls from western Europe, hunting dogs and falcons; cattle or cuts of steak, sheep, ham. The boats were rowboats, approximately 30 feet in length.15 Crucial to the foundation of this warrior elite was the development of what are often simply called “central places,” the locations from which regional clans administered their power. A Norse chieftain did not build castles or palaces, but rather their seat of power was in their great halls, huge wooden buildings called jarls, where the chiefs would hold court, host feasts, conduct religious rituals and which symbolized the heart of their ideological world. This new type of building became a classic feature of the Vendel Period and into the later Viking Age.16 Amber, however, was losing much of its lure. Christian Europe frowned upon the use of such items for spiritual purposes. Fur, however, was on the rise. During the Roman period, fur had never been a prime commodity, but in the Middle Ages – perhaps influenced by the tastes of the Islamic nobility – European elites slowly developed a taste for vair, which came from sciurus vulgaris, a squirrel common in the Baltic region. It was highly prized for lining and decorating princely garments.17 Adam of Bremen in 1075 stated that the Prussians (Figure 2.8.5): have an abundance of strange furs, the odor of which has inoculated our world with the deadly poison of pride. But these furs they regard, indeed, as dung, to our shame, I believe, for right or wrong we hanker after a marten-skin robe as much as for supreme happiness. Therefore, they offer their very precious marten furs for the woolen garments called faldones.18

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FIGURE 2.8.5  Twelfth

century portrait of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. Unknown artist. © National Portrait Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY.

The fur trade was combined with slave trade. Concerning the Bulgars, we have the eyewitness account of Ibn Fadlan, who visited it in 922 and who emphasizes the central relationship between the fur trade and slave trade: I saw the Rus, who had come for trade and camped by the river Itil.… Round their necks, [their women] wear torques of gold and silver, for every man, as soon as he accumulates 10,000 dirhams, has a torque made for his wife. When he has 20,000, he has two torques made [and so on].… With them, there are beautiful slave girls, for sale to the merchants. Each of the men has sex with his slave, while his companions look on.… As soon as their boats arrive at this port, each of them disembarks … and prostrates himself before a great idol, saying to it: “Oh my lord, I have come from a far country and I have with me such and such a number of young slave girls, and such and such a number of sable skins…. I would like you to do the favour of sending me a merchant who has large quantities of dinars and dirhams and who will buy everything that I want and not argue with me over my price.”19 The chieftains who controlled this trade ruled from substantial castles under a strict hierarchical system illustrated by the chronicle of Volynia, which tells how 21 Lithuanian dukes came to sign the treaty of 1219 between Lithuania and the Rus’ of Halich-Vladimir. Of these, five – the most powerful ones – were “grand dukes,” the other 16 dukes of minor importance. From this, we may deduce that Lithuania at that time was ruled by a confederation of chieftains, as was common in such circumstances.20 Over 2,000 hill forts have been catalogued in Poland alone, with the majority erected in the ninth and tenth centuries. Marek Jankowiak has argued that they were necessary

The North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot  157

to protect the long-distance slave trade. Though their sizes varied, Jankowiak noticed that the further south one goes, the larger and more dominant they become, serving as nodal points for the supply system. A typical caravan was composed of 3,000 horses and 5,000 men, not to mention the human cargo. The number of slaves – mostly girls and women, since warrior slaves could easily have been brought in from elsewhere – might have only been 100, but apparently it was well worth it.21 It has been suggested that the astonishing amount of silver found in the Baltics – almost 10,000 hoards have been found containing about one million coins – was more than just payment for goods and slaves. The metal was used to pay for mercenary services and to develop a proper network of administration and infrastructure based on strongholds.22 From the east, wealth came from a different source, walrus ivory. The Vikings learned that ivory from Africa or India was the most expensive luxury item in Europe. What if the aristocrats and churchmen could settle for its somewhat cheaper equivalent? After all, who in Paris could possibly tell the difference between a tusk of a walrus and that of an elephant? Walruses were, however, not native to Scandinavia. The closest place was Iceland, where walruses herded in huge numbers on the beach. The Vikings took the island at the end of the ninth century and made a killing not just on pillaging northern Europe – for which they are more famous – but in selling walrus ivory. So thorough were they that pretty soon they had exterminated the entire animal population.23 Historians now suspect that the Vikings sailed to Greenland not to “explore,” but to seek out a new source of ivory. For a while at least, the wealth generated from walrus trade was immense. A grave of an aristocratic woman at Himlingoje, Denmark, included items of bronze and silver that might well have been local, but it also included a spectacular Roman drinking horn of glass and a beautiful necklace of colorful glass beads that was certainly Italian in origin. Grave goods in burials of elites included Central Asian silver, Mediterranean glassware and Irish bronze and gold as well as a small bronze Buddha, probably from northwest India.24 Even in the fourteenth century, about 40 tusks paid the equivalent to a clan’s yearly tax to the king of Norway. That is a mere 20 animals that a Viking had to clobber to death on a beach – which was not hard to do. Christian Keller makes use of the one surviving record of the size and value of the medieval Greenland ivory trade to gain a broad impression of its value to the Norwegian crown: In A.D. 1327, a load of walrus tusks from Greenland was sold in Bergen. This was the Peter’s Pence and the six-years tithe, a crusade tax which eventually helped finance King Magnus Eiriksson’s 1340 crusade against Novgorod. The load of tusks may be estimated to 802 kilograms, suggesting ca 520 tusks representing some 260 animals. The computed value of the

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520 tusks from A.D. 1327 runs into something like 780 cow e­ quivalents, or nearly 60 metric tons of stockfish….A record from A.D 1311 shows that a total of 3,800 Icelandic farmers paid their (tax of) 20 ells of vaðma (woollen cloth). The value that went to the king has been estimated to 317.5 cow equivalents, making the total [Greenlandic] payment twice as much, i.e. 635 co equivalents…. Thus the value of the Greenland tusks from A.D. 1327 (representing the six years’ tithe) was worth more than the annual tax from nearly four thousand Icelandic farmers.25 Archaeologist Neil Price of Sweden’s Uppsala University suspects that when the Vikings shifted from being relatively quiet traders in fur and iron to walrus suppliers, they needed labor, and a lot of it, and that was what turned them into marauders. Several maps of Europe of this period show the lines of Viking raids with small flames and crossed swords that emphasize the fearsome raids of the Vikings, often deep into north European territory. But the reality is more complicated. Building the fast-growing fleet of ships and fabricating their massive woolen sails were expensive, time-consuming and complex affairs. Large chunks of land had to be turned into pasture for the sheep, wool had to be collected and woven and sails fabricated – a labor-intensive effort that was the work of women, children and slaves. According to archaeologist Ben Raffield, who has looked into this, a single 90-square-meter sail might take a single person up to five years to produce. Naturally, this was not done by a single person, but by teams of laborers as each ship needed two sails, and there were hundreds of ships.26 For every ship there were also teams of carpenters and smithies, most of them not Vikings. So, while the Vikings were raiding northern France, they were also settling the Orkney Islands, which were cool and almost permanently wet. The Vikings cut down the trees and transformed the island into a vast, easily protected pasture zone for

FIGURE 2.8.6 

Eynhallow Island, Orkney Islands. Credit: Rude Heath.

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their sheep, giving it the distinctive open green landscape that we see today. A  few noble families was all it took to manage the slave pastoralists who took care of the sheep and wool manufacturing (Figure 2.8.6). Though almost nothing is known of the day-to-day operations of Viking trade, it is clear that they developed a wide range of sites where distribution took place, from Dublin, a trading emporium that they founded, to Dorestad in the Netherlands, at the mouth of the Rhine. Located close to the modern-day town of Wijk bij Duurstede in the Netherlands, Dorestadt was particularly important in regards to luxury trade in the eighth and ninth centuries with connections to Byzantium and the Muslim world. It had access to Germany via the Nederrijn (the northernmost branch of the Rhine). One of its exports was wine that had been developed in the previous centuries by the Romans south of Mainz.27 Another site was York on the eastern flank of England. From there, ivory from Norwegian suppliers was worked and distributed through England as well as whetstones – used for sharpening blades – which came from Telemark and other places in Norway (also called Norwegian Ragstone). Steatite, which was commonly used for the production of bowls and other vessels, was also imported from Norway or from the Shetland Islands in roughed out form and worked into bowls and exported to Denmark and northern Germany.28 On the Baltic Sea, Kołobrzeg, created by Slavic tribes entering the territory in the late ninth century, became a major emporium (with a local economy focused on salt mining). The Varangians, presumably from Sweden, moved ever further eastward, setting up trading centers along the Volga and its tributaries reaching to the Black and Caspian Seas. Here, there was little wealth to be made from the land itself, and so this area became a thoroughfare connection between west Asia and the Baltics with various elements, launching raiding campaigns every now and then. Taken altogether, this particular sweet spot, from Kiev to Iceland, more or less corresponds to the northern latitudes of the N 55s and spans well over 3,000 kilometers! For simplicity’s sake, I call it the North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot, even though it combined the Baltic Sea and the North Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. Though the Vikings were its dominating force, we should not think of them as hegemonic. We have to recognize that here, as with all sweet spots, there was numerous entry and exist points that made hegemony impossible and thus numerous ancillary players in this economy. Close to the center of this expansive and complex oceanic and shore-based world was Hedeby in southern Jutland and on east into the North Sea. The town, founded around 770, was located at the head of a narrow, navigable inlet known as the Schlei, which made possible a short portage of less than 15 kilometers to the Treene River, which flows into the Eider with its North Sea estuary, making it a convenient place where goods and ships could be pulled on a plank road overland for a direct connection between the North Sea and the Baltic (Figure 2.8.7).

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FIGURE 2.8.7 

North Sea – Baltic Latitudes Sweet Spot.

There, among the comings and goings of ocean-going traders, coastal traders and war boats, one would have seen woolens, hides, fleeces and furs as well as slaves that ended up along the Baltic or in North Africa. Ships were arriving carrying wine, ceramics, soapstone, silks from Bagdad and broken glass from Germany to make bracelets, tin from Cornwall, silver from the Middle East and, of course, there were special wharfs for the walrus tusks brought in from the Arctic. An area to the north, fionn gall, was reserved for fair-haired foreigners and another area, Baile Dubh Gall, was reserved for dark-haired foreigners.29 From Hedeby, goods were transported by ship to other parts of the Frankish realm, to England and east to the Caspian Sea. Al-Tartushi (1059–1126 CE), from Islamic Spain, provides a description of life in Hedeby: Slesvig [Hedeby] is a very large town at the extreme end of the world ocean.… The inhabitants worship Sirius, except for a minority of Christians who have a church of their own there He who slaughters a sacrificial animal puts up poles at the door to his courtyard and impales the animal on them, be it a piece of cattle, a ram, billy goat or a pig so that his neighbors will be aware that he is making a sacrifice in honor of his god. The town is poor in goods and riches. People eat mainly fish which exist in abundance. Babies are thrown into the sea for reasons of economy. The right to divorce belongs to the women. Artificial eye makeup is another peculiarity; when they wear it their beauty never disappears, indeed it is enhanced in both men and women. Further: Never did I hear singing fouler than that of these people, it is a rumbling emanating from their throats, similar to that of a dog but even more bestial.30

The North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot  161

The island of Gotland, perfectly positioned in the middle of the Baltic Sea, was another important trading center. And yet – like Bambandyanalo, its African counterpart – it hardly figures in many discussions of ninth-century Europe, this largely because nothing in the town was made from stone. The number of Arab dirhams discovered on the island, some dating as far back as the eighth century but escalating in the eleventh century, is almost as great as the number that has been unearthed in the entire Muslim world. All this is a testament to the direct connection between the Scandinavian world and the Arab world and its routes to the east.31 Today, with hindsight, we see that the Vikings fell into a spiral: clan competition required more raiding; raiding brought in slaves; slaves allowed more herding; herds required more pastureland; and all of that required more management and oversight. Sooner or later, something had to give. Walruses became scarce as did pastureland and the defenses in Europe became better. Unlike in Mali and in Southeast Asia where wealth generation seemed endless, here the system dried up by the twelfth century. The more structured economies on the continent began to become more normative and with that the impetus for Christianization. But for a few centuries, Europe was flanked by two major sweet spot systems, the  ­Sub-Saharan, Niger River Sweet Spot, nurtured by the Islamic empires  of  the Mediterranean, and the one controlled by the Vikings (Figure 2.8.8).

FIGURE 2.8.8 

Europe in the Long Millenium.

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Notes 1 Bennett, Julian, Trajan: Optimus Princeps. Roman Imperial Biographies (London: Routledge, 1997), 104. 2 Germania, chapter XLV. 3 Tacitus Germania, 45. 4 Ibid., 143. 5 Gimbutas. The Balts, 57. 6 See Detlef Jantzen, Gundula Lidke, Jana Dräger, Joachim Krüger, Knut Rassmann, Sebastian Lorenz and Thomas Terberger, An Early Bronze Age Causeway in the Tollense Valley, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – The Starting Point of a Violent Conflict 3300 Years Ago? (Heidelberg: Bericht der Römisch-Germanischen Kommission, 2014). 7 We should be aware that what we see today in sites like these has to be seen through the lens of late nineteenth-century scholarship and Romantic era interests. 8 Ibid., 237. 9 The Past Societies 4: 500 BC – 500 AD. Polish Lands from the First Evidence of Human Presence to the Middle Ages, ed. Przemysław Urbańczyk, trans. Anna Kinecka (Warsaw: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016), 167, 168. 10 Ken Dowden, European Paganism (London: Routledge, 2008), 242. 11 Gimbutas. The Balts, 179. 12 Gimbutas. The Balts, 128. See J.W. Frondel, “Amber Facts and Fancies,” Economic Botany 22, no. 4 (October to December 1968): 371–382. J. M. Todd, “Baltic Amber in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Investigation,” Journal of Baltic Studies 16, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 292–301. 13 Pliny the Elder, Book 37, chaps. 11–12, 14 Patty C. Rice, Amber, The Golden Gem of the Ages (New York: The Kosciuszko Foundation, Inc., 1987), 43. 15 Frank D. Scott, Sweden: The Nation’s History (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Sothern Illinois University Press, 1988), 13. 16 Christopher Nichols, “Scandinavian Archaeology” (May 23, 2021). http://www. scandinavianarchaeology.com. 17 Squirrel furs were also harvested by the tribes of the Kimek–Kipchak confederation which controlled the area between the Ob and Irtysh rivers, who provided them to Arab elites. Anya H. King, Scent from the Garden of Paradise. Musk and the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 46. 18 Gimbutas. The Balts, 168. 19 P. Lunde and C. Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travelers in the Far North (London: Penguin Classics, 2012), 45–48. 20 Gimbutas. The Balts, 172. 21 Marek Jankowiak, “Dirhams for Slaves. Investigating the Slavic Slave Trade in the Tenth Century,” paper given at Medieval Seminar, All Souls, 27 February 2012, https://www.academia.edu/1764468/Dirhams_for_slaves_Investigating_the_ Slavic_sl ave_trade_in_the_tenth_century. 22 It has been shown that by eliminating their hostile tribal neighbors, the Piasts, for example, acquired silver, mostly from Arab sources, which they could use to consolidate their power. The Past Societies: Polish Lands, from the First Evidence of Human Presence to the Early Middle Ages (Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, 2016), 247. 23 Karin M. Frei, Ashley N. Coutu, Konrad Smiarowski, Ramona Harrison, Christian K. Madsen, Jette Arneborg, Robert Frei, Gardar Guðmundsson, Søren M. Sindbæk, James Woollett, Steven Hartman, Megan Hicks and Thomas H.

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McGovern, “Was It for Walrus? Viking Age Settlement and Medieval Walrus Ivory Trade in Iceland and Greenland,” World Archaeology 47, no. 3, (2015): 439–466. 24 Sophia Perdikaris and Thomas H. McGovern, “Cod Fish, Walrus, and Chieftains Economic Intensification in the Norse North Atlantic,” in Seeking a Richer Harvest, The Archaeology of Subsistence Intensification, Innovation, and Change, eds. Tina L. Thurston and Christopher T. Fisher (New York: Springer, 2007), 194. 25 C. Keller, “Furs, Fish, and Ivory: Medieval Norsemen at the Arctic Fringe,” Journal of the North Atlantic 3 (2010): 5, 6. 26 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/vikings-may-have-first-taken-seasfind-women-slaves. 2 7 Richard Hodges, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 99, 100. (Google Books. Web. 1 November 2013). 28 Arthur MacGregor, “Industry and Commerce in Anglo-Scandinavian York,” in Viking Age York and the North (34–57), ed. R. A. Hall (1978), 39, 40. 29 Robert O’Connor, “Vikings in Dublin, or Dyflin as They Called It,” http://www. viking.no/e/info-sheets/ireland/firehous.htm. 30 Theron Douglas Price, Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): 339. 31 Roman Kovalev, “Dirhams,” in Encyclopedia of World Trade, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2004), 274.

PART 3

The various vectors of exchange in the context of sweet spots thickened access to a wide variety of luxury items that were increasingly in demand by the great urban centers. They brought extreme ecologies into the flow of global trade. Tropical forests, mountains, savannahs, and deserts were now ‘connected,’ meaning that for better or worse, from the perspective of the large urban empires, luxury trade until it reached the border of an empire was in the hands of a string of oral-based, chieftain cultures, – many of whom were identified as ‘barbarians,’ ‘heathens,’ ‘hill people,’ ’non-believers, and ‘tributary kingdoms.’ As a consequence of increased contact, the epistemological gap from the urban side slowly improved as the millennium went on, but it was almost always defined by a civilizational bias as well as by a ledger-oriented perspective by which I mean one that required writing or other forms of documentation as part of a tax system. A ledger economy saw trade as a simple ‘this-for-that’ – cloth for gold, porcelain for pearls, silk for jade, etc. In actuality, the true scale of long-distance interaction modalities was not just invisible to administrative record-keeping, but was designed to be mysterious and impenetrable.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-15

1 BEYOND THE BINARY

During much of the twentieth century, anthropologists argued that ­society, because of the need to deal with every greater social and economic c­ omplexity, evolved out of its chiefdom phase to become states.1 To support this claim, chiefdoms came to be defined again and again as a relatively unstable form of social organization. This instability, so it was then argued, led to war as chiefdoms had to compete for resources; warfare then led to the territorial unification by the strongest polity that then, when it became centralized enough, became finally a state. And by “state” anthropologists mean a ­political entity grounded in agriculture, writing, cities, standing armies and hereditary power. For most of the twentieth century, it was more or less assumed that the transition from chiefdom to state was inevitable and indeed necessary for the development of civilization. The National Geographic recently boiled it down to a handy mantra: “Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew.”2 Today, we are suspicious of such easy teleological positions, given that it was written by city people to begin with. The concept “agriculture,” for example, implies a dutiful farming class that lives in villages around the city, meaning that the word “city” implies a power relationship between city and field that cements the passivity of “agriculture” in place.3 Just as importantly, the argument assumes that cities are a superior form of life to other polity types. Greek author Plutarch of Chaeronea (from 46 to ca. 122 CE) expressed the paradigm in the following laudatory words about Alexander the Great: Alexander founded over seventy cities among barbarian tribes, sprinkled Greek institutions all over Asia, and so overcame its wild and savage

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-16

168  Beyond the Binary

manner of living. Few of us read Plato’s Laws, but the laws of Alexander have been and are still used by millions of men.4 The Chinese developed a whole theory around this. The word tianxia (天下), defined in the writings of the Han dynasty historian Sima Qian (c. 100 BCE), envisions the world in five zones. The center was close to the all-enclosing heavens and its celestial empire (tianguo), thus the proper location of the emperor who serves as the son of heaven (tianzi). He lives as a ruler of the city. The zone that was furthest away, named the “desert zone,” was remote and hence uncivilized. The tension between the normative ecology of agriculture and the nonnormative ecologies at the periphery is the tension between civilization and barbarism. The result was a paradox. Though the Chinese dynasties made a claim of universalism, they were aware that this universalism did not exist everywhere at the same level of implementation. The inability to match image and reality proved to be a lasting burden.5 The Romans, though they never created a position as theoretically clear as the Chinese, adopted something similar in practice, building on the foundations set out by the Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks, all of whom developed city-centric ideological positions. An eloquent example is a passage from De Rebus Bellicis (On the Things of Wars), written ca. 368 CE by an anonymous Roman author. The author suggests that “veterans enriched with imperial grants and farmers still powerful of limb” will till the fields, inhabit the limites (the areas near the borders) and cultivate and defend the land and eventually become taxpayers. Unfortunately, for the Roman Empire, however, there was the haunting presence of nonnormative ecologies and their inhabitants: First of all, it must be recognized that frenzied native tribes, yelping ­everywhere around, hem the Roman empire in, and that treacherous barbarians, protected by natural defenses, menace every stretch of our frontiers. For these peoples to whom I refer are for the most part either hidden by forests or lifted beyond our reach by mountains or kept from us by the snows; some, nomadic, are protected by deserts and the blazing sun. There are those who, defended by marshes and rivers, cannot even be located easily, and yet they tear peace and quiet to shreds by their unforeseen attacks. Tribes of this kind, therefore, who are protected either by natural defenses such as these or by the walls of towns and towers, must be attacked with a variety of novel armed devices.6 The sedentarist ideology that valorizes the city, farming and law required of itself the performance of destruction and annihilation at the periphery as part of its mission. But it could only sustain such activities in uneven bursts,

Beyond the Binary  169

given the extreme distances from center to periphery, thus the ­predilection to c­ ruelty as a way to fix its power in the memory of the locals and buy time before force is needed again. There is, in that sense, in Eurasian history, no proclamation of “civilization” without violence at the periphery, a fact that is rarely mentioned in histories of “civilization.” In other words, what defines “civilization,” state or an empire in Eurasia – in the first ­millennium CE – was not just the palaces, kings, military, bureaucracies, agriculture, refined art works and the often over-vaunted desire for s­tability, the usual items one ticks off, but from the start, the physical and mental agency that the state claimed to have over its distant perimeters and its associated populations. During the long first millennium CE, this pro-sedentarist ideology instrumentalized itself over the destiny of the Inner Asian world with the Silk Route as its central nervous system.7 It manifested itself spatially in the walls along the boundaries. As social anthropologist Richard Tapper has pointed out, they were deployed not just to support the needs of the military, but also to serve as “governmental zones” with special political and economic conditions.8 These zones were not always designed to be antithetical to tribal consciousness, but rather aimed to promote the processes of trade as a presumptive avenue toward dependency and pacification. As governmental zones, the walls were also designed for another purpose, to produce a shatter zone on the other side of the wall. Some tribes were bribed into submission, some not; some were deployed to fight their neighbors, some not; some were given weapons, some not; some signed treatises, some not; some embraced the narrative of civilization’s self-proclaimed superiority and wanted to settle down, some not. The dismembered and destabilized nature of the cultural territory near the wall made cohesion difficult, and this, of course, was much to the advantage of the empire, which could always celebrate itself as a place of law and order.9 Hadrian’s Wall, the German Limes and the Great Wall of China were built not only to protect the interior from raiders, as is often explained, and not just for trading, but as places where the cultures on the other side would coalesce and falter in the harsh illumination of existential decisions. The Chinese, for example, would periodically allow tribes to settle within their border as long as they accepted Chinese oversight in favor of security. The Chinese then installed a Tusi, often translated as “headman” or “chieftain,” to mediate between the state and the village, with the villages then serving as the first line of defense against their still nomadic cousins. Groups that had submitted to Han rule and taxation were considered “inner” barbarians while groups who were outside of the Han sphere of influence were considered “outer” barbarians. As James Scott has shown, the Chinese saw these foreigners as “almost Han,” “on-their-way-to-being-Han,” “couldeventually-become-Han-if–they-wanted-to (and if-we-wanted-them-to!)”

170  Beyond the Binary

and finally a category (e.g., for the “wildest” of the Lahu) “un-civilizable,” which meant, of course, “not-really-human.”10 The sweet spot systems of the long first millennium were not governed by a sedentarist ideology. This distinction is important. In South Asia and Southeast Asia, for example, agriculture did, of course, emphasize its theological elitism, thus its common association with Buddhism and BrahminHinduism, both of which helped manage the complex requirements of water engineering, trade and cross-regional connectivity. Nonetheless, agriculture in this part of the world always operated at a tactical level in relationship to nearby forests. Though the rice-controlling elites looked down upon the hill people, there was no ideological imposition by one onto the other. There was no attempt to “convert” the hill people into “civilized” people. The caste system, in fact, stabilized relations across culture, geography and time. Furthermore, in Southeast Asia, palace-based chiefdoms developed only in zones where rice or other agricultural goods could be grown, and if one takes all those areas of South India and Southeast Asia into consideration, they would have been proportionally and surprisingly small. Large population groups lived in the hills or along rivers and shores. Though some were migratory, particularly those involved with cattle, most were not. They lived off forest goods or they fished, gardened or used slash-and-burn agricultural techniques. Though the hill/forest/shore people were often excluded from regional power politics (even though on occasion they became powerful in their own right), they were not excluded from the economic supply chain. Instead of an either/or situation, there was a complex gradation of superiority and inferiority from the elites to the outcasts and slaves that in some instances could be quite flexible, but that in most cases came to be baked into cultural horizons for long stretches of time. Where there was sustained violence and contestation, it was mostly around more immediate issues like land, taxes, theft or around problems having to do with sacred sites, breach of ritual requirements or with access to water, resources or grazing areas or in the context of slave raiding. In Africa, in the context of the Bantu, it was not agriculture that determined status, but cattle and its associated spirit world connections. Yet there too, because of internal migrations and shifts in power alignments, groups saw themselves as distinct from their neighbors in any number of ways by their speech, habits, clothing, hairstyles and even by what they eat. The names of groups in southeastern Zaire, as described by Allen Roberts, are an indication of this: The ‘Bena Marungu’ are people living in the Marungu Massif, so named for its grassy moors. Conversely, the ‘Gua’, ‘Rua’ or ‘Luba’ are called that by neighbors they have intimidated (‘Luba’ may mean ‘the ferocious

Beyond the Binary  171

ones’), and so the land the ‘Gua’ occupy is ‘Ugua’, using the Bantu nominal prefix for place. ‘Bemba’ are those speaking the Bemba language regardless of culture or history; ‘Kalanga’ means those who preceded current populations, and were hence prior in time or culture, regardless of any more particular identity. ‘Hemba’ are the ‘ones to the east’ of someone to the west; Tabwa’ are ‘the ones easily tied up’ by those wanting to take slaves without undue resistance; ‘Kunda’ similarly are ‘slaves’, and they do not appreciate being called that.11 There is no better expressions of the difference to tianxia than the poetic system known as the Sangam Landscape that was deployed in ancient Tamil literature. Instead of a dualism and superior center and inferior periphery, here the mountains, forests, croplands, seashores were all seen as equal parts of a broader cultural system. Each of the four zones was called an “ulagam” which means “world,” implying that each was a separate unit by itself and distinctly different from one another.12 The mountains were used as backdrops, for example, for scenes of lovers’ union at midnight and are rich with lakes, waterfalls and forests. The people of this region were known by the names kalamar (farmers), kanavar (hillman), vedar (hunter), kuravar (mountain dweller). The next layer downhill is where millet grows and honey is harvested.13 The inhabitants were identified as shepherds and cowherds. The plains below are where the scenes of love take place. Indra, the god of thunderstorm, is the main deity. Here, we find farmers, peasants, tillers and serfs. Next is the seashore where scenes take place among fisherfolk. Boats are drawn up on the beach and beautiful village girls peer through hedges. Settlements here were known as pakkam or pattinam, which were maritime trading ports. These poetic landscapes are hardly to be taken as a direct indication of reality. Violence, slave-acquiring raids, caste system perspectives and force were natural to the system of power as it moved upstream and downstream. The Kuravar (mountain dwellers associated with the Kurinji Mountains of southwest India), due to their consumption of animals, were tabooed by settled Hindu communities and excluded from streets inhabited by upper castes.14 Furthermore, not all hill people were the equivalent of good citizens. Maurya Emperor Asoka (ca. 272–232 BCE) uses the word atavi to describe the “habitually criminal forest-folk” in the Rock Edict (XIII.569). And indeed, in the poems there are the Maravas, whose main task was fighting and who were hired by the more powerful for their military skills, but who were also known to rob wayfarers.15 Nonetheless, the relationship between high and low was never an absolute.16 On the contrary, forest communities, cattle traders, herdspeople or sellers of milk products were not just useful to the villagers, but also served as craftsmen of various types. Some like the Banjaras or Lambadis moved in larger groups with pack animals

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loaded with salt and their women bartered their exquisitely crafted silver jewelry with ­settled villagers.17 Poetess llaveyiniyar, a Kuravar, composed a poem in praise of a great Kuravar chieftain. From these references, it is clear that at least some of the Kuravar were literate and were believed to possess some extraordinary powers, in particular in regards to rainmaking.18 A group’s ways were not – or not just – defined by its inner values, the ones that are often thought to define it in Enlightenment historiography, but also by adaptations to neighbors, states and trade. What makes this localizing possible is a practice in which societies self-consciously operate in a world that is fluid and yet fixed, changing yet stable. As Richard A. O’Connor has explained, groups are often more attuned to maintaining and improving workable cultural practices than life’s meaning.19 The strength of the system was its capacity for capillary-scaled extraction that reached up into the hills or along the shores. In Tamil Nadu, English colonial officials encountered a group of people known as “hill Pandārams,” who they described as “perfectly naked and filthy, and very timid… They fear the sight of other men and try to avoid approaching them.” And yet, it was recorded that “They bring wax, ivory (tusks), and other produce to the Arayans, and get salt from them.”20 The same holds true for the Kurumba, also of Tamil Nadu, who were described by colonial observers as fierce, isolated mountain people. Colonial documentation featured glassy-eyed, wild-haired men. In actuality, they provided honey to the neighboring communities, and more importantly, as noted with some astonishment by a colonial officer, they served as priests to the nearby farmers who “will do nothing without the presence of a Kurumba, so that each district has its own Kurumba priest. No cultivation can be carried out without the presence of one or more Kurumbas.”21 This was because the Kurumba, who lived in the forest, were seen by their neighbors as possessing a magical relationship to the innumerable nature spirits, and so were both feared and respected. What

FIGURE 3.1.1 

Kurumba village in the Mudumalai National Park, 1996.

Beyond the Binary  173

the colonial officer might also have not known as that the Kurumba, who are today shepherds and who still gather honey for the local community, once ruled the entire Pala River valley as the Pallava Dynasty during much of the first millennium (Figure 3.1.1)! The elements of this type of cultural cubism could change and morph over time and, of course, chiefdoms, kingdoms and even empires grew out of these situations to become the glue that could try to hold things together. But words that we use today, like chiefdom, kingdom and even empire, as in the phrase the Empire of Mali or the Empire of Chola, can be misinterpreted by a modern reader who might assume the presence of a hegemony. Power was never linear. This was a world with complex layers of interdependency. We are either too close in and see only tribes and kingdoms or too far and see only regions. The concept of “sweet spot” helps us see the gradual cultural and ecological-geographical transitions and overlapping realities that produced a world where various types of cultures were connected despite differences. Sweet spots produced affluence up and down the chain of economic and social linkages. None of this mapped into the standard theorizing that was created by geographers in the remote urban-centered empires in the first millennium CE. The civilization-barbarian divide was simply too blunt an instrument on which to develop nuance. Furthermore, the epistemological learning curve that would have added some perspective was dependent on the thin accounts of traders and the terse reports of military encounters. But even today, despite our perhaps more sophisticated understandings, it is difficult to map sweet spot worlds. Until recently, we have tended to view peoples singularly (the consequence of anthropological categorization) or in isolation (the response of a modernity that was imposed on people) and not in the context of larger regional communities of exchange and interdependencies. A transdisciplinary, geographic-anthropology of interdependency has yet to be developed. Notes 1 R. L. Carneiro, “The Chiefdom: Precursor of the State,” in The Transition to Statehood in the New World, eds. G. D. Jones, and R. R. Kautz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 39–41. The state, writes Timothy Mitchell, “should be examined not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical affect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.” Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 77–96. 2 Library Resource Article, National Geographic Magazine (2019) https://www. nationalgeographic.org/article/development-agriculture/. 3 The term sedentarist metaphysics was set out by Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (February 1992): 24–44 (32). The state, writes Timothy Mitchell, “should be examined not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, metaphysical affect of practices that make such

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structures appear to exist.” Timothy Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics,” American Political Science Review 85, no. 1 (March 1991): 77–96. 4 Plutarch, “On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander,” Moralia IV, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 397. (328e). 5 Chishen Chang and Kuan-Hsing Chen, “Tracking Tianxia: On Intellectual SelfPositioning,” Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics, ed. Ban Wang (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 267–292 (291–292). 6 Quoted in Mark W. Graham, News and Frontier Consciousness in the Late Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), 60. 7 Though the Silk Route no longer exists, the history of the sharp electrical pulses of these divisions haunts the politics of this area to this day. See, for example, Ulrich Hofmeister, “Civilization and Russification in Tsarist Central Asia, 1860–1917,” Journal of World History 27, no. 3 (2016): 411–442. 8 Richard Tapper, “Introduction,” The Conflict of Tribe and State in Iran and Afghanistan (London: St. Martin’s Press 1983), 60. 9 For an excellent overview, see Ben Raffield, “Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28 (2021): 871–910. 10 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2009), 103. 11 Allen F. Roberts, “History, Ethnicity and Change in the ‘Christian Kingdom’ of Southeastern Zaire: Identity, Conflict and History,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (193–214), ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 193. Text is slightly abridged. 12 T. M. Srinivasan, “Agricultural Practices as Gleaned from the Tamil Literature of the Sangam Age,” Indian Journal of History of Science 51, no. 2 (2016): 170. 1 3 Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, A Social History of Early India (Noida: Pearson Education India, 2009), 33. 14 During the British colonial period, they were placed under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 and were hence stigmatized for a long time. In 1952, after independence they were denotified, but the stigma continued. 15 K. R. Hanumanthan, “Was There Untouchability in the Early Tamil Society,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 38 (1977): 90–99 (94). 16 T. M. Srinivasan, “Agricultural Practices as Gleaned from the Tamil Literature of the Sangam Age,” Indian Journal of History of Science 51, no. 1 (2016): 171. 17 Meena Radhakrishna, “Dishonoured by History,” The Hindu (July 16, 2000), https://web.archive.org/web/20070706074246/http://www.hinduonnet.com/ folio/fo 0007/00070240.htm. 18 Hanumanthan, “Was There Untouchability in the Early Tamil Society,” 91. 19 Richard A. O’Connor, “Place, Power and People: Southeast Asia’s Temple Tradition,” Arts Asiatiques 64 (2009): 116–123, 117. 2 0 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. 6 (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 89. 21 John Shortt, “An Account of the Hill Tribes of the Neilgherries,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 7 (1869): 276, 277.

2 STRUCTURAL ASYMMETRIES

The phrase “long-distance trade” compresses an extraordinarily complex and dynamic reality into the rather dull concept. Agro-industrialized civilizations pushed their wares upstream through the mechanisms of exchange, producing a dependency on their products by the intermediaries, from the level of the nearby kingdom and chiefdom to that of the more remote s­o-called “hunter-gatherers” and First Society people. In other words, even if the great urban-based industrialized civilizations of the world did not have the theoretical capacity to understand how these systems operated, they certainly had the practical capacity. In the age of the Roman Empire, for example, Somalia and Ethiopia were the sources for ivory, turtle shell, rhinoceros horn, frankincense and myrrh. Back in Rome, a pound of myrrh was equivalent to two weeks of a laborer’s wages. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea gives us the list of things that the Romans – mostly using Greek intermediaries – brought to the Horn of Africa. It would be too long to list all the items, but they included Egyptian cloth, various colored cloaks, various types of glassware, imitation murrhine ware, cooking pots, iron, axes, swords, drinking cups and belts. In other words, the Romans had to bring a wide variety of things – much of which would have been considered “cheep” – to get only their precious four or five items. Some of the things going uphill went to the elites, such as the drinking cups and winter clocks; the elites also took the iron to better equip the military; some of the items went to support local craftsmen like the axes; and some went to support the more general population like the cooking pots and glass beads.1 All these affluence-producing items could be passed on as exchange commodities in their own right, and indeed it is quite likely that their “value” derived not just from how they could be put to use in some DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-17

176  Structural Asymmetries

immediate sense, but from how they would be needed as they moved through the local exchange networks. Even into the late nineteenth century, ivory in Africa was exchanged for cotton cloth, brass and copper ornaments, glass and China dishes, all of which had become indispensable to the elites of Bugunda.2 In the report by Captain Hugh Clapperton (1829) as he travelled through Africa, we read: Tuesday, 14th – This morning I waited on Yarro [chief of Kiama] with my present, which consisted of the following articles: – a large blue silk umbrella, one of Tatham’s African swords, three fathoms of blue cloth, three fathoms of red, some red beads and coral, and imitation gold chain, two bottles of rum, two phosphorous boxes, four knives, and six pairs of scissors and some prints. The cloth I had spread out at full length; the large mock coral beads he shook at the naked females as much as to say, Which of you will get these? On seeing the sword he could not restrain his delight, and drawing it, and brandishing it around his head, he called out “Ya baturi! Ya Baturi!” “Oh, my white lord! Oh, my white lord!” He was certainly more pleased than any man I ever saw with a present; his eyes sparkled with joy, and he shook me about a dozen times by the hand.3 Clapperton was not interested in how these objects worked within the Yarro social dynamic. He saw the whole interaction as a type of curiosity and as a prelude to more serious forms of trade and exploitation. From our perspective, however, this is where the story should begin, but, once again, this is where the rules of dark matter economy intervene. A nineteenth-century description of trade along the Irrawaddy River (Myanmar) demonstrates the long continuity of this type of “upstreamdownstream” economy. Though written in the mid-nineteenth century, it is not hard to imagine something similar back in the eighth century or earlier when this type of trade began to take on its specific cultural resonance (Figure 3.2.1): Chiefly by means of the River Irrawaddy, on which several thousand boats are annually employed in transporting rice from the lower provinces, to supply the capital and northern districts; as also salt, and nappi, or pickled sprats. Articles of foreign importance are mostly conveyed up the Irrawaddy, a few are introduced by the way of Arracan, and carried over the mountains on men’s heads. European broad-cloth, hard-ware, coarse Bengal muslins, Cossimbazar silk handkerchiefs, China-ware and glass, are the principal articles carried up the river. Cocoa-nuts, from the Nicobars, bear a high price. Merchants carry down silver, lac, precious stones, catechu [an extract of acacia trees used variously as medicine and as dye], and some other articles.4

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FIGURE 3.2.1 

The Irrawaddy River, Myanmar. Credit: Craig Lovell/Alamy.

From a downstream perspective, the cross-exchange of natural and manufactured goods played a key role in the creation and expansion of urban-based empires that developed the wherewithal to focus on multitiered production systems. Already the ancient Gupta in north India established an export profile around their technological superiority. Cotton was a key element. Grown largely in the arid highlands of what is now Pakistan and Baluchistan or in the black soil areas to the south of the Ganges River, it required a host of complex activities relating to its farming, harvesting, dyeing and weaving. The elites demanded their show-off pieces, but so too in the process did they in essence market their brand, with Indian cotton becoming one of the essential elements of exchange. By the sixth century CE, north Indian kingdoms were also more advanced in the chemical and metallurgical industries than most places in the world, certainly Europe. King Porus is said to have selected, as an especially valuable gift for Alexander, not gold or silver, but 30 pounds of steel. Steel and other high-end products obviously require a huge outlay of cultural-civilizational capital, much in contrast to what it takes – technically speaking – to dive for pearls. Greek expansion, back in the fifth century BCE, was another case in point. In fact, one of the reasons for the geopolitical success of the Greeks was their capacity to exchange sophisticated craft goods for items they lacked. If one can assume that the mark of a civilization is its cuisine, then one has to remember that Greek cuisine which focused on grapes, olives

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and seafood – though undoubtedly healthy – was hardly much for a feast. Herodotus even once commented on the poverty of Spartan table offerings compared to those of the Persians, leading him to wonder, somewhat sarcastically, why the Persians had even bothered to invade.5 The truth was more complex, for if the Spartans were happy with simple fare, then that was not the case for the Athenians. And since feasts were such a mark of power and distinction, the Greeks were forced to invest in long-distance trade. Fine Greek pottery was in great demand abroad and examples have been found as far afield as the Atlantic coast of Africa. Other Greek exports included bronze work, emery, hides and marble as well as olive oil and wine. Like silk from China or cotton from north India, olive oil and wine have to be considered on the order of manufactured products, produced with an eye to suck luxuries out of the hinterland. What the Greeks got in exchange was described in a play by the fifthcentury playwright Hermippus: Tell me, ye Muses, now, who hold your Olympian dwellings, Whence Dionysus comes, as he sails over wine-colored water; What are the goods men bring in black ships hither to harbor! Out of Cyrene the cauliflower comes, and hides of the oxen; Out of Italia ribs of beef and grain in abundance; Syracuse sends us cheese, and pork she furnishes also. As to the Corcyræans, we pray that Poseidon destroy them Utterly, vessels and all, for the treacherous heart that is in them! – Rhodes provides us raisins, and figs that invite unto slumber. Slaves from Phrygia come but out of Arcadia, allies! Carthage, finally, sends to us carpets, and cushions resplendent.6 All of this leads to the conclusion that the economy of manufacturing – and that includes items that might normally be listed under agriculture such as wine, cotton, rice and even silk – were always produced with an eye to their remote upstream use value. This agro-industrial horizon was designed not only as a way to produce a necessary surplus, but also as a pumping mechanism that could heat up the extraction process. The Chinese were the masters of this asymmetry.7 Distance and lack of a trading fleet meant that they had to focus on a few high-end, easily bureaucratized, mass-produced products: first silk and bronze and then from the tenth century onward, porcelain and tea, all of which was placed at various times under imperial monopoly. The advantage of concentrating on high-end products was clear. These commodities stood at the top of a huge economic pyramid that energized the mobility of the wide variety of items that circulated outside of China’s borders. The Chinese did not need to produce carpets, leather goods, silver cups, horses, camphor and the innumerable other things

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that came over the so-called “Silk Route” when they had one of the most desired products on the continent. Even after the thirteenth c­ entury, when the Chinese market was being undercut by Arab silk, the fabric remained one of China’s prize exchange materials. The Ming government of the first half of the fifteenth century warehouses large quantities of silk ready for ­bestowals – as many as 330,000 rolls. Porcelain, one of China’s most important exports of the second half of the first millennium CE, played a similar role, in particular to the oceanic south. Its production employed many thousands of laborers in its kilns and was an industry designed explicitly to oil the system of long-distance trade.8 Fabricators from early on took special interest in the taste of other cultures. Persians, for example, used large plates for communal feasts. These were unheard of in China but were manufactured specifically for Persian exchanges.9 In 967, Emperor Taizu of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) decided to engage this trade in a more formal way. He sent eight court officials with four fleets loaded with Chinese goods – mostly porcelain – to Southeastern and South Asia in order to attract foreign tribute and collect spices, raw medicine, rhinoceros horn, ivory, pearls and borneol, an oil extracted from Borneo camphor.10 The Belitung shipwreck, as it is called, from around 830, gives us some clues. It was an Arab or a Persian vessel with planks made of African timber. The ship had completed the outward journey from Arabia to China, but sank on the return journey from China, off the coast of Belitung Island, Indonesia. It was laden with cargo customized for a Middle Eastern market. There were three main types of ceramic wares: Changsha Ware that was produced in kilns in Tongguan in central China, Whiteware, manufactured in the Ding kilns and Yue ware from Zhejiang Province. The majority of the 60,000 items were packed in straw cylinders or special storage jars (Figure 3.2.2).11

FIGURE 3.2.2  Ceramic

jars on the seabed belonging to the Belitung shipwreck. Credit: Michael Flecker.

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Once again, we have to understand the circulatory system. Porcelain’s increased availability meant more pearls could be extracted from the waters of Sri Lanka; more pearls meant more silk could be exported from China to Cambodia; more silk in Cambodia meant more kingfisher feathers could be collected; more kingfisher feathers meant ever larger temples could be built; and so on. From this perspective, we have to see people working the kilns in China as one side of a system directly tied across distance and ecology to the pearl divers in Sri Lanka, to the bird hunters in Cambodia, to the members of the Punan seeking out magical camphor trees in the great forests of Borneo and on and on. Even though the self-proclaimed civilizations specialized in multitiered production commodities that could fuel all of this coming and going, chiefdom and kingdom polities were in on the game as well, since they stood in the liminal zone between upland and lowland realities. It was not just “agriculture” that they needed to develop, but also craft industries that could shorten the upstream delivery time and reduce their own dependency on over-the-horizon imports. The shore-based chiefdoms of the Philippines, for example, had goldsmiths, silversmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, textile manufacturers and other artisans in coastal centers such as Sulu, Manila and Cebu.12 Spanish chroniclers reported large-scale iron and copper-working industry ­concentrated in the vicinity of the paramount ruler’s residences. This “material fund of power,” as one anthropologist phrased it, allowed chiefs to enhance their social ranking, to strengthen political alliances and to expand their political authority into the hinterlands. A chiefdom’s control and sometimes quasi-monopoly of the hinterland extraction forced arriving traders to deal with them as middlemen rather then head out into the forests t­hemselves. These specialized exchange relationships with hill people were  part of the portfolio of expertise that chiefdoms developed and protected. We should be careful not to assume that the objects that moved about were of the same cultural value. In fact, the materials moving upstream often switched from a trade good to a spirit value good. The paradigmatic image of exchange was the drawing made in 1769 by a Maori artist – known as “The Artist of the Chief Mourner” – that shows a Maori man holding a lobster and exchanging it for a piece of cloth offered by the English naval officer. What the officer did with the lobster is obvious. What the Mauri man did with the cloth is not. We know today that among the Maori, the weaver and the action of weaving incarnate the life force, Mauri, the authority, mana, and the sacred, tapu. Maori weavers were linked over time with the ancestors, nga tupuna, and with future generations. This cloth would have been received in that light as the passing of a sacred object.13 It would not have been made into clothing, but used in ceremonial exchanges or given as an offering to the ancestral spirits (Figure 3.2.3).

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FIGURE 3.2.3  A Maori

bartering a crayfish with an English naval officer by a Maori artist – known as “The Artist of the Chief Mourner.” Originally published in 1769 in drawings illustrative of Captain Cook’s First Voyage, 1768–1771.  Source: British Library.

Porcelain also underwent a transformation. In the upstream world, it was coveted not because people suddenly wanted to eat from porcelain dishes, much less drink tea, but because of its perceived magical properties, especially the further one rose into the forest. Laura Watson Benedict (1861–1932), the first anthropologist to travel to the Philippines in 1906 to study the Bagobo people, notes the value of porcelain for the “mountain tribes”: The use of China bowls and saucers as receptacles for offerings at shrines may have been either transmitted by the Filipino to more southern tribes, or introduced directly by the Chinese at the coast of Mindanao. Such dishes would quickly have supplanted for ceremonial use the rough black ware or the cocoanut-shell bowl…. Manufactured products…were also ceremonially presented to the gods.14 In Borneo, there was a similar attachment to large, colorful, Chinese kilnfired jars. In China, such jars, Martaban jars as they are now known, were initially made to serve as ship-worthy, watertight transportation containers.15 Islamic traveler Ibn Battuta, who visited Myanmar in 1350 CE, wrote: “The Princess made me a present consisting of … four huge Martaban jars filled with ginger, pepper, citron and mango, all prepared with salt, as for a seavoyage.”16 He probably served the contents at a feast, but knew quite well that the jar itself might have been the most valuable item – not because of its intrinsic value, but as an exchange item with upstream peoples. In Borneo, these jars were key to the life and identity of the longhouse and an essential aspect of their connectivity in the exchange processes.17 Along with gongs, which were used to announce various events, Martaban jars were displayed

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in the longhouse on a raised platform across the entrance, transforming the longhouse into the cosmological, spiritual center for its group. One has to imagine the jars as battery packs that brought life – in a very real sense – to the longhouse. The more jars, the stronger the life force. Unlike batteries, however, the older the jars were, the stronger they became. Some jars possessed oracular powers. During the period of the Sultanate of Brunei, from the fourteenth century onward, even the sultan had a jar. It was covered with a golden cloth and could actually speak to him.18 A late nineteenth-century English description reads (Figure 3.2.4): One very valuable jar, named Gusi, was brought, a common-looking article, small and one that would certainly have been trampled on by strangers, but it is supposed to possess mysterious qualities – one of them being, that if anything be placed in it over night, the quantity will increase before morning even water will be found several inches deeper. It is wrapped in cloth and treated with every mark of respect. People crawl in its presence, and touch and kiss it with the greatest care.19 In 1521, when the Magellan expedition landed in Borneo, the visitors ­presented a set of gifts to the sultan. These gifts were placed inside the sultan’s personal set of Martaban jars that were brought to the shore by an honor guard of 12 men. Magellan would, of course, not have been in a

FIGURE 3.2.4  Interior

of Borneo Longhouse with spirit jar. Credit: Timothy Tye.

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position to understand the meaning of this. But the jars represented the living ­embodiment of the island’s affluence: When we arrived at the city, we were obliged to wait about two hours… until there came thither two elephants covered with silk, and twelve men, each of whom carried a porcelain vase covered with silk, for conveying and wrapping up our presents. We mounted the elephants, and those twelve men preceded us, carrying the vases with our presents.20 Among the most ubiquitously prized commodities that moved upstream throughout the chieftain world were beads. Indian traders figured out very early on that the forest people of Borneo would trade gold for beads. This was not the case with the Romans by way of contrast; they had been more sophisticated traders. Roman gold was exchanged for diamonds, gems and cotton; in other words, high-value items were exchanged for high-value items. But once the gaze moved to the east, the Indian traders realized that though gold was far away, the terms by which it was mobilized had changed in their favor, and considerably so.21 Workshops in various places in India began to make cheap beads out of carnelian, onyx and agate.22 Relatively valueless in India, they were of extremely high spirit value to the forest peoples in Borneo.23 Imparting physical strength and inner brilliance, beads were signs of status marking out social rankings. Marriage ceremonies required yellow, black, blue, dark blue and so forth – all with specific meanings.24 Social groups needed particular colors for particular purposes. The orange and orange-red colored Mutisalah necklaces were especially prized and associated with high status. In Sumba, they were owned and touched only by royalty.25 As in many places in Southeast Asia, the lower classes were rarely allowed to wear beads. Beads were also used in exchange for slaves. If a person was captured during a tribal conflict, a family could use beads as ransom payment. Some beads possessed powerful healing properties, especially among the upriver communities, where beads protected the soul, allayed the spells of enemies and fought against armies of malevolent spirits. Beads were also used as gifts to the spirit world, to ancestors, rivers and forests. The bead culture was no less important in Africa. In fact, when the Portuguese began trading on Africa’s eastern coast, they discovered that the local populations would only accept the beads to which they were accustomed, and they were Indian. The Portuguese subsequently purchased beads from both Cambay, in northwest India, and Negapatam (Nagapattinum) on the southeast coast for their African trade.26 For the Turkana, a pastoral community in Tanzania, beads were the sole medium in which payment was accepted well into the early twentieth century.27 Differentiation was an important aspect of the community. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, there were about 400

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FIGURE 3.2.5 

A sample of foreign made beads that were used in Borneo.

varieties with different values, some of which had even three or four different names (Figure 3.2.5).28 Unlike wine, silk, porcelain and cotton, which required elaborate preparation and difficult packaging and transportation, beads were one of the most cost-efficient ways to extract wealth out of the distant hinterlands. Production was hardly complicated and transportation easy. Furthermore, unlike porcelain and silk that were aimed only for the elites, beads moved easily into the capillary systems of the dark matter economy. They were such a key element in profit-making that their manufacture expanded from South India, which had established a monopoly on its production early in the millennium, to the Funan in Vietnam and then by the ninth century to Java for use in Borneo, Timor and the spice islands. At some moment, the Chinese got into the act, exporting beads in vast quantities to Southeast Asia.29 At Barus, Sumatra, from where the Chinese imported camphor, coil beads from the Northern Song period (960–1127 AD) quickly outnumbered beads from elsewhere.30 The Mutiraja (Mutisalah) necklaces that were used by the Timor elites, though first made in India, were eventually made in China specifically for that trade.31 Notes 1 Condensed from Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), 116–122. 2 John Tosh, “The Northern Interlacustrine Region,” in Pre-Colonial-African Trade: Essays on Trade in Central and Eastern Africa Before 1900 (103–118), eds. Richard Gray and David Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 115. 3 Hugh Clapperton, Journal of a Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, from the Bight of Benin to Soccatoo (London: John Murray, 1829), 67. 4 Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, The Australian Geography; with the Shores of the Pacific and Those of the Indian Ocean (Sydney: J. Moore, 1851), 180, 181.

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5 Herodotus, 9.82. 6 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae (quoting Hermippus) 1.49. https://www.bartleby. com/library/poem/4021.html. 7 Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 171, 172. 8 John N. Miksic, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 1. 9 For Chinese efforts to cater to Islamic tastes, see K. A. Aga-Oglu, “Blue-andWhite Porcelain Plates Made for Moslem Patrons,” Far Eastern Ceramic Bulletin 3, no. 3 (1951): 12–16. 10 Eric Herbert Warmington, The Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India (London: Curzon Press, 1928), 200. 11 Geoff Wade, “The Pre-Modern East Asian Maritime Realm: An Overview of European-Language Studies,” Working Paper Series. Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore 16 (December 2003), 20. 12 See Laura Lee Junker, “Craft Goods Specialization and Prestige Goods Exchange in Philippine Chiefdoms of the 15th–16th Centuries,” Asian Perspectives 32, no. 1 (1993): 1. 13 See Suzanne Mac Aulay and Kura Te Waru-Rewiri, “Maori Weaving: The Intertwining of Spirit, Action and Metaphor,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 1996. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1859&context=tsaconf. 14 Laura Watson Benedict, “A Study of Bagobo Ceremonial, Magic and Myth,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 25, no. 1 (1916–1917): 1–282 (260). On Benedict, see Jay H. Bernstein, “The Perils of Laura Watson Benedict: A Forgotten Pioneer in Anthropology,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture & Society 13, no. 3 (1985): 171–197. 15 They are named after the Port of Martaban in the ancient kingdom of Pegu and current Myanmar. They probably acquired the name, however, from the Spanish and Portuguese who used the jars and picked them up there. The specific places of production and origin of these jars in south China and the chronology of its development is still unknown. Some authorities believe that “Martaban” wares, custom- made for export, originated as early as the Tang dynasty; other experts think that they started to be made during the Song period. 16 Henri Cordier, Cathay and the Way Thither: Being A Collection of Medieval Notices of China, vol., trans. Henry Yule (London: Harkluyt Society, 1866), 2: 467. 17 William Robert Geddes, Nine Dayak Nights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 43. See also M. Geiger-Ho, “Vessels of Life and Death: Heirloom Jars of Borneo,” Malaysia–Brunei Forum Proceedings (2014): 49–56. 18 Ibid., 286. 19 Henry Ling Roth, The Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo (New York: Truslove and Hanson, 1896), 285. 20 Antonio Pigafetta, The First Voyage Around the World (1519–1522): An Account of Magellan’s Expedition, trans. Lord Stanley of Alderley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1874), 111. 21 Ian C. Glover, “Indian Thai Exchanges in the Protohistoric Period,” Research Conference on Early Southeast Asia (Bangkok, 1985): 333–364 (345). See Marilee Wood, “Making Connections: Relationships between International Trade and Glass Beads from the Shashe-Limpopo Area,” Goodwin Series 8, African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago (December 2000), 78–90, 84, 85. 22 Peter Francis, Jr. Asia’s Maritime Bead Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002). See also James W. Lankton, Laure Dussubieux and Thilo Rehren, “A  Study of Mid-First Millennium CE Southeast Asian Specialized Glass

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Beadmaking Tradition,” in Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past: Selected Papers from the 10th International Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists: The British Museum, London, 14th–17th September 2004 (335–356), eds. Elisabeth A. Bacus, Ian Glover, and Vincent C. Pigott (Singapore: NUS Publishing, 2006), 335, 356. 23 Heidi Munan, “Lun Bawang Beads,” Beads: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 5 (1993): 45–60. 2 4 Heidi Munan, Beads of Borneo (Kuala Lumpur: Editions Didier Millet, 2004), 34. 25 “Mutisalah Beads. What is their True Story?” The Margaretologist, The Journal of the Center of Bead Research 5, no. 1 (1992): 5. 26 George MaCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, Vol. 2 (Cape Town: Government of the Cape Colony, 1898), 303. 27 W. S. and K. Routledge, With a Prehistoric People – The Akikuyu of East Africa (London: 1910), 106. 28 Richard F. Burton, The Lake Regions of Central Africa, Vol. 1 (London: 1860), 146, 398. 29 Marilee Wood, “Making Connections: Relationships between International Trade and Glass Beads from the Shashe-Limpopo Area,” in Goodwin Series 8 (December 2000): 85. See also Francis Jr, Advanced Bead Identification (Lake Placid, NY: The Center for Bead Research, 1993). 30 For a discussion, see Francis, Peter, Jr. Chinese Glass Beads: A Review of the Evidence. Occasional Papers of the Center for Bead Research (Center of Bead Research: Lake Placid: Lapis Route Books, 1986). 31 “Mutisalah Beads. What is their True Story?” The Margaretologist, The Journal of the Center of Bead Research 5, no. 1 (1992): 5.

3 INSTITUTIONS WITHOUT INSTITUTIONALITY

Because the materials pushed upstream were often of metal, wood, porcelain or glass, they have an outsized role in our understanding of long-distance trade. There was another force at work, one that in essence sucked these items upstream. It was based on the operations of status. It formed an invisible yet palpable energy that integrated the apparent pragmatics of any given situation with symbolic weight.1 At the core of its meanings were things that anthropologists call “prestige goods.”2 The word “prestige” is tricky in the modern context since it can be seen as a type of vanity where people want to rise above their station. As one financial advisor recently wrote, “The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige Is Ruining Your Life.”3 A first millennium headline would have read: “Let the Desire for Prestige Run your Life.” In Mozambique, for example, in the early days of Portuguese colonialization of Africa, the Europeans supplied glass beads and brass ingots, which were worked on by local smiths to produce armbands and neckbands of one form or another. Because of their rarity, these items had tremendous value that was translated into political power through the monopoly of trade exercised by the chiefs. The chiefs granted the right to trade in these items to themselves alone, and the articles were distributed among their followers as rewards, in much the same way as cattle. For this, the Portuguese received, in return, hides and ivory.4 But if we focus only on material goods, we are missing the huge amount of more important things that are distributed in dark matter economies, in particular the distribution that came in the form of titles, ranks, food, seating location at the feasting table, gifts of slaves, labor and even daughters for marriages. Without these, the entire network would evaporate into nothing, meaning that the need to develop and sustain social relationships has to be seen as an engine in its own right.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-18

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In the Sumatra-based state of Sŕīvijaya, the local chiefs (dātu), some of whom were relatives of the king, were all bound up in a tight fabric of obligations.6 Acquiring, moving and distributing prestige goods through the network were critical to the survivability of the chiefdom. Similarly, among the Vikings, wealth generated from farming, fishing, loot, trade, or protectionselling was not an end in itself, but a means to acquire the key elements of chieftainship – retainers, loyal clients, fine clothing, jewelry, weapons, exotic objects for display and award, spectacular architectural settings for glorious feasts and impressive ritual moments. Though prestige implies a vertical arrangement of power, we should not focus on that alone. Prestige worked as a multidimensional, multi-temporal force. In all of this, power rested just as much on the leader’s ability to dispense with authority as on the ability to disperse wealth and services in order to attract subjects, a political strategy that Jane Guyer and Samuel Belinga describe as “wealth in people.”7 This “wealth,” an essential element of affluence, depended upon creating the right composition of people, knowledge and skills that included knowledge of soil, rainfall and crops as well as of songs, dances and rituals. All of these played into the overlapping and interpenetrating world of alliances, oaths and marriages. And since many such goods were passed on as gifts, they were accompanied by a subculture of bravery, generosity and diplomatic acumen. In matrilineal societies, young men needed such items if they were to be invited as husbands into the homes of the most desirable women or if they hoped to be selected as family heads of league chiefs.8 In all cases, we also have to take into account suprahuman relationships with deities, spirits and ancestors. Southeast Asian kings and chiefs in ­various degrees often self-identified with the god Siva, the sovereign deity who ­created the universe. The overlord’s close relationship with Siva needed to be n ­ urtured and acknowledged throughout the system by dances and sacred rites. One can think of the effort that the system required as having a maintenance cost. Perhaps we can call it “culture,” for in many ways culture – as we might understand it today – was the mechanism by which hierarchies and obligations were established, internalized and perpetuated. This relationality does not mean that everyone is friends or that everyone knows each other’s history and pasts. It only means that humans operate within networks of belonging that operate at several scales, from the personal to the ancestral. Oral history, clan history, the landscape and its seasonal manifestations as well as a host of spirit world relationships all do their part. A critical driver in this were individuals who possessed a special type of personal magnetism. In Southeast Asia, this quality is called semangat, which historian Anthony Reid characterized as “soul-stuff,” a type of vital principle that permeates the universe.9 Somewhat equivalent to the idea of kami in

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Japan, it is present in everything from rocks and plants to animals and even man. Semangat is not static; it can rise and fall, depending on circumstances; when it rises in the soul of a man it improves his quality of leadership to become something akin to what we might call charisma. The potency of a man’s semangat is thus not acquired by work in the form of sweat and labor, but by its apparent effortlessness (which the English when they encounter chiefdom world misdiagnosed as laziness). There are no guarantees, and a spate of bad luck, as we might phrase it, can reduce a person’s semangat. There is in this an inherent mobility, especially since it is seen as quality that allows the person to navigate the complexity of the spirit world more ­easily than those without it. A person with high status is seen as a person who might be brave and strong, but also one who has a stronger connection to the spirit world and thus a more powerful pull of prestige goods to him or her.10 Semangat binds and holds and moves certain objects ever closer to the seat of power. Semangat, one can say, activates the trade system, not the other way around. From the perspective of the Borneo forest tribes, for example, it is not “trade” that brings important objects to its shores, but the magnetic semangat of its elders. Ancient Scandinavians had the related term gipta. Etymologically related to various words for giving, it was the quality of good fortune bestowed by the gods and an important concept for understanding the pre-Christian dispensation in Scandinavian cultures.11 The Native Americans have a similar concept that is called in English translation “medicine,” though the Wyandot (Huron) word arendi (sometimes spelled orenda) means the presence and power embodied in or demonstrated by a person, a place, an event, an object or a natural phenomenon. Arendi may be something you have, but it can also be an object that has the power to affect your or another’s well-being. The function of arendi was to serve as a medium of communication and interaction between seen and unseen forces in the cosmos.12 And in Africa, in Benin, vodun is a belief in a mysterious force that permeates the world and the lives of those who reside in it. Vodun can govern the forces of nature but can also direct the destiny of streams, trees and rocks as well that of clans, tribes or even nations. The king of the Bemba (Zambia) affects his entire territory by his health, sickness, anger, sorrow, dreams or death. Good health gives his chiefdom life or bumi. This latter is the word used to distinguish a live man from a dead one, and by analogy, a busy, active, successful capital with much comings and goings – the ideal of any ruler in Lubemba. A village with bumi is described as a village which is “warm” and many Bemba rites of kingship are concerned with the “warming” of the capital or the territory. The opposite of a “warm” village is one that has been made “cold” (umushi uatalala) by a death which brings social relations to an end, or by the absence of young men, a situation that also

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lessens the size, the bustle and the activity of a village. Ritual misdemeanors of the chief or of the priest-counselors nearest to him, or failure to perform the arduous ceremonies for the good of the land are said to result in “spoiling the land” or “turning it upside down.” The sex life of the chief is particularly liable to have this effect, and so is important as a source of supernatural power. The death of a chief is nothing short of a disaster. The land under his rule is said to have broken to pieces (calo catika) and to have fallen down (calo cawa) or to have gone cold (calo catalala). Once again, the economic energy of the realm is not measured in mercantile terms or in the number of traders that visit, but in trans-ontological terms. In the language of the Haku in Papua New Guinea, the chief is known as tsuono, and his authority and power is called nitsunono, which means something equivalent to divine potency. It resides in his head and flows through his body so that whatever he touches is made potent, invigorated or even made sacred (a goagono). During sacrifices, the food is held over the head of the tsuono so as to be fit for spirit world consumption. The tsunono’s mouth is also sacred and the words he says carry his nitsunono.13 Needless to say, the translation of nitsunono into “chief” strips the word of all its cultural and linguistic connotations, and this is just as true in Papua New Guinea as in other places around the world. Examples like this led anthropologist Audrey I. Richards to conclude that kings and chiefs are to be viewed not as passive “recipients” of upstream trade, but rather as initiators of economic activity. They are at the dynamic center of a socio-politico-economic universe in which they act as territorial entrepreneurs.14 We have to see this type of power not just as a question of social standing, but as infrastructure, as something that brings and defines stability and constancy to the world and indeed to the “universe.” It is an institution without institutionality. It operates as a socio-ontological epistemology, known intrinsically to all the participants. As to the high-value objects that circulated in these environments, risk of miscommunication was a factor of overriding concern. Ceremonial activities were thus integral to slowing down the processes of exchange and fostering cultures of trust and familiarity.15 This included dance and music but also the proper use of language, posture, colors, jewelry and so forth. All were part of a system that helped frame the reception and exchanging of goods. So, even though the tendency today is often to see ceremonial activities as the quaint residue of a bygone era, back in the age of the long first millennium, there was no exchange without ceremonialism and vice versa.16 The difficulty that we face as historians is that there are no metrics by which dark matter economy of affluence can be measured, since it was designed as an evaporative system, disappearing not only into the fabric of human relationships, but also into the fabric of the spirit world. Some of the wealthiest entities in the world in the first millennium CE were not the

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proverbial elites, but a vast array of groves, rivers, lakes and mountains and their associated spirits and ancestors, none of which figure into our discussions about economy, trade and the development of capitalism. John Shortt, a medical officer of the East India Company, described in the mid-nineteenth century that among the Toda in the hills of South India, “donations and offerings of different value and kind are not unfrequently made to [their] sacred groves by not only the Toda, but by all the other tribes.”17 Such groves, now rare, once proliferated across Africa and Asia. Often associated with rain and thunder deities as well as divination, groves were almost always the abodes of the ancestors of local elites and thus ­foundational to the identity of the neighboring community. In Timor, every village: has its temple hid away in some sacred grove and surrounded by a stout enclosure. Each petty state has its special sanctuary, a hallowed spot which the profane dare not approach, for in it dwells the lulik, or tutelar genius.18 The term sacred in the words “sacred grove” should not imply that these sites were purely religious in nature. They served political purposes through their links to land tenure, moral order and political legitimacy. Despite their perceived wildness, they were institutions that defined ancestry, marriage, puberty and the cycles of agriculture. Monitored and tended, they had active

FIGURE 3.3.1 

A sacred grove near Mombasa, Kenya. Credit: Ninara.

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and important roles in rituals. The Circassians, who live to the north of the Black Sea, would make offerings in their groves just as the villagers in Africa and Southeast Asia. In many places – at least where they have survived into the modern age – they stand out visually and formally in an agricultural landscape. The sacred grove might, in fact, be the most basic building block of social cohesion. More than that, a community’s affluence is directly tied to its health (Figure 3.3.1). The community of Malshegu in the Northern Region of Ghana has a sacred grove that houses the deity, Kpalevorgu. All forms of farming and grazing in the grove are prohibited. Only the priests and their aides have regular access to pray to Kpalevorgu on the community’s behalf. For others, entrance is permitted only during biannual rituals honoring Kpalevorgu or on other special occasions with advance consent of the priest and village leaders.19 The relations between the grove and ancestrality were so foundational that the death of an elder or chief was usually communicated to the people as “a great tree has fallen.”20 In Madagascar, some villages differentiate between ancestor burial forests and ceremonial forests where spirits reside.21 In some cases, groves ­encompassed a large territory, in other cases they were just a few trees. In Rajasthan, sacred groves called “Oran” are held by the local community in honor and respect of a local deity. In Sierra Leone, a recent survey of the current ­chiefdoms in the Moyamba District showed that of the 392 sacred groves, over half are women’s sacred forest, around a third were men’s, with others dedicated to fetal burials or mythical deities.22 On the island of Okinawa, sacred forests are called utaki and are associated with villages that are usually ­positioned to the south of the grove. It is believed that when a woman dies, her spirit goes back to the utaki and that the spirit is transferred to a granddaughter, hence the forest is the medium of contact between generations.23 Entering groves was a risky act even in the best of circumstances, as it could produce a mysterium tremendum, a phrase coined by the Romans to identify the shakes of terror that the presence of deities transmits to humans. The forest’s self-defense, in other words, was a form of psychological warfare. Permission to enter would have to be given, and not just from the priests, but more importantly from the residing deity or even from the trees themselves.24 The spirits would have to be consulted, omens interpreted, blessings made and offerings given. In rural Ghana – at least in the past – before any big tree was cut, a libation was poured for the gods to ask for their blessings and guidance so that no bad omen would befall the community.25 For the construction of Ise Shrine in Japan, even today, for the thousands of trees that are felled, elaborate rituals have to be performed as part of Yamaguchi-Sai (“mountain entrancing ceremony”), during which the priests ask the trees their permission to be cut. In Java, the tree spirits, Gendruwo or the female

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version Wewe, can be extremely protective. If not properly respected, they can make one ill or go insane.26 Cato the Elder, writing on Roman agriculture in the second century BCE, preserves for us a special prayer to be used by the husbandman when cutting down a tree in a grove for timber: A pig is to be sacrificed, and the following prayer uttered: “Whether thou be god or goddess to whom this grove is dedicated, as it is thy right to receive a sacrifice of a pig for the thinning of this sacred grove, and to this intent, whether I or one at my bidding do it, may it be rightly done. To this end, in offering this pig to thee I humbly beg that thou wilt be gracious and merciful to me, to my house and household, and to my children. Wilt thou deign to receive this pig which I offer thee to this end.”27 We today mis-associate this type of animism with “nature worship.” The Javanese, for example, do not venerate trees, rivers or mountains as such, but rather the spirit of these places.28 Furthermore, when thinking about how this spirit world operates, it would be more accurate to call it as having an atectonic institutionality. The Greek word tekton – carpenter – is conventionally associated with buildings. And since today we associate buildings with institutions, an atectonic institutionality is difficult for us moderns to fully imagine. At an exhibition at Glasgow University, one can see a finely crafted Roman bronze jug, with a beautiful ornate handle. Found at the bottom of a river, the archaeologists have conjectured that the jug, which was made as an export commodity somewhere in the Mediterranean region, was brought to Britain during the building of Hadrian’s Wall by a commander who traded it to a local chief, probably as part of an agreement of some sort. The chief then, to honor his ancestors, gave it to the sacred waters of the river. Though we call this a river sacrifice, we have to first see the river as “an institution.” In another example, as described by Gregory of Tours in the sixth century: In the territory of Javols [on the western edge of the Massif Central] there was a large lake. At a fixed time, a crowd of rustics went there, and as if offering libations to the lake, threw into it linen, cloths and garments, pelts of wool, models of cheese and wax and bread, each according to his means. They came with their wagons; they brought food and drink, sacrificed animals, and feasted for three days.29 On the Gold Coast, local communities believed that the rivers are animated by powerful spirits who can slay men but who can also bring them much good fortune. Hence, they pay great respect to these formidable beings in the form of sacrifices by throwing cowries into the water.30 Such river worship was no isolated phenomenon. The Vikings repeatedly used certain riverine

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sites for offerings called a blót where they sacrificed something in order to get something back in return, good weather, fertility or luck in battle. Bridges and fords were particularly important because they served as a boundary between the living and the deceased. A magnificent English sword sacrificed in Skåne in Sweden is on display at the Historical Museum in Stockholm and may well have been an offering to the ancestral/spirit world; the same appears to be true for the Battersea Shield dredged from the bed of the Thames in London in 1857. In south England, llyn Cerrig Bach was once a sacred deposit site with over 150 metal objects already having been retrieved, and in Ireland in the so-called Golden Bog of Cullen where 100 cauldrons, spears, swords, axes and gold bars, dress fasteners, chains, discs have been discovered. Whether these are associated with burials or not is debated.31 The bog at Vimose (Denmark) seems to have been a ritual center of tremendous importance. Though only 2% of the bog has been actually studied, archaeologists have found swords, lances, spears, bows, arrows, shields, armors, belts, knives, combs, beads, jewelry, gaming pieces, horse equipment, bowls, rivets, oars and perhaps even entire boats, most probably placed there in grand ceremonies in the third century CE. The prize of the hoard is a 12-centimeter-­ high bronze griffin sitting atop a pole with a flag that probably came from a Roman cavalry unit.32 These were not put there by the Romans, but by those who defeated them and gave victory gifts to the gods (Figure 3.3.2). Halfway around the world, in Borneo, the Punan would place locally sourced gold in their mortuary barges as riverine gifts to the ancestors, a fact that the downstream traders discovered – unbeknownst to the Punan – to their obvious advantage. William Henry Furness III, a US physician and ethnographer, who made four expeditions to Southeast Asia and Oceania between 1895 and 1901, writes the following: [It is the custom among the Bukits] for the youths, when they reach the bank of a new river, to divest themselves of every article of clothing, save

FIGURE 3.3.2 

The Thorsberg Moor, Germany. Credit: Alexander Leischner.

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a chaplet of leaves, which they twist from the vines near at hand; then crouching at the edge of the water, they toss some personal ornament, such as a brass ear-ring or a bright bead, far out into mid-stream, and at the same instant scoop up a handful of the water; gazing earnestly into the few drops which they hold they invoke the spirits of the river to protect them, and implore permission to enter the new territory.33 The bishop of Tours (538–594 CE) documents a similar situation in France: There was a mountain in the land of the Gabali… called Helanus, with a big lake [now known as Lac S. Andéol] Here, at a certain time, a large gathering of rustics, as though they were making offerings to that lake, threw in pieces of cloth, and material for the making of men’s clothes. Some gave fleeces of wool, very many cheeses and wax, or bread, and all sorts of things, each one according to their resources, which I consider it would take too long to list. They came with wagons, bringing food and drink, slaughtering animals, and feasting for a period of three days.34 Perhaps the most dramatic example is the story of the treasure of Delphi. Many Greek states had special “treasuries” allotted to them in the temple precincts at Delphi in which their offerings to the gods were deposited. The temple was without doubt the richest sacred site in the Mediterranean. In 280 BCE, when Volcae invaded Greece, they went to Delphi and looted its entire holdings, seemingly some 15,000 talents of gold and silver ­bullion, taking it all back in a long celebratory convoy to their homeland near Toulouse. There, they gifted the entire loot, the Gold of Tolosa as it is known, into a sacred lake, thought today to be Lake Boums. One hundred and 50 years later, Roman General Quintus Servilius Caepio when he defeated the Gauls drained the lake and recovered the loot – some 50,000 bars of gold and 10,000 bars of silver.35 But in the journey back to Rome, it mysteriously ­disappeared and the general later died in battle, no doubt as a result of the curse ­associated with the loot. Strabo’s Geography, Book IV, Chapter 1, talks  about how the Romans “sold” the lakes to the highest bidders (Figure 3.3.3): but it was the lakes, most of all, that afforded the treasures their inviolability, into which the people let down heavy masses of silver or even of gold. At all events, the Romans, after they mastered the regions, sold the lakes for the public treasury, and many of the buyers found in them hammered mill-stones of silver. The mysterious relationship of water to economy trickled down to village level. The number of sacred springs in the landscape of pre-Christian Europe

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FIGURE 3.3.3  Boums

Lake in Haute-Garonne, one of many lakes near Toulouse,

France.

was prodigious. In Ireland alone there are assumed to have once been around 3,000.36 In many places in the world, the “wishing well” – of which many still survive – is perhaps the last manifestation of this economy. Along with groves and lakes, there were, of course, mountains and their associated shrines that throughout Asia and Africa were at the center of cultural and economic identities. Here too we should not see this as “nature worship,” but rather as yet another aspect of institutions without institutionality. This unique and powerful form of social organization can take imagined as well as literal forms. Even as late as 1876, an observer of the Limba of Sierra Leone wrote that: Their national God is Mt. Casogoduna, once in three years the King [Suluku] and all the males repair to the top for a sacrifice…. On the previous day, the King repairs to the top, recounts all the chief matters of the land and begs for the aid of the mountain for the time to come – also before any war is undertaken, the assistance of the mountain is implored by sacrifice.37 Harry H. Johnston, a British colonial administrator and military commander, describes a cave at the north end of Lake Nyasa (also called Lake Malawi) that was the residence of the deity Mbase: Mbase lives in a remarkable cave in the side of the mountain called Ikombwe [Ikombe, Tanzania]. This cave has stalactites and stalagmites in abundance…. When Dr. Cross visited the cave it was very filled up with old broken pots and rotten cloth. These pots had been deposited full of meal for hundreds of years in the cave so that it is now almost blocked up. Two years ago a harum-scarum son of chief Mwankenja…robbed his

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cave of large quantities of cloth and offerings of brass-wire and beads. As no harm happened to him subsequently the belief in an evil spirit is said to have received a severe shock, and this, with the growing influence of the missionaries, is bringing about a cessation of the worship.38 But not everywhere has such worship disappeared. In many places in Asia, the relationship between affluence and the spirit world is vibrant and ongoing, from the national to the village level.39 In Indonesia, the Tengger make offerings to the volcano deity of Mount Bromo. It has become not just a spectacle that attracts tourists, but one that attracts various people with big nets who hope to snag some of the money floating down from the summit. As recently reported in a newspaper (Figure 3.3.4): Despite the cold weather that reached 10-degree Celsius, thousands of people went to Mount Bromo on Monday morning to witness the annual Yadnya Kasada ritual. Held on the 14th day of the Kasada month on the Hindu lunar calendar, Yadnya Kasada is a ritual practiced by Tenggerese Hindus.… Following the ritual, the Tengger tribe shamans, local public figures, and Tenggerese people gathered and prayed for their safety and prosperity. At dawn, the offerings are carried to the crater of Mount Bromo. The ritual procession attracts many tourists. For the main ritual, the Tenggerese made offerings such as livestock, fruit, and vegetables to Hindu deities by throwing them into the crater of Mount Bromo. The offerings are symbols of gratitude from the people of Tengger. In the procession, some were seen throwing out Rp. 50,000 and Rp.100,000 bills

FIGURE 3.3.4 

Mount Bromo, Indonesia. Credit: Kadek Gita.

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as offerings and this ended up creating a bit of a chaos from people who were trying to get the money before they went into the crater. Tourism minister Arief Yahya said the tradition has a positive impact on the local economy.40 Notes 1 Karl Polanyi uses the term “administered trade” to describe a pattern of exchange of status symbols and ritual objects. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1944), 65. 2 K. Ekholm, “External Exchange and the Transformation of Central African Social Systems,” in The Evolution of Social Systems (115–136), eds. J. Friedman and M. J. Rowlands (London: Duckworth), 119. 3 Sam Dogen, “The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige Is Ruining Your Life,” (ca. 2016) https:// www.financialsamurai.com/the-unhealthy-desire-for-prestige-is-ruining-your-life/. 4 See C. Renfrew, “Trade as Action at a Distance: Questions of Integration and Communication,” in Ancient Civilization and Trade, eds. J. A. Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975), 3–59. 5 Ian Knight, The Anatomy of the Zulu Army, From Shaka to Cetshwayo 1818– 1879 (London: Greenhill Books, 1999), 30. 6 Kenneth R. Hall, Maritime Trade and State Development in Early Southeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1985), 5. 7 Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” The Journal of African History 36, no. 1 (1995): 117. 8 Dean R Snow, “Iroquois-Huron Warfare,” in North American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (149–159), eds. Richard J. Chacon and Ruben G. Mendoza (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 157. Hacon and Ruben G. Mendoza, 149–159 (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 157. 9 Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Vol. 1, The Lands below the Winds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 6. 10 Robert Wessing, “A Community of Spirits: People, Ancestors, and Nature Spirits in Java,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (2006), 73. 11 Barbarian Conversion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 407. 12 Kenneth S. Cohen, Honoring the Medicine: The Essential Guide to Native American Healing (New York: Random House, 2006), 28. 13 Bill Sagir, “‘We are Born Chiefs’ Chiefly Identity and Power in Haku, Buka Island,” in Bougainville Before the Conflict (346–373), eds. Anthony J. Regan and Helga M. Griffin (Canberra: Pandanus, 2005), 351. 14 Audrey I. Richards, “Keeping the King Divine,” Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1968): 23–35, 27, 35. 15 See Robert l. Hall, “Calumet Ceremonialism, Mourning Ritual and Mechanism of Inter- Tribal Trade,” in Mirror and Metaphor: Material and Social Construction of Reality (31–42), eds. Daniel W. Ingersoll Jr. and Gordon Bronitsky (Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1987). 16 In some cases, the ceremony itself was an exchange item. Among the Plains Indians, a ceremonial dance was considered a type of property that could be exchanged for the customary amount of goods. It was in this way that the River Crows came to have their Muddy Mouth performance and the Hidatsa their Hot Dance. See Robert H. Lowie, “Ceremonialism in North America,” American Anthropologist, New Series 16, no. 4 (1914): 602–631.

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17 John Shortt, “An Account of the Hill Tribes of the Neilgherries,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 7 (1869), 249. 18 Élisée Reclus, The Earth and Its Inhabitants: Oceanica (New York: Appleton and Co., 1890), 214. 19 See: C. Dorm-Adzobu, O. Ampadu-Agyei, and P. G. Veit, Religious Beliefs and Environmental protection: The Malshegu Sacred Grove in Northern Ghana (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, and Nairobi, Kenya: Acts Press. 1991). 20 George J. S. Dei, “A Forest beyond the Trees: Tree Cutting in Rural Ghana,” Human Ecology 20 no. 1 (Mar. 1992): 72. 21 Maria Tengö, Kristin Johansson, Fanambinantsoa Rakotondrasoa, Jakob Lundberg, Jean-Aimé Andriamaherilala, Jean-Aimé Rakotoarisoa and Thomas Elmqvist, “Taboos and Forest Governance: Informal Protection of Hot Spot Dry Forest in Southern Madagascar,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (December 2007): 687. 22 Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch, “Sacred Groves in Africa: Forest Patches in Transition,” in Forest Patches in Tropical Landscapes (300–326), eds. John Schelhas and Russell S. Greenberg (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996), 309. 23 Asato Eiko, “Okinawan Identity and Resistance to Militarization and Maldevelopment,” in Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (228–242), eds. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 238. 24 In Greece and Rome, sacred groves were protected by strict regulations against violation. See Darice Elizabeth Birge, Sacred Groves in the Ancient Greek World (Berkeley: PhD thesis. University of California Berkeley: Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, 1982). 25 G. J. S. Dei, Ibid., 72. See also Bruce A. Byers, Robert N. Cunliffe, and Andrew T. Hudak, “Linking the Conservation of Culture and Nature: A Case Study of Sacred Forests in Zimbabwe,” Human Ecology 29, no. 2 (June 2001), 187–218. 26 Peter Boomgaard, “Sacred Trees and Haunted Forests in Indonesia,” in Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Critical Approach (48–62), eds. Ole Bruun and Arne Kalland (London: Routledge, 1995), 51. Among the Iban in Indonesia, anyone wanting to fell trees within such a site had to perform proper ritual offerings. Farming on or even near such land was said to result in illness for the family doing so. See Reed L. Wadley and Carol J. Pierce Colfer, “Sacred Forest, Hunting, and Conservation in West Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Human Ecology 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 313–338. 27 Cato the Elder, De Agricultura, Par. 139 Loeb Classical Library, 1934. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cato/De_Agricultura/ home.html. 28 G. A. Wilken, Het animisme bij de volken van den Indischen archipel,” in De ­verspreide geschriften van Prof. Dr. G.A. Wilken (Vol. 3, 1–287), ed. Frederik D.E. van Ossenbruggen (Semarang: G.C.T. van Dorp, 1912), 232. 29 Gregory of Tours, Glory of the Confessors, trans. R. Van Dam (Liverpool University Press, 1989) chap. 2, 19 (slightly abbreviated). 30 Publii ovidii nasonis Fastorum libri sex Vol. 4, Edited and Translated by James George Frazer (London: McMillan, 1929), 101 31 Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Their Nature and Legacy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 190. 32 Theron Douglas Price, Ancient Scandinavia: An Archaeological History from the First Humans to the Vikings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 300, 301. 33 Furness III, Folklore, 25.

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34 Quoted in Ken Dowden, European Paganism, The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge 2008), 50. Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), 121. 35 Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), 121. 36 Celeste Ray, The Origins of Irelands Holy Wells (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2014), 4. 37 Richard Fanthorpe, “Locating the Politics of a Sierra Leonean Chiefdom,” Africa 68, no. 4 (1998): 579. 38 Harry H. Johnston, British Central Africa, An Attempt to Give Some Account of a Portion of the Territories Under British Influence, North of the Zambesi, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen and Co, 1898), 450. 39 See, for example, Laurel Kendall, Vũ Thi Thanh Tâm, Nguyen Thi Thu Hương, “Three Goddesses in and out of Their Shrine,” Asian Ethnology 67, no. 2 (2008): 219–236. 40 https://www.thejakartapost.com/travel/2017/07/12/thousands-of-tourists- witnessthe-yadnya-kasada-ritual-in-mount-bromo.html.

4 CROSSING CHIEFTAIN GEOGRAPHIES

The mechanisms of long-distance trade are obviously not always easy to reconstruct, but they do stand out from other forms of trade, such as shortdistance trade that is mostly village to village or even long-distance trade that goes from marketplace to places over the borders, or what might be called regional trade. Long-distance trade involved specialized goods. It also required specialized groups of intermediaries, transportation specialists and traders. These people take an outsized role in our histories because they are the most visible aspects in the historical record. We draw their routes on the map as a line. But the danger is that we flatten out the complex nature of what transpired. One of the many reasons it is difficult for historians to come to terms with a full dimension of long-distance upstream exchanges is because in quite a few places it began in the form of silent trade. James Woodburn describes it as an exchange of goods between two parties who keep apart and don’t encounter each other face to face. If they see each other at all, it is only at a distance.1 It was common among forest people in Africa and Asia. An example comes from Herodotus, who, writing about 2,500 years ago, describes that trade occurred between the Carthaginians and an African people on the Northwest or West African coast. When the Carthaginians arrived by ship: they unlade their wares, and having transposed them after an orderly fashion along the beach, leave them, and returning aboard their ships, raise a great smoke. The natives, when they see the smoke, come down to the shore, and, laying out to view so much gold as they think the worth of the wares, withdraw to a distance. The Carthaginians upon this come ashore DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-19

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and look. If they think the gold enough, they take it and go their way; but if it does not seem to them sufficient, they go aboard ship once more and wait patiently. Then the others approach and add to their gold till the Carthaginians are content. Neither party deals unfairly by the other.2 Woodburn asks, however, whether the whole idea was made up by nineteenth-­ century ethnographers who failed to take other factors into consideration. But Philip James Hamilton Grierson, who wrote the seminal book on the subject, brought together such a large number of references to the practice that there can be no doubt of its legitimacy. Al-Masʿūdī, a tenth-century Islamic historian, writes this astonishing description of how gold was exchanged in a sub-Saharan region known as the “land of Sijilmasa.” Traders: bargain with them [the locals] without seeing them or conversing with them. They leave the goods and on the next morning the people go to their goods and find bars (‘amud) of gold left beside each commodity. If the owner of the goods wishes, he chooses the gold and leaves the goods, or if he wishes he take his goods and leaves the gold. If he desires an increase he leaves both the gold and the goods.3 The English colonialists who encountered this practice thought that the reason for the silent trade lay in the timidity of the tribals. Today, we would no longer assume that. Instead, it is more likely that the forest people were seeking to avoid the spiritual pollution that came from people with unfamiliar voices and countenances. Macquarie, writing in 1940 about the Wanahoza the nomadic fishermen and potters of the Malagarasi swamps in Tanzania, describes the way in which they trade their famous pots: They have… evolved a system of marketing which I thought unique… All the people living near the shores of these waters, and even many distant ones, are familiar with the routine. As the time draws near housewives take stock and decide what replacements are required for the next twelve months. The food exchange value of each requirement is then prepared and packed ready in separate units. A large company of Wakiko (Wanahoza) women and girls set off laden with pots of all descriptions, in time to arrive near the selected village during the dark hours. They arrange their wares on the ground near the spot where paths converge on that leading to the huts. When all are ready they wail in concert for a few minutes and then disappear into the bush. This signal is recognized and immediately all intending purchasers snatch up what they have to offer in exchange and hurry to the showroom. As each pot is selected, its value in food- stuffs is placed exactly on the spot from which the pot had been removed. I had heard of the market before I met the Wanahoza but they corroborated it, adding that they had never been swindled.4

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Silent trade was reported up until the 1890s between the Malays and the Kubu of Sumatra.5 These exchanges were often mediated by local chiefs or others who knew the expectations of the various sides in advance.6 Since we today know of the silent trade only from the perspective of written accounts, we have no way of fathoming its scale, especially since the written accounts tend to overemphasize the isolation of the encounter when in actuality, all of this was tied into larger systems. Though not everything was inserted into the system of exchange by means of silent trade, a remarkable number of the items traveled through the entire spectrum of polity types, beginning with people we call hunter-gatherers to end in bedrooms of imperial palaces.7 Gold, for example, went from the hands of forest tribes in Borneo to shore-based chiefdoms, to Malay and Javanese traders and representatives, to Javanese princes, to palace craftsmen, to Sri Lankan shippers and on to Arab or Indian merchants, buyers and distributors. Not only was it a chain with many links, but any person in a particular link would not have had the knowledge – or at least not a particularly deep knowledge – of how the other links worked. It was epistemologically obfuscatory. Given the distances that goods had to traverse and the multiple cultures and ecologies that were involved, the routines of exchange along the way had to have become known well in advance to all the players so as to become part of anticipated protocols, even in conditions of silent trade. Tides, monsoon, dry seasons, botanical calendars, spring floods and bird nesting seasons were all part of an extensive knowledge horizon of expectations and activities that had to be organized like the hidden gears in a clock. Frankincense is collected once in the spring (April) and then in the fall (September). Gold in Borneo was mostly collected after the spring floods had receded. The pearl diving season in South India and Sri Lanka lasts for only about 20 or so days in March. Swallow’s nests are gathered during the rainy season. Ivory hunters have to know the migration patterns of the herds. The harvesting of pepper along the mountain slopes of the Malabar coast was dependent on the local’s sophisticated knowledge about the plant’s growing cycles. And so on. The reverse flow was also dependent on tides and weather patterns. Traders needed water, food and protection (Figures 3.4.1 and 3.4.2). It all worked so well because this was not an open economy. If a villager found a bag of gold or had managed to pilfer some cinnamon from a boat, what was he to do with it? There was nothing for him to buy; there were no banks; nor could he just pack his suitcases and head to the city to open a business. More organized economies that preyed on trade were, of course, a perennial problem: piracy in the coastal shipping lanes and thievery in the forests. Merchants cheating each other in some way or other were a threat as well, but here if family connections, spies and gossip did not work, the spirit world served as one of the great police forces ever invented. It cost nothing, apart from gifts and sacrifices. Through its continued threat to expose bad behavior, it dampened the possibility for theft and fraud in very real terms.

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FIGURE 3.4.1  Samburu

harvester collecting frankincense resin. Credit: Hilary Sommerlatte.

FIGURE 3.4.2  Man

harvesting black pepper in Kerala, India. Credit: Roger Cracknell/Alamy.

The prestige/spirit/dark matter world economies were not independent s­ ystems distinct from commercial economies. At some moment, silent economy and ledger economy overlapped, but for that reason in many places they were codependent. The radical expansion of the chieftain world in the first millennium is directly tied to preserving and indeed managing this ­phenomenon. In fact, managing the horizon of exchange became the central ­organizing principle of many a kingdom’s culture’s purpose and longevity. Ancient written sources address neither the complete nature of cross-­ territorial exchanges nor the vast economic strength of tribal/chiefdom worlds that controlled this system, and thus falsify any understanding of the global economy in the first millennium. The Chinese, despite their famous penchant for documentation, had a surprising lack of knowledge, even in the twelfth century, of the ultimate source of many of their luxury imports. They mostly had to wait patiently until goods arrived at a dock or at a frontier

Crossing Chieftain Geographies  205

marketplace. On December 29, 1378, official Chinese records indicate that envoys from Pahang, an entity on peninsular Malaysia, arrived with a set of typical Southeast Asian gifts: The minister Dan-wang Ma-du and others who had been sent by Ma-hala-re Da- rao, the king of the country of Pahang, presented a memorial of gold and offered as tribute six fan slaves, 2,000 jin of pepper, 4,000 jin of sapan-wood as well as aromatics and medicines, including sandalwood, frankincense and camphor. Also, the envoy Ba-zhi Ya-tan and others who had been sent by La-ding La-zhe- wang-shi, the king of the country of Bai-hua, presented a gold memorial and offered as tribute white deer, red monkeys, turtle shells and tortoise-shell, peacocks, parrots, talking birds, pepper, aromatics, bees-wax and other products. It was Imperially commanded that patterned fine silks and silk gauzes interwoven with gold thread and clothing, as appropriate, be conferred upon the kings of the two countries and their envoys.8 What this shows is that the Chinese received an astonishing array of goods, and yet all they had to give in return, in this instance, was some silk. If one can imagine the huge outlay of human, political, communicational, technical and spirit world capital that was necessary to bring goods to the Chinese docks and compare that with the quotidian energy it took to manufacture silk, one can begin to see the astonishing paradox of wealth in the first millennium. The above quotation can also give the false impression that the chain of exchange was organized as a “this-for-that.” Missing is the transition between a spirit world economy and a desire world economy. The transition mostly took place at the ports where goods were stripped of their spiritcarrying capacity and placed with the framework of ownership, law and bureaucracy. As anthropologist Eric Wolf has argued, the transformation of goods into commodities is not neutral in its consequences. It can seriously weaken tributary power and indeed is often designed to do just that. When defined as a purely economic exchange, trade destabilizes the political economy of ­chiefdoms, disrupting peronsonalistic bonds of clientage and alliances.9 In the sweet spot system, it was often in the best interest of the chiefdom elites to resist the hegemonies of trade, if possible, so as to remain a type of outpost. Kingdoms who were directly involved with the trade matrix, like those in South India, were well aware of the negative impact that overthe horizon hegemonies could have. High-value items had to function in both dimensions, but first and foremost, the status world had to be dealt with to create a chain of enforceable obligations from the forest to the palace to the docks, for it was not just the palace elites who had to deal with status, but everyone along an entire capillary system (apart from commoners and slaves). Once a status system was in good order – good cultural order – there

206  Crossing Chieftain Geographies

was then a surplus that was shifted to a more outwardly directed economy, the desire world economy of trade. Finding the right balance between the internal status economy and the trade economy was never easy but was the main geopolitical task of the affluent chiefdom. This can be diagrammed as (Figure 3.4.3): Extraction: usually relatively easy, though the properties of the spirit world were complex and had to be handled with a great deal of care and knowledge. This was sometimes done as a form of silent trade. Material is controlled by local chieftains through their prestige systems. Entities that we might call chiefdoms or kingdoms consolidate exchanges at control centers. They negotiate the exchange between dark matter economy and the conventions of trade. Network systems allow materials to be brought through that world to a port/boundary. Exchanges/trades are made for goods that flow back upstream. Material is transported to centers for processing and crafting. The finished product is traded with elites. In reverse: Fabrication of surplus goods custom-made for trade, usually involved massive amounts of forced, repetitive labor. Warehousing, transportation and then consolidation at ports or borders. Transportation along merchant network systems up the chiefdom supply chain. Distribution in the chiefdom network by designated authority figures. Redistribution and fragmentation of goods by chieftain elites in feasts and ceremonies. Distribution and circulation of intangible goods. Redistribution by chieftain elites in the form of mortuary practices, and the building of clan monuments. Redistribution by chieftain elites or clans to ancestor and into streams, lakes and mountains or their associated shrines and temples. In some places, redistribution into the domain of silent trade. If one begins to multiply these types of exchanges with all their regional ­variants around the globe, one quickly realizes the huge scale of an economy that had its origins in the world of social connections and beyond that in the spirit world. This dark matter economy had the capacity to pull prestige goods up toward itself and thus was inevitably interlocked with desire economies that came from the direction of state elites. Dark matter economy was not a form of exchange that was more primitive than mercantile ones. In fact, it might well be considered just as advanced, especially since it constituted a defense mechanism against the transformative potential of the marketplace perspective.

Crossing Chieftain Geographies  207

FIGURE 3.4.3  Cross-ecological

and polity interactions in the first millennium CE.

This means that we have to see the picture of the globe a bit differently from what we might be accustomed to. If we look at the world of 100 BCE or so, we see small pockets of self-proclaimed “civilizations” centered around the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia/Persia, north India and northern China. Here we see density, industry, wealth, power, armies and powerful theocentric elites, all the necessary attributes of state organizations. Luxury commodities that filter in through the borders were destined for the elites, but these exchanges did not constitute a significant portion of the economy, although their potential was huge since vast stretches of southern Africa, Asia, the Arctic, the Americas and all of Australia were still populated by nonagricultural, relatively detached First Societies. The dynamic changed as the centuries progressed. In fact, the period before the advent of European colonialism was one in which tribes, chiefdoms and occasionally kingdoms and empires were doing the hard work of wealth extraction and negotiating the complex exchange with mercantile economies from across the horizon. The impulse of the self-proclaimed “civilizations” was to shorten the distance between the site of extraction and the site of use, but only later during the colonial and postcolonial eras would these “civilizations” come more directly into the picture and attempt to consolidate that effort into the controlling orbits of their power. But before then, in the long millennium, the chiefdom worlds knew that it was in their best interest to regulate that flow as best they could, to slow it down and to enforce protocols of their own – often to the great irritation of urban elites,

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who complained of trickery, thievery and untrustworthiness. But there was little they could do. Notes 1 James Woodburn, “Introductory Note to ‘Silent Trade’ with Outsiders: HunterGatherers’ Perspectives,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2 (2016): 473. 2 Herodotus, cited by Grierson 1980: 22. 3 Nehemia Levtizon and J. F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), 32. 4 C. Macquarie, “Water Gypsies of the Malagarasi,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 9 (1940): 66. 5 Edwin M. Loeb, Sumatra, Its History and People (Vienna: Des Institutes für Völkerkunde der Universität Wien, 1935), 282. 6 See the discussion in P. F. de Moraes Farias, “Silent Trade: Myth and Historical Evidence,” History in Africa 1 (1974): 9–24. 7 Laura Lee Junker, “Hunter-Gatherer Landscapes and Lowland Trade in the Prehispanic Philippines,” World Archaeology 27, no. 3 (February 1996): 389–410 (406). 8 Geoff Wade, translator, Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: an open access resource, Singapore: Asia Research Institute and the Singapore E-Press, National University of Singapore, http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl/reign/hong-wu/year-11-month-12day-9, accessed January 22, 2019. 9 Jonathan Friedman and Michael J. Rowlands, “Notes Towards an Epigenetic Model of the Evolution of ‘Civilisation,’” in The Evolution of Social Systems (201–278), eds. Jonathan Friedman and Michael J. Rowlands, 201–286 (London: Duckworth, 1978), 232.

PART 4

During the long first millennium, a huge proportion of affluence – if it did not disappear into the networks of cultural obligations and prestige - was ‘stored’ in streams, lakes, and mountain sanctuaries. More concrete expressions of affluence came in the form architecture and its associated spatial and constructional practices. Architectural histories, however, often start with Stonehenge (a product of the chieftain world) and then move to the great empires with a heavy concentration on palaces, temples and cities, leaving the study of the architecture of the chieftain world of the first millennium CE to archaeologists or to those interested in ‘traditional structures’ and vernacular buildings. In arguing that the sweet spot world outside of the reach of the large, agro-urban-centric empires is a distinct zone of reality, I am also arguing that its architectural history has to be conceptualized differently. Even though most of the accomplishments in sweet spot areas and their associated “dark matter’ economies are now lost, important elements have survived, even if often altered and transformed. The following is a sketch of this history, one that will always be incomplete, given that it has to move through – and against the grain of – various disciplinary productions, historical absences and conceptual biases.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-20

1 SHRINE LANDSCAPES

Because shrines these days are mostly associated with folk religion and domestic rituals, their foundational place in human history is rendered almost invisible. Trying to describe that landscape today is like trying to describe a symphony when we only have a fragmentary xerox copy of the sheet music of the piccolo player. Yet, there can be no doubt about the importance of shrine landscapes across the chieftain spectrum. They were foundational of a region’s onto-cognitive world/universe.1 Ancestor shrines played a big part. Anthropologist Eric Gable describes such shrines in the houses of the Manjaco in northwestern Guinea-Bissau. Enter a courtyard in any house, he writes: And you will immediately recognize the ancestor shrine. An ancestor shrine might contain as many as thirty individually carved ironwood posts, three feet tall and planted into the ground about a foot deep. New posts at the periphery ring a venerable core of old posts worn down by weather and termites. Occasionally posts are carved to look like portraits, yet they seem ironically incongruous. A plump colonial officer in a white tunic, his face and hands painted pink, the pockets of his tunic festooned with brightly colored medals; a dapper little white-faced man with long black sideburns and a Hitleresque moustache dressed in a black suit with a white hand-kerchief and a row of pens peeking out of the pockets; a severe bird-like avatar decked out in a top hat, clutching under one arm a tax-book, the other hand holding a fountain pen.2 Igor Kopytoff, a cultural anthropologist, has shown however that the Suku of southwestern Congo (Kinshasa) and northwestern Angola have no term DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-21

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that can be translated as “ancestor.” The dead members of the family are referred to as bambuta, which means variously the “big ones,” the “old ones” and “those who have attained maturity.” Collectively, the term refers to the ­ruling elders of a lineage. A mbuta (singular) is literally anyone who is older than someone else. Consequently, eldership is not an absolute state of being old or dead or alive. As to the elders who are dead, they know more and see things that living elders do not; they are, therefore, more powerful and can sometimes be more helpful. For this reason, they require a special form of contact or buzitu (“honor,” “respect”). Interaction with them is necessarily less frequent, and when it occurs, it is formal – but no less formal than the interaction with living elders on ceremonial occasions. The offer of palm wine is normal on occasions when a junior approaches a senior, but dead elders also have their preferred foods – the special forest mushroom and roots.3 The point is well illustrated by Jomo Kenyatta with his inside view of the Kikuyu, a Bantu ethnic group who live in Central Kenya: I shall not use the term [worship], because from practical experience I do not believe that the Gikuyu worship their ancestors…. I shall therefore use the term “communion with ancestors.”4 Needless to say, ancestor worship was almost universal and even the great self-proclaimed civilizations relied – and in some places continue to rely – on its practice. In ancient Rome, the ancestors, known as lares, were enshrined in an aedicule on the wall. During important meals, the statues of the lares were placed at the table. The Romans also had Penates, who were the tutelary deities of the storeroom (penus), where they watched over the household’s food, wine, oil and other supplies. They eventually became a symbol of the continuing life of the family. Hindu devotees will have their house altar usually in the northeast part of the house. Most are built around an image or figure of the family’s favorite god or goddess. Since each family member, even the children, might have their own deity to worship, there may be several gods represented or even several small altars in the home. In this space, members of the family gather for daily rituals, individual and group meditation and private worship and prayer. Rites can be as simple as lighting a lamp and offering a flower or can be the more elaborate chanting and offerings (Figure 4.1.1). The house shrine is more than just the soul and protector of the inhabitants. In many places, it is what permits the house to be built to begin with. In southern China, in the area of Dali, the land is not thought to belong to humans, but to a land deity who needs to be appeased before a house can be built. Sacrifices and prayers are required before breaking ground and construction can begin.5

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FIGURE 4.1.1  First-century

Roman Lararium from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii. Credit: Patricio Lorente.

Though house shrines are certainly ancient, as ancient has houses themselves, the vast majority of shrines in the wider landscape were atectonic, meaning that they did not need architectural definition. They were associated with lakes, rivers, springs, groves, stones and trees where offerings are given. Because many of us today would interpret shrines of this type as “nature worship,” we miss the importance of these sites. In the Baltic religion, open-air religious sites were called Alkas. Its trees could not be cut and even fishing was not allowed. These groves were sometimes defined by an enclosure, fence or perimeter similar to what the Greeks called a temenos, but even that might have been known culturally and not necessarily laid out spatially. In Ireland, the ancient gaeilge term was temair. In Japan, the term is tamagaki (玉垣). It was the domain of the gods and defined by a place cut off from this world by ditches, embankments or fences.6 In many places across the globe, shrine-intensified landscapes included caves and mountain tops, their remote location and the difficulty of access being a key element of their potency: Mount Popa in Myanmar; the mountain top shrines in Petra, Jordan; and the water temples of the Inca-Caranqui in Ecuador are just three of hundreds of such places. Sacred mountains are a well-studied and well-known phenomenon. The conversation is almost exclusively within the domain of religion. Less commented on and rarely studied is the equally important relationship between a mountain and the “economic” health of the region as mediated through the socio-ontological realm of devotees. Mountains are inevitably part of territorial cults that function to ensure the well-being of the community, its fields, livestock, fishing, hunting and general economic interests. They also issue and enforce directives with regard to a community’s use of its environment.

214  Shrine Landscapes

Finally, they provide schemas of thought in which myths, rituals and directives for action appear as parts of a coherent worldview. In Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the Labuhan ceremony that honors Mount Merapi to the north and the South Sea to the south are still conducted to preserve the long sacred relation between the Sultan of Yogya as the direct descendant of Panembahan Senopati – the first ruler of the second Mataram Kingdom and its landscape. For the sea ceremony, members of the court walk far into the sea to surrender their offerings. Offerings are also solemnly given to the mountain, with the ceremony witnessed by large crowds of people wishing to get a blessing from the Creator of the world (Figure 4.1.2). These landscapes can also work in the opposite direction, namely in the direction of ever smaller increments. Among the Bahuma in Uganda, a warrior will have one amulet on his left shoulder and a second on his shield. These amulets are connected to a shrine back in the house to which his wife makes daily offerings during her husband’s absence.7 Different regions and cultures shifted toward more architectural expressions for their outdoor shrines at different times in history. The Gauls made the shift only after their contact with the Greeks in the third century BCE.

FIGURE 4.1.2  Labuhan

ceremony on the slopes of the Mount Merapi. Credit: Beawiharta Beawiharta/Reuters/Alamy.

Shrine Landscapes  215

In Japan, Shintoism, as we call it today, made the shift mostly only after the introduction of Buddhism in the eighth century CE. In South India, we are fortunate to have rock-cut representations of shrines at Mamallapuram, the Draupadi Ratha in particular. It is clearly a replica of a wooden shrine with a thatched roof surfaced with plaster and decorated. But since there are no examples that have survived, it is unknown when such structures began to be made and even where they would have been located. In some places in Africa, the shrine world has remained almost exclusively atectonic into the present. But the ancient Egyptians already developed the prototype as represented in the Book of the Dead from about 1250 BCE: a box with a single opening, a peaked roof and a porch with a few steps. In India and elsewhere, one can find similar shrines even today (Figures 4.1.3–4.1.5). Eric Appau Asante, Steve Kquofi and Stephen Larbi, who have studied the shrines of the contemporary Asante in the south of Ghana that were made in the last 200 years or so, noticed that different shrines have different

FIGURE 4.1.3 

Draupadi’s Ratha, Mahabalipuram, India.

FIGURE 4.1.4  The

ancient Egyptian goddess Hathor in the shape of a cow in front of her shrine.

216  Shrine Landscapes

FIGURE 4.1.5  Indian

village shrine dedicated to Hanuman. © Rachanalodhi 08081996|Dreamstime.com.

decorative motifs, each having a specific set of meanings associated with the deity. Some, like the leopard, protect people from the terror of evil spirits; two birds facing each other represent the idea of peaceful coexistence; the swirling motives visible on another shrine represent the moves of a sacred dance that invokes the deity to protect the people from the machinations of malevolent spirits.8 Shrines can have different types of interactional agents, such as devotees, pilgrims, petitioners, guardians, family members, priests, priestesses and even passersby. Tending the shrine can be done by priests or priestesses, but also by locals and community members or even as a ritual obligation by devotees. Etiquette is extremely important when accessing a shrine (Figure 4.1.6). The word “ritual” is sometimes used to describe the behavior toward a shrine, but this modern word can mislead if the assumption is that the engagement with a shrine involves blind or repetitive activities. Shrines are dynamic places that require incantations, food offerings, music, dreams and vision quests, all inevitable aspects of its world-contacting, world-making capacity. The true complexity of shrines in their various dimensions always lies just beyond human comprehension, thus their innate magic.9 Generally, however, the rules are not complicated. They inevitably involve depositing at least a small gift of some sort. In Japan, there are no strict rules when it comes to praying at a Shinto shrine, and everyone seems to do so just a little differently. Regional customs are common and the way of praying can differ as well. The best way to proceed in such cases is to ask a local. Though shrines each have their individual force field, they rarely operate as isolated objects, but rather as a network of relations serving collaboratively as intensifiers of the human/spirit/ancestor world. As Komal Kothari notes in regards to the villages of Rajasthan, the shrines there form a network of relations that holds the fabric of rural society together.10

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FIGURE 4.1.6 

A typical shrine interaction.

These networks in more ancient times were not limited to what we today would call rural society. A typical example is ancient Greece. Whereas much attention has been devoted to Greek religion, its major gods and goddesses and their associated temples, given the availability of information in ancient official or state records and inscriptions, much less information is available for the understanding of what one scholar has called “the humbler aspects of religion as practiced along the byways and in the neighborhoods of the urban centers of Greece.”11 Humbler, yes, but no less foundational. Temples in Greece but also as was typical throughout South and Southeast Asia, they never stood alone as religious monuments, despite the role that architectural history gives to them in that respect. They were always in regional dialogue with other temples and even humble spirit shrines. In Athens, there were certain obvious concentrations of these shrines. The greatest was on the Acropolis, its western approaches, and the adjacent Hill of Ares, the steep northern and southern slopes and the caves that penetrated the rocks on these sides. The agora was also full of shrines with a wide range of values. Some had great civic dignity, whereas others were less important and still o ­ thers were obscure even to contemporary inhabitants. Shrines of various sorts were also strung out along the road that ran toward the northwest, through the main city gate, the Dipylon, to the cemeteries. Furthermore, in the streets, there were always the ubiquitous Herms, square pillars surmounted by a head of Hermes, who, amongst other things, was the great god of streets and gateways. As one scholar phrased, “there were gods everywhere.”12

218  Shrine Landscapes

In today’s world, house and village shrines are mostly disconnected from the larger political landscapes. But in former times, there were powerful capillary connections across scales. On the island of Madagascar, there were once several shrines that were seen as protectors of the kingdom, some 15 or 16 it seems with different rankings and different associated practices. Since most of these shrines have been lost, we are dependent on descriptions by colonial observers: From the drawings given to me by a native friend whose family was the hereditary guarding and keeper of one of these chief idols, it appears that Rakélimalàza consisted simply of three small pieces of the wood of some sacred tree, wrapped round with white silk. It was kept at a large village called Ambòhimànambòla … and it … had a house appropriated to it. The office of the idol-keeper was hereditary, and was one both of honor and profit, those who held it having several privileges belonging to no other subjects, such as the right of carrying a scarlet umbrella.… At none of the idol-houses, however, was there any regular worship, but they were visited by those people who desired to obtain certain benefits, offerings of money or of fowls, sheep, and other animals being brought to the idol keeper. The idols were also taken abroad on special occasions, being at these times usually fastened to the top of a slender pole, so as to be visible from a distance, although the idol itself was generally hidden from view by a covering of scarlet silk or velvet, striped with dark-blue cloth.13 Dark matter economies required extensive, cultivated shrine landscapes that produce a trans-spatial, transtemporal, communication-rich environment. These shrine-intensified landscapes were never designed to be static. They were dependent on a particular community for upkeep and maintenance. If that community moved away or if its needs changed, the shrine can disappear or its purpose altered. For that reason and many others, such landscapes will inevitably have shrines that decay and that attract only a few people or whose purpose might even have been forgotten. But the core investment in the culture of shrines – because of its potential and indeed requirement for proliferation – always guarantees that many will be maintained over long periods and that new ones are continually being added. Because of the difficulty of reconstructing these in historical conditions, we have to shift focus to places in the contemporary world where shrine cultures still flourish, as in Myanmar. There, nats, as spirits are called, come in two types: the lower nats and the higher nats who inhabit the six heavens. Much like saints, nats can be designated for a variety of reasons, including those only known in certain regions. A typical nat shrine in a house might have a coconut with its stalk intact, hung often in the southeast corner of a home. It hangs in a basket adorned with ribbons, jasmine chains and fans, with offerings of green sprigs and water. A small curtain screens it from any light

Shrine Landscapes  219

FIGURE 4.1.7  A nat

shrine in Yangon, Myanmar. Credit: James Jiao/Shutterstock.

com.

at night. Furthermore, almost every Burmese village has a nat shrine which serves as the village guardian. The shrine is tended by a nat-kadaw, who serves as the master of ceremonies. These people often lead festivals called nat-pwes, which are devoted to interacting with the nats. The nat- kadaws have the special power to be able to be possessed by nats. Once ­possessed, their voice changes and they perform elaborate dances (Figure 4.1.7). The Giant Rocks of Singida (Tita) near Singida, Tanzania, are still a major spirit world center for the Turu, a Bantu-related people.14 Seen from the base of the hill, the shrine is a confused but awe-inspiring jumble of huge boulders. In actuality, the site is the homestead of beings who control the source of rain and therefore of life. All trees, plants and stones on the hill were considered sacred and could not be cut or taken away. In former times, warriors brought their spears and arrows to the shrine to be made invulnerable and hunters laid the heads of the kudu at its entrance. There were taboos. Women were not allowed near the shrine, nor were anything red allowed in the area, for red was a “hot” color in opposition to black, associated with the rain clouds. The central cave is the house of a female being, Sita, of whose name Tita is another form. The current priest informs visitors that the three nearby stones are “the navel” and the central sacred object of the shrine, which is a living thing capable of speaking, singing and moving of its own volition (Figure 4.1.8).15 Disrespecting a shrine, even if by accident, can have consequences. Documents pertaining to the well of St. Winefride are a testament to this. For centuries, the well was more than just a site of miraculous healing. It was also a powerful arbiter of social order whose influence extended across the nation. It continues to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day. In a report from 1574, during the reign of Elizabeth I, a man named William Shone berated the worshipers who were bathing in a well and contemptuously declared that he wanted to clean his boots in the water. He leapt into the pool and “his

220  Shrine Landscapes

FIGURE 4.1.8  The

Giant Rocks of Singida, Tanzania. Credit: Stephan Schramm/ Alamy Stock Photo.

whole body was stricken with lamenesse and benummed.” Soon, the man was no longer able to make a living and was reduced to begging for food. Eventually, he returned to Holywell, much humbled. He bathed in the water, reverently asking the saint to forgive him. St. Winefride heard his prayer and healed him, but, so we are told, “not to his full strength” (Figure 4.1.9).16 In 1946, a young man accidently burned a portion of a hill on the edge of the Zambezi escarpment in Zimbabwe, which was regarded as a shrine especially important for rain. The headmen screamed their rage at his impudence, put him in handcuffs and threatened to make all the men in the district who were of his approximate age pay chickens for a purifying feast. Finally, however, they agreed to fine only the offender.17 E. Colson describes a situation regarding the rain shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia: About 1910 some men found women cutting thatching-grass close to the sacred spot. The women came from a village only about three miles from Luanga, but belonging to the cult district of Ciboya. When the Luanga men told them they were trespassing at a sacred spot the women cursed them heartily in terms which left no doubt as to their opinion of Luanga and its people. The leader of Luanga went to demand an apology from his peer at Ciboya, who promptly spat in his face. The next step was an armed raid by the Luanga people in which several men were killed and the followers of Ciboya were driven from their homes.18

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FIGURE 4.1.9 

St. Winefride’s Well, England. Photo by Tom Oates.

So important were shrines as a form of anchoring the world that they were obvious targets for enemies.19 Destroying a shrine would induce loss of social identity, loss of community, solidarity and even loss of social control.20 Julius Caesar in conquering Gaul knew this full well and set out to destroy the sacred sites of the druids who had been a thorn in the side of the Romans ever since they occupied Brittan. In 60 CE, Governor of England Suetonius ­conquered the island of Anglesey, known then as Mona, one of the most sacred spots for the druids It was a brutal battle that ended with the ­purposeful desecration of the site. As recorded by Cornellius Tacitus, a Roman historian: “Their groves, devoted to inhuman superstitions, were destroyed. They [the Roman soldiers] deemed it indeed a duty to cover their altars with the blood of c­ aptives and to consult their deities through human entrails.”21 It took several more attacks to beat the island into submission, but ultimately the  Romans won out. Today, no one knows where these groves once were. Mostly, however, sacred landscapes today have been eaten away by land development, roads and changes in cultural norms. Monotheism has repressed the use of shrines even though many modern religions, even Islam, have sometimes accommodated shrines into their architectural vocabulary. Unlike the ancient animist shrines, these usually memorialize a saint or religious figure. But recent news items show the ongoing significance of shrine cults in many parts of the world. At Clootie Well on the Black Isle, Scotland, a recent headline from The Times stated: “A mystery person has incurred the wrath of a Highland community by repeatedly ‘tidying up’ a Celtic shrine which is thought to have stood for thousands of years” (January 26, 2022).22 And elsewhere, we read (Figure 4.1.10): Death toll rises to 13 after quake hits Malaysia’s highest peak: State o ­ fficial blames tragedy on a group of 10 foreigners, including two Canadians,

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FIGURE 4.1.10  Clootie

Well on the Black Isle, Scotland. Credit: F. Leask/CC BY-SA 2.0.

who “showed disrespect to the sacred mountain” by posing naked at the peak last week. (Eillen Ng, Toronto Star, June 6, 2015) In Japan, continuities with ancient practices are undergoing a sort of revival. There, in the context of Shintoism, nature spirits, known as kami, possess a type of invisible energy field that can exist in a variety of scales and in a variety of embodiments. The shrines that are built on site where a kami resides are called kamigaki or kamiyashiro, which means “the place where kami stays.” Shrines can come in the form of small roofed boxes (hokora) or can be an actual building with a main hall (honden), but even if the shrine is a magnificent one, it is still in essence temporary (Figure 4.1.11).23 Kami are not just “nature spirits,” since they can also live indoors. In fact, kami house shrines still figure prominently in many a Japanese household. The kamidana, roughly translates to “god-shelf,” is usually shaped as a box with a roof and doors. Amulets or talismans can be stored inside. The rope that hangs on top is ornamented with white paper to show the purity of a place occupied by a kami, just as you will see in shrines. There are also usually a pair of vases, candleholders and white dishes for offerings. The kamidana may also include a sacred rope of twisted rice straw called shimenawa, which is traditionally used to demarcate a sacred area. Offerings of water, sake or rice wine and food are placed daily in front of the shrine and prayers are offered to ask for blessings for the household. As always, this world ­accommodates a certain amount of give and take (Figures 4.1.12 and 4.1.13). On a side street of a busy commercial thoroughfare in Ibadan, the huge capital city of Nigeria’s Oyo State, one finds a shrine dedicated to Shango,

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FIGURE 4.1.11  Hokora

or small wayside Japanese Shinto shrine in the mountains of Japan. Credit: CulturalEyes-DH/Alamy.

FIGURE 4.1.12  A kamidana

with kagamimochi offering in a house in Japan. Credit: shig2006/Wikimedia Commons.

the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning. It was built shortly after the Oyo Yoruba established Ibadan as a war camp around 1829. Since then, the Agbeni Shango shrine, as it is commonly known, has been the scene of daily and periodic ritual activities devoted to the propitiation of Shango. A description by Leo Frobenius, a German ethnologist and archaeologist, in 1910 recounts that: On entering, a spacious courtyard met our view in which the intermediate roofs, supported on carved beams, jutted out over a verandah. We slipped underneath a curtain-cloth, and I am bound to say that for a moment’s space the originality of the building in front of me, whose straggling black facade was broken up with many colours, struck me dumb. A lofty, long

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FIGURE 4.1.13  The

God of Thunder’s Temple in Ibadan (1910–1912). Image courtesy of Frobenius Institute.

and very deep recess made a gap in the row of fantastically carved and brightly painted columns. These were sculptured with horsemen, men climbing trees, monkeys, women, gods and all sorts of mythological carved work. The dark chamber behind revealed a gorgeous red ceiling, pedestals with stone axes on them, wooden figures, cowrie- shell hangings, and … some empty spirit bottles, which already play a part in sacrificial rites. On one side of the dark wall a small niche, like a passage, has been cut, in which sat a wily-looking old fellow surrounded by a row of men and women squatting on skins and mats spread upon the floor and doing reverence to the aged man. The whole scene, the richly carved columns in front of the gaily-coloured altar, the ancient man in his circle of devotees and the upward tending scaffolding towards the front, sustaining the mighty, soaring frame of thatch, was superbly impressive.24 In some places, shrine communitarianism continues to grate against the ­modern world sensibilities. During the Trokosi Festival in Ghana, women work as a team to make a clay mix that they then use to repair the shrines’ walls while offering a prayer. “Tro” means god or shrine and “Kosi” means wife, queen or slave. This linguistic ambiguity reflects the practice where families from the local community would send daughters or women as slaves to the shrine. It is believed that the girl’s servitude atones for the misdeed of a family member, relative or ancestor. Despite the official ban of the practice, Ghanaian authorities prefer to end it by persuasion rather than compulsion by mobilizing community leaders and teachers to stop the practice. “It takes the whole community to send a woman to the shrine, so we need to educate the whole community,” one official stated. “Only if change comes from within, will it be long lasting. And it will only come through education.” Regardless, the practice continues, though the women are no longer slaves.

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The reason the government is reluctant to interfere is that they do want to go against the widespread acceptance that anyone who opposes the priests or neglects to do the bidding of the shrines will be cursed and become insane or even die. While Christians look on the Trokosi Festival with disdain, the locals argue that the situation revolves not around slavery but around situations where a family sends a girl to the shrine if it is experiencing difficulties beyond its wisdom. According to defenders of the practice, the girl acquires divine powers and then comes back to her village. Her presence reminds community members to live moral lives.25 The question before us is: what would the shrine landscape have looked like at the end of the first millennium CE? As the above notes indicate, the answer can only be evoked through the incomplete and incompatible lenses of contemporary practices and disciplinary observations. But there can be no doubt that to have traveled the world at the end of the first millennium CE is to have traveled through countless shrine-intensified worlds of various scales. A foreigner would not have been expected to stop at each shrine, but would have been expected to pay homage to particular ones as a sign of respect. Many shrines would have been off limits to a non-local giving even then an incomplete picture. As a result, the few travel accounts of that period do not help. Yes, Marco Polo from Venice and Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta from Morocco are celebrated as world travelers, but one was Christian and the other Muslim. Apart from some limited instances of fascination, neither of them was inclined to delve too deeply into worlds that they thought they had transcended. Marco Polo writes: Keshimur [Kashmir] also is a Province inhabited by a people who are idolaters and have a language of their own. They have an astonishing acquaintance with the devilries of enchantment; in so much that they make their idols to speak. They can also by their sorceries bring on changes of weather and produce darkness, and do a number of things so extraordinary that no one without seeing them would believe them. Indeed, this country is the very original source from which Idolatry has spread abroad.26 The value of Marco Polo’s narratives to our study is zero. And similarly, for Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta, who brings almost no insight into the spirit world practices at the fringes of Islam. Even today, without the proper awareness of how shrine landscapes function, one might miss their very existence. Albert Titus Dalfovo, in discussing the Lugbara who live in northwest Uganda and northeast Zaire, notes that many shrines might not even be recognized as such by a visitor. In a village that he studied, shrines came in a variety of designs: three stones lying flat under the granary and a fourth leaning against a pole of the granary; a clay statuette of an ox between two parallel 25-centimeter-long strings under the granary; a grass rope fastened

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to and running from the top of a house to that of a granary, a stone tied in the center of this rope, causing it to sag almost to the ground; a single stone placed under a tree; three stones fixed in the ground, with a fourth on top across the three, making a kind of miniature house, which is encircled by single stones fixed in an erect position; and so on.27 Following similar reasoning, William Elison points out that a city like Mumbai, normally not listed as a one of India’s holy cities, is actually a vast shrine-intensified cityscape. In that sense, it is not unlike ancient Athens, Rome or Zimbabwe or any number of places throughout premodern AfroEurasia. These shrines, most of which need no priests, are often erected by local people who have placed them to front the street to provide the community with a public face of sorts. The multiplicity of these shrines is thus not dependent on some atmospheric sense of ancient religiosity. They mark urban public space and point to an array of communities – some big, some small, some religious, some secular – that use the liminal space of the street as a conduit by which their participation is noted. Elison argues that the shrines should be theorized through the Sanskrit term pitha or “seat,” as in the places where divinities “sit” or mark their presence. And as in most such landscapes, some shrines are active, whereas others are in a state of disrepair. Some have known histories, whereas yet others were put up for reasons no one can now recall.28 So, unlike some of the more notable global travelers of former times, let us read a telling and eloquent passage from Elison who has

FIGURE 4.1.14 

A Mumbai Street Shrine. Credit: Rainer Krack/Alamy.

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a more observant point of view as he passes the numerous mandir (shrines), this one belonging to a local social club (Figure 4.1.14): Let’s continue one more stop down the Western Railway, to Charni Road, where the station is connected to the Girgaum business district by a pedestrian overpass. About a decade ago, the crowds of commuters would have been greeted daily by a great, metallic murti [embodiment] of Lord Ganesh framed in the window of a building overlooking the crossing. It was an eye- catching display, with an artful bit of staging behind it. The brass-colored Ganesh was as tall as a man (and of course considerably broader), and viewed through the windowpane it had a solid, threedimensional appearance. A visit to the building that housed the image, however, showed it was a bas-relief, both shallow and hollow, made of vac-form plastic.29 It is in the context of a shrine-intensified world that the sweet spot systems of the long first millennium found their strength not just to endure, but to prosper. These landscapes – from the scale of amulet to mountain – were not designed to be fully transparent and visible to outsiders. Their potency and effectiveness lay in their hiddenness and concealment to outsiders who were given access only to special types of shrines. Notes 1 Coming to understand the intangible aspects of the interrelationship of l­ andscape, power and artifactual production are so difficult to integrate into historical ­narratives that archaeology has recently begun to address the problem of the “Western gaze” and the primacy that it has historically been afforded to visual perception and technological achievement when it is clear that these might not be the prime avenues to understand such complex environments. Barbara Bender, “Subverting the Western Gaze: Mapping Alternative Worlds,” in The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape (31–45), eds. J. Ucko and R. Layton (London: Routledge, 1999), 41; Motohisa Yamakage, The Essence of Shinto: Japan’s Spiritual Heart, trans. Mineko S. Gillespie, Gerald L. Gillespie, and Yoshitsugu Komuro (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2006), 73. 2 Eric Gable, “Women, Ancestors, and Alterity among the Manjaco of GuineaBissau,” Journal of Religion in Africa 26, Fasc. 2 (May 1996): 107. 3 The previous is condensed and excerpted from Igor Kopytoff, “Ancestors as Elders in Africa,” Africa 41 (1971): 129–42. 4 Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (London: Harvill Secker, 1938), 217. 5 Shiwu Li, Folklore Studies of Traditional Chinese House-Building, trans. Xiao Xiao (Singapore: Springer, 2022), 19. 6 Mac Giolla Easpaig, “The Significance and Etymology of the Placename Temair,” in The Kingship and Landscape of Tara Dublin, (423–448), ed. E. Bhreathnach (Dublin: The Four Courts Press, 2005), 446–448. 7 John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911), 79.

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8 Eric Appau Asante, Steve Kquofi & Stephen Larbi, “The Symbolic Significance of Motifs on Selected Asante Religious Temples,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 7, no. 1 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3402/jac.v7.27006. 9 Ernst Halbmayer, “Amerindian Mereology: Animism, Analogy, and the Multiverse,” Indiana 29 (2012): condensed from 114–116. 10 Komal Kothari, “The Shrine: An Expression of Social Need,” in Gods of the Byways: Wayside Shrines of Rajasthan, Madya Pradesh and Gujarat (5–52), eds. Julia and David Elliott (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 1982), 5. 11 Charles Kaufman Williams II, “The City of Corinth and Its Domestic Religion,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 50, no. 4 (1981): 408. 12 R. E. Wycherley, “Minor Shrines in Ancient Athens,” Phoenix 24, no. 4 (Winter 1970): 283, 284. 13 James Sibree, The Great African Island: Chapters on Madagascar (London: Trübner, 1880), 298, 299. 14 John C. McCall, “Rethinking Ancestors in Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 65, no. 2 (1995): 259. 15 Makarius Peter Itambu et al., “Rock Engravings and Paintings: Rethinking of the Cupules, Gongs, and Grinding Hollows of Siuyu and Ughaugha in Singida East (Tanzania),” Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection 6 no. 6 (June 2018): 172. 16 Matthias Bryson, “The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales,” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Humanities 2 (Spring 2017): 11. 17 E. Colson, “Rain-Shrines of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 18, no. 4 (October 1948): 275. 18 Ibid. 19 See, for example, David K. Abe and Allison Imamura, “The Destruction of Shinto Shrines in Hawaii and the West Coast during World War II: The Lingering Effects of Pearl Harbor and Japanese-American Internment,” Asian Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2019): 266–281. 20 George Sabo III, “Indians and Spaniards in Arkansas: Symbolic Action in the Sixteenth Century,” The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, 1541–1542. Proceedings of the De Soto Symposia 1988 and 1990 (1993), 202. 21 Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals, BOOK XIV, chapter 30. 22 Paul Drury and Constance Kampfner, “Anger as Offerings at Celtic Shrine Tidied Away,” (January 26, 2022) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ anger-as-offerings-at-celtic-shrine-tidied-away-8kzzr38g9. 23 Motohisa Yamakage, The Essence of Shinto: Japan’s Spiritual Heart, trans. Mineko S. Gillespie, Gerald L. Gillespie and Yoshitsugu Komuro (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2006), 73. 24 Leo Frobenius. The Voice of Africa, Vol. 1 (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1913), 46, 47. 25 See Victor Selorme Gedzi, Yunus Dumb, Gabriel Eshun, “Field of Power: A Religio- Cultural Analysis of Trokosi in Ghana,” Political Science Journal: Critical Thinking 1 (2016): 122–142. 26 Marco Polo, “Of the Province of Keshimur” Book 1 Chapter 31. https:// en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Travels_of_Marco_Polo/Book_1/Chapter_31. 27 Albert Titus Dalfovo, “The Lugbara Ancestors,” Anthropos Bd. 92, H. 4./6. (1997): 485–500 (491). 28 Ibid. 29 William Elison, “Site, Sight, Cite: Conceptualizing Wayside Shrines as Visual Culture,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18 (2018), 2018, accessed October 25, 2019, http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4540; https:// doi.org/10.4000/samaj.4540.

2 FEAST AND DANCE

Feasting enforces – and reenforces – human/clan/ancestral/spirit world ­relations. It, like a well-maintained shrine landscape, was a key index of affluence. There were, of course, the ubiquitous village feasts and new year’s festivals. In ancient Ireland and Scotland, a feast gathering, Lugnasad, at the beginning of the harvest season and named in honor of a deity Lug, was ­celebrated with horse racing, trading, legal procedures and political negotiations, possibly including yet another institution without institutionality. They diagrammed the social world. Special foods were consumed and prestige goods were displayed with the event resonating not just among the elite, but also far down the chain of social obligations. When one considers the many types of vessels, implements and furnishings employed and the large number of animals involved, along with servants and preparers, the significance of feasting becomes clear. The necessary requirement of alcohol meant that a certain amount of loss of control was built into the system, a loss of control that had embedded within it, had, of course, advantages and disadvantages for its members.1 The architecture associated with feasting is not easy to pinpoint as feasts often took place in the open or in a courtyard. Recent excavations at Pylos in Greece make it apparent that the building, though often described as Homeric King Nestor’s palace, was in all likelihood mainly designed as a site for formal, large-scale communal feasts. It was less a palace than a palace-feasting center, since one of the duties of the monarch was to host such events, some possibly with 1,000 guests or more. These events took place in the megaron, a windowless, square room with a central opening defined by four columns with a large fire pit at the center. The room was surrounded by spaces that served as pantries where oil and food were stocked. There was even a special DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-22

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room for wine and wine drinking cups known as kylikes.2 Tablets from that age even list the bronze serving vessels, tables, chairs and stools, axes and knives that went into the preparation of a feast. Though megarons are often portrayed in history book as empty or with a few scale figures, one has to imagine the space at night crowded with boisterous people with tables of food and drink. In more nomadic worlds, feasts were no less important even though they were not centered in a building. In a list of feast-oriented places, one would include the vast kurgan landscape that stretched across the steppe into eastern Europe and Scandinavia from the ninth century BCE onward. Though often discussed in the context of funerary monuments, kurgans were the center for elaborate and probably competitive funerary feasting serving as places for yearly get-togethers such as that exist among Siberian tribes still today. People met to share stories, sing, dance, drink, engage in competitions and to find a spouse. We have a rare eyewitness account of a Hunnic feast from a man named Priscus, an aristocrat attached to the early fifth-century court of Emperor Theodosius II in Constantinople. He was part of the state mission undertaken in the years 448–449 to Attila’s court, at a place in the Hungarian Plain whose precise location remains unknown. He describes the king’s court not as if it were a den of thieves, as the Greeks had imagined it, but rather as a multiethnic society governed by elaborate rules of etiquette. Of particular interest is Priscus’s account of a banquet hosted by Attila. The affair was an elaborate one that lasted hours. Toast after toast was drunk in accord with the participants’ rank: As evening came on pine torches were lit up, and two barbarians, a­ dvancing in front of Attila, sang songs which they had composed, chanting his ­victories and his virtues in war. Those at the feast looked at the men; some took delight in the verses, some, reminded of wars, were excited in their souls, and others, whose bodies were weakened by time and whose spirits were compelled to rest, gave way to tears.3 For the Vikings, feasts took place in special halls, known as mead halls. Mead, beer and wine, the latter a luxury import from the Mediterranean, were distributed by the king within the conventions of reciprocity. Of the approximately 100 Old English poems that have survived, comprising about 30,000 lines of verse, all but a tiny handful deal with life in the mead hall or use mead-hall-based imagery to tell their stories. In an Irish saga, we read of a hall that had seven doors and seven passages through it, seven hearths in it and seven cauldrons with an ox and a salted pig in each cauldron. Every man who came along the passage used to thrust the fork into a cauldron and whatever he brought out at the first catch was his portion. “If he did not obtain anything at the first attempt, he did not have another.”4 In one saga, we read about the elaborate nature of the building.

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Called Fled Bricrenn or “Bricriu’s Feast” and dating to the eighth century, it tells the tale of Bricriu, an inveterate troublemaker, who invites the nobles of the area to a feast at his new Mead Hall at Dún Rudraige (Dundrum, County Down) where the three heroes of the story compete for the “champion’s portion” of the feast. The saga begins with the following passage which is worth quoting in full, given its unusual detail: The preparation of the feast took a whole year. For the entertainment of  the guests a spacious house was built by him. He erected it at Dun Rudraige after the likeness of  the Red Branch in Emain Macha. Yet it ­surpassed the building that Period entirely for material, for artistic design, and for the beautyof architecture its pillars and frontings splendid and costly, its carving and lintel-work famed for magnificence. The house was made in this fashion: on the plan of Tara’s Mead-Hall, having nine compartments from fire to wall, each fronting of bronze thirty feet high, overlaid with gold. In the fore part of the palace a royal couch was erected for Conchobar high above those of the whole house. It was set with carbuncles and other precious stones which shone with a luster of gold and silver, radiant with every hew, making night like day. Around it were placed the twelve couches of the twelve tribes of Ulster. The nature of the workmanship was on a par with the material of the edifice. It took a wagon team to carry each beam and the strength of seven Ulstermen to fix each pole, while thirty of the chief artificers of Erin were employed on its erection and arrangement. Then a balcony was made by Bricriu on a level with the couch of Conchobar and as high as those of the heroes of valor. The decorations of  its fittings were magnificent. Windows of glass were placed on each side of it, and one of these was above Bricriu’s couch, so that he could view the hall from his seat, as he knew the Ulstermen would not allow him within. When Bricriu had finished building the hall and the balcony, supplying it with both quilts and blankets, beds and pillows, providing meat and drink, so that nothing was lacking, neither furnishings nor food, he straightway went to Emain Mach to meet Conchobar and the nobles of Ulster.5 This over-the-top structure was not replicated in every mead hall, but it certainly served as its imagined condition. In Beowulf, also probably from the ninth century, we learn that when Hroþgar, King of the Danes, determined that his fame among men was insufficient, he set about building a mighty mead hall to remedy this situation: It came into his mind that he would order a hall-building a greater mead-house to be built by his folk than the sons of men had ever heard of,

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and inside there he would share out all that God gave him, to young and old except for common property and the lives of his warriors. Then I heard of the workforce’s summoning far and near among many peoples across this middle-earth to adorn the meeting place. It happened over time along the lives of men that all was ready, the greatest of hall-buildings – he shaped its name ‘Heorot,’ he whose word had wide rule. He did not betray his oath: he dealt out rings, treasures at the feast. The hall towered up high and wide-gabled… (Beowulf, lines 67–82) By staging himself in the high seat in the hall, the chieftain would mirror Odin in his high seat in the mythological halls of Valhalla; there, the unbeatable mythological warriors who died on the battlefield each day awoke again every evening, ready to play and drink at the feast. By acting out this ­ performance, the chief displayed himself as the ruler, inherently promising his men a splendid afterlife and legitimizing an entire social order in which raiding figured prominently.6 The high seat was called in Old English gief-stol (“gift-stool,” “seat where rewards are given”), a feature of both Scandinavian and A ­ nglo-Saxon tradition. The seat was designed around special posts that had the function of housing the “spirit” of the ancestors, so that the person seated between them would have the symbolic authority of the gods and ancestors.7 Anthropologist Michael Dietler has classified Viking feasts as either “entrepreneurial” or as “patron-role” feasts.8 In an entrepreneurial feast, the host aims to acquire social power, prestige and alliances through a generous display of commensal hospitality that serves to indebt guests. Viewed as efficacious and wise, successful hosts are accorded respect and deference, which translate into quasi-institutionalized forms of political power or influence often observed in “big man” societies. Patron-role feasts, by contrast, are not reciprocal, but instead generate and legitimize asymmetrical social relationships. Though the ghosts of the mead halls remain today in the English term “manor hall,” there is plenty of archaeological evidence to demonstrate their size such as the one found within the hill fort of Yeavering Bell in Northumbria. The Hríısbrú farmstead in eastern Iceland measured an impressive 28 meters from end to end and was well situated for social gatherings. In its ruins, archaeologists found nonferrous metals and glass objects of various designs that were imported from Europe.9 In Ireland, at the Hill of Tara known as Temair in gaeilge, there is what seems to be the foundation of a

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vast 200-meter feasting hall known as Tech Midchúarta (meaning the House of the Mead Circuit). Tara was one of Ireland’s most important ritual site; it was the sacred place of dwelling for the gods and considered as the entrance to the otherworld. Its first use dates back to the fourth millennium BCE. As the cultural significance of Tara grew, so too the assortment of mounds, avenues and tombs. Between seventh century and tenth century, it underwent several modifications that included the addition of the Tech Midchúarta. The builders had to blend the building into the ancient sanctuary.10 How the hall was designed is any one’s guess, but there is no doubt that approaching Tara was nothing short of a peregrination, mediated through an itinerary of ­traditional ceremonies and rituals at special, historical monuments and places, the l­ighting of fires and the recounting of tribal myths and legends (Figure 4.2.1). Imagine some traders in the first century CE breaking bread in a tavern in one of the ports of South India. They had a lot to discuss and share. Somewhere in the conversation, in their more relaxed moments, they would have commented on the astonishing things they had seen. The topic would certainly have circled around to Petra in Jordan. Is it true that they could make water seem to appear out of the rock? Is it true that they hosted huge feasts in the desert? Is it true that travelers there could gamble and womanize? Is it true that travelers – for a price, of course – could lounge in a pool, drink wine and watch the dancing temple girls? Is it true that the mountain

FIGURE 4.2.1  Reconstruction

of a Viking house from the ring castle Fyrkat near Hobro, Denmark.

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top shrines – with the right amount of gifts – could guarantee safe passage and high profit? Petra had the advantage that it was just beyond the military reach of the Romans. Only in the second century CE, after several failed attempts to conquest, did the Romans decide to give the elites of Petra citizenship status. It was a brilliant move, bringing in development money that built several large temples, a shopping colonnade, a huge theater, a market and an impressive fountain. By then, Petra was, however, already a destination point. Using the secluded site as their base of operations, the Nabateans had come to control the cross-Arabian trade by the third century BCE. They earned huge amounts as caravan protectors and leaders. Beginning small, but with ever greater showmanship, different families and clans competed to build sumptuous tombs. These tombs were not places of quiet meditation, but the sites of boisterous feasts. Where did the food come from? Though today, Petra seems completely inhospitable, the Nabateans chiseled hundreds of cisterns and many miles of canals out of the rock and transformed the nooks and crannies in the surrounding areas into micro gardens growing grapes, figs and fruit. The result was astonishing. It has been estimated that despite only six inches of rain a year, the Nabatean’s could host the many caravans, their men and animals, which they brought to the site (Figures 4.2.2 and 4.2.3).

FIGURE 4.2.2 

General map of Petra, Jordan.

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FIGURE 4.2.3  The

triclinium of the “Tomb of the Roman soldier.” Credit: Nick Brundle/Alamy.

The designers and architects of the tombs were most likely not Nabatean, at least not at first, but were brought in from Anatolia or Egypt, where the rock-cutting tradition had been perfected over 1,000 years. It is extremely specialized work, since the facades have to be carved from the top to the bottom so that the rocks do not fall on someone’s head. This applies to the interiors as well, which is all the more difficult since one first carves out the ceiling and then works down. These laborers might possibly have come on their own, offering their services for work and protection, but more likely they came as contracted servants from trading partners or even as “gifts” from foreign elites eager to connect with the Nabateans who provided the security arrangements across the desert. Importing and supporting such skilled laborers were typical examples of the efficacy of prestige in the dark matter economy. It is likely that over time, many of these laborers became freemen serving at the behest of the various supporting clans. Petra – the city – during its peak, would thus have had a large community of Greek-speaking craft specialists. Most of these probably did not live in tents, but in village communities (Figure 4.2.4). Though funerary events must have been part and parcel of Petra’s lure, in 106 CE, when Petra became officially Roman, the feasting and celebrations hit a new high. Roman funerary ceremonies were particularly ­elaborate events involving professional mourners, funeral processions and even actors sitting atop a chariot dressed in the dead man’s clothes organized by a

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FIGURE 4.2.4  Diagram

of rock-cut techniques base on an unfinished façade at

Petra.

director – all of which was available for hire for anyone who could afford it. Tombs proliferated as did the building of sacred shrines on the mountain tops, and not just because the locals were increasingly “religious” but as a way to turn Petra into a spirit world destination for the caravan leaders. How these shrines worked in the day-to-day world is unknown, but there can be no doubt that ceremonies became more numerous and more elaborate and, of course, more costly. Here, caravan leaders would come to seek out a blessing for a good and safe crossing or perhaps for a good profit. As the decades passed, the entire area became increasingly saturated with mountaintop shrines, offering a powerful mixture of pleasure and spirituality. To drive up revenue even more, north of Petra, there is a place called “Little Petra” that was a type of high-end hospitality zone. It was an easily guarded, roughly 200-meter-long canyon lined with restaurants some more elaborately carved than others, but a few still possessing their wall ornamentation. They are called triclinia and are square rooms along which there are horizonal couches on three sides, here carved out of the rock, with a central area where servers would stand and dancers and musicians perform. Access to the canyon was by narrow entrances. Here, the highfliers could eat, drink and most certainly gamble and womanize, enriching the local economy considerably. To the east of the entrance, there was a large sandy area protected from the winds where the camels would have been “parked” and watched over by their handlers. Cisterns, carved out of the cliffs nearby, provided water for clients and the animals (Figures 4.2.5 and 4.2.6). There can be no doubt that with things going so well, a certain amount of centralization was required, as evidenced by the tomb known as The Treasury, the tomb of the Nabatean King Aretas IV, a spectacular building by any measure in the world. Once probably painted in vibrant colors, it had no real interior, only a space with niches for the bones of the deceased. Its

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FIGURE 4.2.5  A mountaintop

altar overlooking Petra, Jordan. Credit: Verity

Cridland.

FIGURE 4.2.6 

Entrance to a triclinium in Little Petra, Jordan. Credit: Ankur P.

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effect was purely on the outside and once built, it probably became instantly a “must-see building” along the caravan route, as is such today. It was twice the height of the Pantheon in Rome, which was built more or less at the same time. The Pantheon, as huge as it was, looks diminutive and stale. Above the pediment of the Treasury, there is a level with an innovative broken pediment framing a circular shrine. Carved with extraordinary delicacy and care and layered with meanings that are mostly lost, it was and remains one of the outstanding examples of late Hellenistic architecture. It is clear that the intake of wealth was so extreme and the needs for competitive architectural expression so narrow (basically, some version of a temple front) that conventionality was not wanted (Figure 4.2.7). Affluence at Petra lasted about 300 years, reaching its climax under the Romans, who added temples and markets, a spectacular theater, canals and even a fountain to show-off – like in Las Vegas – the very thing that was most precious. The fountain connected to a bridge over the canal at the terminus of the caravan route was located at the precise spot where to the west against the setting sun a “camel” appeared in the silhouette of the mountain ridge. In the middle of the fifth century, an earthquake ruined the water supply system, and there was no way that it could be easily repaired. The site was abandoned and the Nabatean culture disappeared. Those people who could leave did so, becoming refugees in the surrounding areas. The remaining

FIGURE 4.2.7 

The Treasury, Petra, Jordan, compared to the Pantheon in Rome.

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locals returned to a simpler, ancient lifestyle. Some people were captured and sold off as slaves, morphing and disappearing into neighboring tribes or cultures. Like at Angkor when it collapsed, there was no plan B. It was all boom or bust. A small Christian community lived there until even that became untenable. Where there was feasting, there was dancing. Since the history of dance is difficult, if not impossible, to recreate, its importance is sorely underestimated, and here too, as with feasting, its essential role in community building has no parallel place in the history of architecture. In many parts of the world, detailed description of dances only began in colonial times, and even then they were often tinged by orientalist attitudes. Similarly, in many parts of the world, dance traditions, especially those associated with palace cultures, were actively repressed by missionaries and other modernizers. In Bali, the destruction of royal courts in the early twentieth century led to the dispersal of court dancers into the villages. In Tahiti, after the injunctions placed on them by missionaries, by the 1820s no trace of the once vibrant dance societies remained, at least in public. Such examples could fill volumes. Furthermore, many anthropologists who study dance can describe its cultural value and history, but will never once discuss its spatial requirements, its situatedness in the building or plaza or the spatial disposition of the audience. It is safe to say that – when combined with the massive diminution of dance as a way of life in many parts of the world – its ancient importance is almost impossible to fully reconstruct. Its strongest location is in village rituals practically the world over. In Yemen, the dance known as bar’a is synonymous with belonging to a tribe. Though not a combat dance, the bar’a requires strength and endurance and at least a dagger and often a rifle; the way the dagger is wielded varies from tribe to tribe. The dance embodies the values of valor and cooperation and is danced at weddings and important occasions and holidays. In earlier days, it was performed outdoors to the accompaniment of drums with the participants forming a circle. Dancers would begin near the bottom of the valley and dance their way toward the higher elevation in the course of an afternoon, and in this way tie in the whole community. In the 1980s, after the bar’a became a symbol of Yemen as a nation, its locus shifted from rural areas, where the dance is now rarer, to city squares.11 In South India, Karagaattam (“karakam” means “water pot”) is a folk dance with musical accompaniment, performed while balancing a pot on the head. Traditionally, this dance was done in praise of the rain and river goddesses. The pot is decorated with flowers or sprouted grains and involves intricate steps and body and arm movements. An early twentieth-century description of village dance in India claims that: Some rude image of wood or stone, a rock or tree in a secluded locality, frequently forms the Kota’s object of worship, to which sacrificial offerings

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are made; but the recognized place of worship in each village consists of a large square of ground, walled round with loose stones, three feet high, and containing in its centre two tent-shaped sheds of thatch, open before and behind, and on the posts (of stone) that support them some rude circles and other figures are drawn. No image of any sort is visible here. These sheds, which at Kotagiri are a very short distance apart, are dedicated to Siva and his consort Parvati under the names of Kamataraya and Kalikai. Though no representation thereof is exhibited in the ­temples at ordinary times, their spirits are believed to pervade the buildings, and at the annual ceremony they are represented by two thin plates of s­ ilver, which are attached to the upright posts of the temples. The stones surrounding the temples at Kotagiri are scratched with various quaint devices, and lines for the games of kote and hulikote. The Kotas go, I was told, to the temple once a month, at full moon, and worship the gods.12 This description by John Shortt, an English doctor stationed in Southern India in the mid-nineteenth century, goes on to mention shrine festivals and dances “which comprises a continuous course of debauchery and licentiousness extending over two or three days.”451 Needless to say, though the description of the physical space is probably accurate, his understanding of tribal attitudes is prejudiced. Though dance was integral to tribal and village life almost everywhere, so too for the palace elites. In China, there are many ancient songs about feasting and dancing in palace courtyards.13 And that would be true for almost any palace culture the world over. Unlike most village-oriented dances, these however required special instruments, intonations, body motions and even a specific culture of respect. These dances were in many cases seen less as entertainment than as an offering to the gods. The early Minoan representations of dance might well be of a joyous village event, but could also be a ­palace event commissioned for the deities. In India, in many Hoysala ­temples, one can still see the circular platforms directly in front of the sanctum that used to be where music, singing and dance were offered to the gods. The area was called Rangabhoga which means “dance-enjoyment.” The circle in front  of the “Nandi Shrine” in Ellora is an example (Figures  4.2.8 and 4.2.9). In India, temple dances were performed by women who had various names, but are generally today known as Devadasis.14 By the end of the tenth century, the number of Devadasis was in direct proportion to the wealth and prestige of the temple. Most temples of any size had at least 300. The kings, noblemen, vassals and their generals often donated some of these girls. Some may have been captives, but some were daughters of elite families. Nearly 30 daughters from the Nayaka family of Kalinga, for example, were donated to the temple of Mukhalingam. The motives were political and economic.

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FIGURE 4.2.8  Clay

model of a dance scene with four men on a circular dance floor, with attached Horns of consecrations, marking the religious character of the dance. Kamilari, 1500–1400 BC. Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, case 98.  Credit: Zde/Wikimedia Commons.

FIGURE 4.2.9  A sanctum

inside the Hoysaleshwara temple in Halebidu, India. Credit: Anks.manuja/Wikimedia Commons.

A Devadasi was technically married to a deity or god, but that did not mean that she had to live her life without the normal pleasures of sex and childbearing. She was a respected member of the society. Touching them, speaking to them or looking at them was considered an offence for anyone visiting a temple.15 In many instances, dancers embodied quite literally the glue holding society together. One seventh-century account, for instance, details the gifts given by a high dignitary to a temple which he had erected. Included were nine female dancers, seven female singers and nine male musicians, together with three other female dancers and six female singers who presumably held a different position or function than those first indicated; all are mentioned by name.16

242  Feast and Dance

Evidence for the tradition of the temple dance can be traced back to ancient Egyptians. In a banquet scene from the tomb of Nebamun, two girls are shown dancing accompanied by a group of seated female musicians. The two are depicted with much more freedom than what one might suspect from Egyptian artists known for stylized representations. Here, their bodies are almost entwined as they dance and snap their fingers to the beat of the music. There can be no doubt that these dances were to a large degree associated with deities. Hathor, for example, was with her son Ihy associated with music and dance, and dancers were often described as having been performing in her honor. Sometimes dancers were shown carrying musical instruments (sistra and clappers) or objects (such as mirrors) that were sacred to Hathor. Another Egyptian god, the popular Bes, was often shown dancing and playing musical instruments. The story of the Twelfth Dynasty official Sinuhe offers a good description of an Egyptian funeral dance (Figure 4.2.10): A funeral procession will be made for you on the day of burial, with a gold coffin, a mask of lapis lazuli, heaven above you, you being placed in  the portable shrine, with oxen pulling you, and singers going before you. The dance of the Muu will be performed at the entrance to your tomb and the offering list shall be recited for you.17 A papyrus from the Twelfth Dynasty temple of Senwosret II at Lahun describes the occasions on which dances were performed with the name and nationalities of the singers and dancers/acrobats concerned. From this, we learn that the temple employed Asiatic and Nubian performers, in addition to Egyptians. These dancers were paid to perform at religious festivals to mark

FIGURE 4.2.10  A fragment

of the frescoes on the wall of the tomb chapel of Nebamun, depicting guests, servants, musicians and dancers at a funerary banquet.

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the end of the old year, the New Year, the coming of the annual inundation, the full and new moon and the feasts of specific gods. Most of the rituals of Egyptian state religion took place within the temple itself, to which only the priests and royalty were allowed entry. However, ordinary Egyptians were able to watch dances for the gods on the occasion of public religious festivals, which often took the form of processions.18 The dancers wore an unusual headdress that resembled a wreath wrapped around their heads. Rising from this wreath was a woven, cone-shaped structure that came to a point, then flared at the end. Somewhat similarly, the earliest evidence of dancing in Southeast Asia specifically associates it with funeral rites and by extension the realm of ancestor spirits. Dancing figures are a primary motif in the elaborate ornamentation of large bronze kettle drums of a type found from southern China to Indonesia, including sites in Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, dating from at least the fifth century BCE.19 The evidence suggests that drums and dancing were believed to assist the deceased in gaining rebirth in the spirit world. Even in 1927, when King Sisowath died in Phnom Penh, dancers accompanied the procession. The earliest written records of dance in Southeast Asia date from the late sixth century onward mentioning dance as a temple offering. In Africa, dance is similarly fundamental. A drawing made at the end of the nineteenth century shows King Munza of the Mangbetu people dancing during a ceremony. The great dancing hall that was a part of his palace was an impressive structure and might well have been custom-built for the occasion (Figure 4.2.11).

FIGURE 4.2.11  King

Munza of the Azanda dancing before his wives. Sketch by Dr Georg August Schweinfurth (1836–1925), German botanist who travelled in the interior of East Africa (from 1868) and studied the inhabitants. The African Adventure: A History of Africa’s Explorers by Timothy Severin, page 247.  Credit: Smith Archive/ Alamy.

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Albert M. Opoku, the noted choreographer and artistic director of the National Dance Company of Ghana, has much to say about the historical role dance plays for the chiefs in West Africa. The chief or paramount leader, he notes, is the visual focus of court panoply. As such, he commands ­varied modes “of dress for different occasions; indeed, one of the characteristics of high Akan office is that many outfits, not just one, are available for any ­particular event.” The chief is expected to be a capable dancer. Leaders ­reinforced the trust and respect of their people partly by the way they danced, with the chief absorbing the dance tradition almost from birth (Figure 4.2.12): A chief’s dance movements must at all times reflect his position to win the acclamation of his people, who while exhorting him to make graceful, studied and regal gestures, use stronger dynamic forms of the same movement patterns to express pride in him as the embodiment of the highest within his society and their willingness to die for him in peace or war. In particular, royal or court dances provide opportunities for chiefs and other dignitaries to create auras of majestic splendor and dignity.20 In Ghana, the Damba festival that lasts for over two weeks in June and July commemorates the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, but it actually is a celebration of the chieftaincy and a time for families to meet and socialize, exchange gifts and participate in dance. Its history is not established, but it almost certainly dates back to the sixteenth century, with parts of it certainly predating the introduction of Islam into the kingdom. For the first ten days or nights after the appearance of the new crescent moon of the month of Damba (on the Dagbon calendar), young people gather at the chief’s palace for dance rehearsals. They are called to the palace by the beating of drums every night. On the 11th day of Damba, the second part of the festival takes place. In the

FIGURE 4.2.12 

Nigerian chief during a dance. Credit: Tim Graham/Alamy.

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morning, the Muslim chiefs and their disciples come to the palace where a bull is slaughtered according to Islamic rituals. Those present form a circle around the bull and walk or jump over it three times. During this exercise, verses of the Holy Quran are recited. The bull is slaughtered and the meat is distributed for feasting. Later, people gather at the palace in response to the drumming. The chief (King/Ya-Naa) emerges accompanied by his elders, as musketeers fire their weapons while praise singers sing appellations. He sits on a pile of animal skins covered with beautiful oriental rugs also known as skins in Dagbon. People then approach the chief for permission to dance while the chief provides money for the drummers and gonje players (a gonje is a stringed musical instrument). Once someone is on the dance floor, the audience showers money and praise at the dancers and musicians. The chief is the last to dance. People climb trees and stand on rooftops just to see the event. On the 17th day, the Naa (the chief of Damba) is celebrated and characterized by more dancing and chiefly processions. The 18th day is the farewell Damba, which is known as Belkusi. The highest-ranking subchief will lead low sectional chiefs and elders to thank the sectional chiefs, leading to the climax where the people, chiefs and others assemble at the palace of the Yaa Naa or chief of the town. They will move from house to house to greet the sectional chiefs and mobilize the people on issues relevant to the community. Politicians, NGOs (nongovernmental oraganizations) and wealthy individuals are approached for support. At the durbar grounds, most of the chiefs and the affluent in society ride on their horses to display their heritage and gain admiration.21 One of the preeminent missions of the palace elites practically the world over was to participate in ceremonial dances to support the court dancers and their families all the way down to the makers of the instruments. It was all part of the palace’s extended association with cosmological forces that govern rulership. It is not just the humans who dance, but the gods as well. Many a Hindu temple has at its apex a “palace” of the gods, which must certainly have been modeled on real-life palaces, made of wood, thatch and plaster. What we see is not a palace in its entirety, but rather what can only be a dance and reception pavilion. With that in mind, the whole structure – a representation of Mount Meru, the abode of the gods – is a vast, multitiered singing, dancing and performance structure. In Angkor, this was taken to the extreme. Performances were believed to elicit assistance from supernatural powers in creating natural harmony throughout the kingdom, especially in regard to rainfall. Many of the dancers were slaves, but unlike other slaves who bore names such as “Cat,” “Dog” or “Stinking,” dancers in the earliest inscriptions bear Sanskrit names, including “Adorable,” “Gifted in the Art of Love” and “Spring Jasmine.”22 At one point near Angkor’s zenith, King Jayavarman VII installed 615 female dancers in the temple dedicated

246  Feast and Dance

to his mother’s spirit; 1,000 dancers in the temple dedicated to his father’s spirit; and 1,622 d ­ ancers in other temples throughout the kingdom, these in addition to the many dancers already in temple service at the time (Figures 4.2.13–4.2.15).23 In her study of the “sacred dances” of Cambodia, French ethnologist Solange Thierry pointed out that many Khmer folk dances were traditionally considered to represent a point of contact between the celestial terrestrial worlds.24 By extension, the dances in the royal palace were believed to be the most potent means of such communion. Their performance was considered a sacred trust, out of bounds for all but the highest members of the palace. The king was surrounded by thousands of these dancers. In fact, his central position in this feminine world was believed to create the welfare of the kingdom.25 Where the dancers performed is not known precisely, since the Khmer palaces, which were made of wood, no longer exist, but they certainly took place in front of the temples or even along their numerous terraces.

FIGURE 4.2.13  Sri

Ranganathaswamy Temple, Srirangam, India. Credit: Foto Flirt/Alamy.

FIGURE 4.2.14 

Angkor Wat. Credit: Kheng Vungvuthy.

Feast and Dance  247

FIGURE 4.2.15  Dancing

apsaras carved at the Bayon temple. Credit: David

Wilmot.

Angkor was positioned in an extreme landscape. The remote forest with sporadic rainfall and sandy soil made it unsuitable for rice cultivation without extensive and complex irrigation networks. The rulers were not blind to the risk, but clearly where there was risk, there was reward. The Angkor kings mastered the situation through a mixture of extreme technology and extreme devotionalism that took the form of dance as the manifestation of the divine and the guarantor or success. The extent to which dance and dancers were integral to the social, religious and economic fabric of the Khmer palaces was perhaps unequaled anywhere else in the world. Khmer temples were in every sense an architecture for dance. What we see today of the great temples is just the empty stage. Notes 1 Though feasts could celebrate anything from a victory to a marriage, feasts were also used as a way to organize labor. See V. C Uchendo “Cultural and Economic Factors Influencing Food Habit Patterns in sub-Saharan Africa,” in Proceedings 3rd Int. Conf. Food Sci. Technology (Washington, DC, 1970), 160–168. 2 Deanna L. Wesolowski, “Feasting at Nestor’s Palace at Palace at Pylos,” Nebraska Anthropologist 26 (2006): 117–128.

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3 C.D. Gordon, The Age of Attila: Fifth-Century Byzantium and the Barbarians (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 1960), 95–96. 4 J. Gantz, Early Irish Myths and Sagas (London: Penguin, 1981), 180 5 George Henderson, Fled Bricrend. The Feast of Bricriu (Cambridge, ON: Parentheses Publ., 1999), 2. 6 Marianne Hem Eriksen, Architecture, Society, and Ritual in Viking Age Scandinavia Doors, Dwellings, and Domestic Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 67, 68. 7 Stephen Pollington, “The Mead-Hall,” Medieval Warfare 2, no. 5 (2012): 47–52 (50–51). 8 Michael Dietler, “Feasts and Commensal Politics in the Political Economy: Food, Power, and Status in prehistoric Europe,” in Food and the Status Quest (87–125), eds. P. Wiessner and W. Schiefenhövel (Providence, RI: Berghahn), 96, 97. 9 See Davide Zori, Jesse Byock, Egill Erlendsson, Steve Martin, Thomas Wake, and Kevin J. Edwards, “Feasting in Viking Age Iceland: Sustaining a Chiefly Political Economy in a Marginal Environment,” Antiquity 87 (2013): 150–165. 10 Conor Newman, “Procession and Symbolism at Tara: Analysis of Tech Midch Arta (The ‘Banqueting Hall’) in the Context of the Sacral Campus,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 26, no. 4 (2007): 425. 11 Condensed from Gerald Jonas, Dancing, The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement (New York: Abrams 1992), 115; See Najwa Adra, “Tribal Dancing and Yemeni Nationalism: Steps to Unity,” Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée Année 67 (1993), 161–164. 12 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras: Government Press, 1909), 12. 13 Liu Wu-chi, An Introduction to Chinese Literature (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1966), 14. 14 Temple women are historically referred to as Sanulu, Sani, Sampradayamuvuru and Gadisanulu. Hindu texts talk of seven categories: Datta – one who gave ­ urpose; ­herself as a gift to the temple; Vikrita – one who sells herself for the same p Bhritya – one who offers herself as a temple servant for the prosperity of the family; Bhakta – one who joins the temple out of devotion; Hrita – one who is enticed away and presented to the temple; Alanka – one who is well trained in her profession and is decked and presented to the temple by kings or noblemen; and Rudraganika – one who receives regular wages from a temple and is employed to sing and dance. 15 The first legal initiative taken to stop the Devadasi system dates back to 1934 when the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act was passed by the British Government. Today, in many parts of India, dances are being revived, though they are no longer part of the mission of the temples. 16 Bernard Philippe Groslier, The Art of Indochina, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Crown Publishers, 1962), 32. 17 Patricia Spencer, “Dance in Ancient Egypt,” Near Eastern Archaeology 66, no. 3 (September 2003): 116. 18 Ibid., 113. 19 Bernard Philippe Groslier, The Art of Indochina. Translated by George Lawrence (New York: Crown Publishers, 1962), 32. 20 Condensed from A. M. Opoku, “The Dance in Traditional African Society,” International Reviews on the Ghana Dance Ensemble. Institute of African Studies Research Review 7, no. 1 (1970): 3. 21 Condensed from: Elias Yussif. The Face of Black Culture, Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: Trafford), 155–158.

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22 Donald J. Lancaster, Some Notes on the Classical Khmer Ballet (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Asian Studies Program, Lancaster, 1971), 147. 23 George Coedes, “La stele de Ta-Prohm,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’ExtremeOrient 6, no. 1 (1906): 77. 24 Solange Thierry, “Les danses sacrées au Cambodge,” (Collection Sources Orientales: Editions du seuil. 1963), 350. 25 Paul Cravath, “The Ritual Origins of the Classical Dance Drama of Cambodia,” Asian Theatre Journal 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1986): 185.

3 GREAT WORKS

Though shrine landscapes, feasts and dances were foundational across the chieftain world, affluent chiefdoms, especially by the end of the first millennium, were able to produce architecture on a dramatic scale. We have already seen this at Angkor, Sri Lanka, Petra, in parts of Africa and in South India. How this was possible is no mystery. Wealth was not something to be stored away in a bank, but to be spent as an indication of status and power and as the venue for aggrandizing influence not just locally, but to the horizon and beyond. The more centralized the polity, the greater its capacity of architectural manifestation. Another factor that sometimes played into the making of buildings was the competitive outlay of resources. This was true for Angkor, Petra and Nan Madol as well for the great kofun monuments in Japan that were constructed between the early third century and the early seventh century CE by the ruling chiefdom polities. The period was an important phase in the development of Japan. Rice had been introduced around the fifth century BCE in particular and with it a core group of rapidly developing chiefdoms that asserted themselves over the long-established but relatively isolated indigenous populations, assimilating and integrating some, defeating or destroying others. Unlike taro or breadfruit which grows easily in tropical conditions, rice required from the start clear political hierarchies, especially in Japan which was at the most northern reach of its ecological range. Facilitating its development, however, was an astonishingly rich soil – andisol (from Japanese ando, “black soil”) – which derived from volcanic ash. It was the discovery of andisol that created the foundation for the cultural transformation of the island. The transformation was rapid, and by the third century CE, trade connections with China and other parts of the mainland had become well established. One has to imagine DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-23

Great Works  251

an oceanographic sweet spot with a chain of connections from Sri Lanka to Japan with its numerous bold, upstart kingdoms. In this vast stretch of the world, rice cultivation had become the lingua franca of the elite. Indigenous populations that were not subsumed into the newly verticalized social structure either retreated to the mountains or to the north, and it would take several centuries before these populations could be brought into the political organization of a centralized polity. Kofun came in various shapes, from those that look like a keyhole to circular shapes, to squares and even to conjoined rectangles. A total of 161,560 kofun tomb sites have been found so far, clearly indicating a competitive mortuary practice. They were significant undertakings involving thousands of tons of stone and earth and clustered in areas that held special significance. Most involved water in some way, which is a testament not just to their sacredness, but also to their increasingly large role in defining power. Histories (Kojiki and Nihon-shoki) compiled in the eighth century include stories about the construction of reservoirs and irrigation canals associated with rice cultivation. Accordingly, construction of large burial mounds can be seen as a reflection of advanced civil engineering and systematization of society into chiefdoms/kingdoms (Figure 4.3.1). Excavated inscriptions from kofuns are few and seldom inform us about who was buried, much less about how these structures were built or used. Clay figures, called Haniwa, are found on most mounds of this period, but even their origins and purpose are unknown. The numbers of Haniwa range from a few to a few thousand on any one kofun. The basic arrangement is one, two or three rows of them set around the flanks of the mound. Some were set in square or rectangular enclosures located on top of the mound, near the bottom or nearby but outside the mound area itself.

FIGURE 4.3.1  Daisen

Kofun, Osaka Prefecture, Japan. © National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.

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Kofun fit into what Henri J. M. Claessen has called “great works, ordered, organized and financed by the chief.”1 They were part of a community’s coming into being and placed “in full view, on the landscape,” as one anthropologist expressed it.2 Nor were these works static. Many of these sites, like Stonehenge, became ever more complex as the centuries passed. These structures were often designed with alignments to sacred directions. Oracles governed when construction began. Omens had to be obtained and divine protocols adhered to.3 And in more than one instance, the regional wealth and competition between clans led to what Joseph W. Michels, in studying Pre-Colombian Mayan cultures, has termed a “disproportionate grandeur” that required ever greater displays of wealth, not just in the building’s scale but in the outlay of labor.4 This holds true only if we do not to see disproportionateness through modern assumptions of reason; what we might see as disproportionate is in reality proportionate to spirit world demands. In other words, the kofun in Japan, the temple of Borobudur in Java or the palace of the Great Zimbabwe might be no more disproportionate than the Amiens cathedral. The mobilization of labor was an important part of the system. Generally speaking, labor came in the following forms: Symbolic Labor – the labor of the elites as part of their ceremonial ­activities, such as bringing the first mound of earth or laying the first brick. Devotional Labor – the labor of the community or subgroups as an ­extension of their devotion horizon. Buddhist monks and Hindu devotees will still today offer their labor for the construction of a temple. Skill-Based Labor – the labor of artisans, whether local or foreign, enslaved or free, is responsible for specific aspects or elements of the design and often given some form of protection by the elites. Gift Labor – gifts of labor were part of long-standing rituals of diplomacy designed to cement alliances. The gifts could be fulfilled by individuals, ­relatives, villagers and slaves. Tribute/Tax Labor – the labor from clans, internal or external, to the ­community is given as a sign of allegiance or submission to the elites. Slave Labor – the labor of men and women acquired through conquest, raiding or other forms of control. Which form of labor was used and in what combination for any project is in almost all cases anyone’s guess, but there can be no doubt that the larger the works and the greater the grandeur, the more different kinds of labor were required. A village shrine will most likely be made as a form of devotional labor by locals, but as we move up the ladder of political and spatial complexity other forms of labor will be required.5 Repairing the mosques in Mali is still today done as a mix of devotional labor and skill-based labor. A shrine in China carved in the second century CE was also a mixture of devotional labor and

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skill-based labor, though some slave labor cannot be ruled out. It was made for the Wu family, who lived in what is now southwestern Shantung province and wealthy officials under the Later Han dynasty. The family hired a mason/ contractor (Figure 4.3.2): His filial sons, Chung-chang, Chi-chang Em and Chi-li Em, and his filial grandson, Tzfi-ch’iao Em, personally followed the path of sonly duty and spent everything they had. They chose excellent stones from south of the southern mountains; they took those of perfect quality with flawless and unyellowed color. In front they established an altar and an area; behind they erected an offering shrine. The clever workman Wei Kai Sac engraved the text and carved the designs; he arranged everything in its place, he gave free rein to his talent and the gracious curves were exposed to all. This work will be transmitted to the sight of later generations and for ten thousand generations it will endure.6 We should, therefore, not assume that all manual labor was performed by the slaves. In the former kingdom of the Baganda (Uganda) in Africa, when a temple was built, each district contributed workmen as a way to demonstrate the unity of the realm. In that sense, it was a combination of the political with the devotional, for during the time that the temple was being built, the

FIGURE 4.3.2  Annual

repair of the great mosque of Djenné. Credit: Ralf Steinberger.

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chief was not permitted to shave his head or cut his nails. As a result, his hair grew long, and he had the appearance of a mourner. Nor was one to pass along the roads near the temple during construction. If anyone attempted to do so and was caught, he was made prisoner until the god entered the new temple, at which time he was executed.7 In Madagascar, when a special work is required, like rebuilding a wall for the royal courtyard, all ranks of people from the highest to the lowest took part under the eye of the Queen who sat on a raised seat looking on. The highest officers worked harder than the slaves and so garnered praise.8 Nonetheless, the larger the effort, the more important tribute labor and slave labor became. The fundamental aim of warfare was, in fact, often to increase the available manpower. Chola King Karikala, when he founded Puhar in the second century CE, brought 12,000 captives back from his ­conquests of Sri Lanka to help construct a 160-kilometer embankment – still used today – along the Kaveri River.9 Sultan Iskandar Muda of Aceh carried off thousands of men to his capital from the areas he conquered, reportedly as many as 11,000 from Pahang in 1618 and 7,000 from Kedah the following year. In the sixteenth century, Goan (Makasar) chronicles tell of subject people sending laborers for specified duties, while the distant Timor sent a tribute of 50 slaves a year.10 In Thailand, war captives, including soldiers and civilians, males and females, remained important well into the nineteenth century. After the Siamese capture of Vientiane in 1826, some 6,000 families were removed to Thailand.11 As late as the mid-nineteenth century, as one author explains regarding Thailand, several of the tribes living between the Mekong and the crest of the main Anam range (the boundary between Anam and Siam) had submitted to the king of Siam and paid him a tribute. For this, they had received substantial advantages and no longer needed to fear the incursion of the slave dealers, who still drove a flourishing trade amongst the independent tribes.12 Throughout Asia and Africa, hydrologists, masons, carpenters and metalworkers were held in high esteem. In India, they belonged to special castes. Their services could be paid for directly, but also through a variety of service exchanges. Most palaces had a fixed pool of such craft specialists, with often a hereditary place in the court. Alliances were made by loaning or even gifting such specialized laborers. A classic example can be found in the Old Testament. After King David defeated the Phoenicians, it seems that Hiram, King of Tyre, some 250 kilometers north, sought peace and “sent messengers to David, along with cedar trees, and carpenters and masons” and they build a palace for him (2 Samuel: 5). Even in the eighteenth century, the Bamum provided slaves to the coastal kingdoms so as to get access not just to beads, fabrics and brass rods, but to their associated artisans, the brass casters, bead embroiders, weavers, potters and sculptors. Their work was critical to the

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social order as they produced the necessary regalia for the secret societies that cemented authority over an expanding population. And then there are the ancillary costs. In Java, for example, we know that when one factors in the accompanying feasts, the ceremonies and spirit world donations, the cost of making and maintaining a temple was as much as or even more than the construction itself.13 A living example – though much modified – can be found in the construction of the Ise Shrine. Though rebuilt every 20 years, the process is extensive and complicated and involves a vast variety of labor formations. Priests have to bless the trees, special workmen have to prepare the logs. Devotees help float the logs down the river. Hundreds of local participants take hold of these ropes and pull the carts forward. Almost all residents of nearby towns, including children, youths and the elderly, join these holy events. Still today, the emperor in a special viewing box gives his blessing. The cost is around half of a billion dollars. The thought that the Japanese government could save money by not building is unthinkable (Figure 4.3.3). Throughout Southeast Asia, Great Works took the form not just of temples, but also of irrigation systems. The complex and elaborate irrigation system on Sri Lanka that began to be developed in the second century BCE, if not earlier, produced legions of experts without whom the sweet spot system of Southeast Asia would never have worked. The temple-water system of Angkor, begun in the ninth century, was one of the most elaborate in the world outside of China. These systems reinforced the sacred devotional contract between humans and deities (Figure 4.3.4). The water infrastructure in Bali, which still operates, gives us a smaller but no less clear indication of its extent. Like other places in oceanic South Asia, Bali underwent a typical period of riceification and kingdomificaiton in the eighth and ninth centuries. But unlike in other places, the kings of the island

FIGURE 4.3.3  Locals

Getty.

participating in Sengu Ceremony at Jingu Shrine in Ise./

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FIGURE 4.3.4 

Angkor Wat. Credit: Charles J. Sharp.

never had full hegemonic control. The first king to leave a written inscription (914 CE) was Sri Kesari Warmadewa in which he testifies to the connections of Bali with the Sanjaya Dynasty in Central Java. He indicates that he was eager to introduce Buddhism to the island. But two other inscriptions by Kesari in the interior of the island suggest that it was not an easy transition and that there were conflicts with the animist-oriented people of the mountainous interior. Nor was the king ever fully in charge. Villages operated as quasi-autonomous republics. They were governed by a council of elders and paid taxes to the king in the form of money, food or service. The king, for his part, was mainly responsible for the annual cycle of rites in special temples.14 Cohesion on Bali was based on its water system called “pura subak,” where pura means “temple” and subak “paddy irrigation.” Introduced in the ninth century, the system today consists of terraced rice fields and water temples covering nearly 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres). The whole is under the authority of the priests who manage the relationship between humans, the earth and the gods. Tirta Empul (“Holy Spring” in Balanese), a temple complex located near the town of Tampaksiring, includes a bathing structure where islanders go to for ritual purification. The temple pond is fed by a spring. It was founded in the tenth century and expanded with time. Pura subak took more monumental architectural form beginning in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when, with the decline of the Majapahit Kingdom of Java, architects came to Bali in search of clients. An early example is the Pura Beji Sangsit, located in Sangsit, Buleleng. The architect was a man named Truna Pesaren.15 The shrine’s bases and the white sandstone walls are covered in elaborate carvings of foliage, vines and flowers that were once painted in lively colors. Statues of demons and guardian figures inspired by Hindu epics decorate the stone staircases and the walls. The temple is dedicated to the rice goddess Dewi Sri, who remains highly revered in Java, Bala and parts of Indonesia. The temple is also revered by the farmers around the

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area as it is over a spring and thus part of the pura subak system. Pura Ulun Danu Batur (“temple at the head of the lake Batur”) that was built in the seventeenth century is one of the most important temples in the system as it acts as the ultimate maintainer of harmony and stability of the entire island. The temple overlooking the volcanic cauldron of Mount Batur is dedicated to god Vishnu and local goddess Dewi Danu, goddess of the lake. It is not one building but comprises nine different temples, containing in total 285 shrines and pavilions dedicated to the gods and goddesses of water, agriculture, springs, art and crafts. What Bali makes visible is the survival of the worldview in which all things exist and must coexist with an aquatic spiritual frame (Figures 4.3.5 and 4.3.6). In all cases, Great Works were inevitably part of the subculture of prestige. They were institutions without institutionality, defining and forming a physical as well as cognitive-cosmological landscape that tethered the group to a particular place.16 Rituals and their funding and maintenance were integral to the process.

FIGURE 4.3.5 

Tirta Empul, Bali. Credit: Arian Zwegers.

FIGURE 4.3.6 

Pura Beji Sangsit, Bali. Credit: Ondřej Bahula.

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The following list covers some of the Great Works that would have been common in the first millennium CE: Sacred groves/sacred trees/springs and associated structures Spirit paths, ceremonial roads Zones of purity and impurity Sacred enclosures Burial mounds – kurgan – kohfun – Mastaba –Tumulus tombs, etc. Stepped mounds Sweat lodges Stone circles – menhirs – alignments, etc. Dance areas – palace pavilions Men’s houses Village deity shrines Tombs Chief’s house Forest clearing/land management Irrigation works and water temples Roads Palace/gardens Notes 1 Henri J. M. Claessen, “On Chiefs and Chiefdoms,” Social Evolution & History 10, no. 1 (March 2011): 9. 2 Timothy R. Pauketat and Diana D. Loren, “Alternative Histories and North American Archaeology,” in North American Archaeology (1–29), eds. T. R. Pauketat and D. D. Loren (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 22. 3 Eran Lupu, Greek Sacred Law: A Collection of New Documents (NGSL) (Brill: Leiden, 2005), 37. 4 Joseph W. Michels, Kaminaljuyu Chiefdom (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1991), 163. 5 Though there are excellent studies of craft specialization in chiefdom societies, how crafts were deployed in large-scale building projects is rarely discussed, largely because there is no real living tradition of that any more, except in the building of houses. This has the consequence that we associate building arts in rural Africa and Asia mainly with vernacular traditions. 6 Wilma Fairbank, “The Offering Shrines of ‘Wu Liang Tz’u,’” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 6, no. 1 (March 1941): 8. 7 John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Native Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911), 303, 304. 8 James Sibree, Madagascar and Its People (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1870): 189. 9 Ram Sharan Sharma, India’s Ancient Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 128. 10 Anthony Reid, “The Structure of Cities in Southeast Asia, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (September 1980): 243, 244.

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11 Andrew Turton, “Thai Institutions of Slavery,” in Asian and African Systems of Slavery (251–291), ed. James Watson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 255. 12 Archibald Ross Colquhoun, Amongst the Shans (New York: Scribner and Welford, 1885), 53. 13 John Miksic, Old Javanese Gold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 4. 14 J. Stephen Lansing, Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 29. See also Lansing J. Stephen, Priests and Programmer, Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 15 I Gede Yogi Adi Prawira. “Pura Beji sebagai Cagar Budaya Dalam Perspektif Pendidikan di Desa Sangsit, Sawan” (2013), 4 https://ejournal.undiksha.ac.id/ index.php/JJPS/article/view/1026/893#. 16 Timothy Earle, “Economic Support of Chaco Canyon Society,” American Antiquity 66, no. 1 (January 2001): 26–35 (27).

4 PALACE UNIVERSES

The intensification of the chieftain world at the end of the first millennium CE brought with it, as we have seen, the emergence in many parts of the world of palace-centric chiefdoms that attempted to stabilize the problematic and fateful asymmetry of external-oriented trade and internal-oriented extraction. Even if it is impossible to recreate the spatial/political landscape of the world at the end of the first millennium, palaces in the sweet spot systems would have far outnumbered those in the urban-based societies. And yet, most architectural history books will hardly even mention them. If one compares a search in Getty Images for “European Palaces” with “African Palaces,” the difference is striking. The former does not lack for examples, whereas the latter shows ancient Egyptian structures, some palaces in Morocco, most built after the sixteenth century, but almost nothing that is in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, among anthropologists and ethnographers who study chiefdoms and kingdoms, the conversation often takes place without any reference to a palace as a real place; and even when palaces are mentioned, few scholars do anything more than note their existence, making it extremely difficult to place the palace as a physical and spatial object within its cultural history.1 Technically, the palace was the site of governance. But it was much more than that. The palace was at the center of a complex network of quasi-selfgoverning subunits and tributary entities with their own set of clans, family units and histories that pledged their allegiance to the ruler. The palace served as a stage for the ritual activities and performances as well as a space, whether overtly or covertly expressed, of inclusions, exclusions and seclusions. One can get a sense of the intensity of the palace protocols from a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-24

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sixteenth-century Portuguese description of one of the kings of Zimbabwe (Figure 4.4.1): He is lord of an exceedingly great country, which runs far inland, and also extends as well to the Cape of Good Hope and Mozambique: rich presents are daily laid before him, which the other kings and lords send him, each according to his ability. These they carry uncovered on their heads through the town, until they arrive at a very lofty house where the king is always lodged; and he sees them through a window but they see him not, they only hear his voice. Afterwards the king sends for the person who has brought him such and such a present, and soon dismisses him after he has been well entertained.2 Colonial era narratives, though they can give some details, are governed by a typically impatient Eurocentric perspective. Furthermore, few visitors

FIGURE 4.4.1  A few

times a week, Muhammad Sanusi II, Emire of Kan (northern Nigeria), holds court. Credit: Jane Hahn for the Washington Post/ Getty Images.

262  Palace Universes

would have even been allowed past the reception rooms. As for the palace of the powerful sultans of Palembang, William Marsden could see it only from the outside, commenting that “nothing is known to the Europeans of the interior, but it appears to be large, lofty, and much ornamented on the outside.”3 When Henry Morton Stanley was granted an interview with the chiefs at Wangata in the late 1870s, it was done in the open area in front of the palace. Furthermore, Europeans, especially in Africa, had a hard time seeing mud and thatch as anything but an inferior material. The royal palace of Timbuktu was once described as “nothing by a vast enclosure of mud walls, built ­without taste or symmetry.”4 William Winwood Reade, a British historian, novelist and philosopher, wrote in his book from 1864 that (Figure 4.4.2): I went ashore with the doctor on a visit to Peppel, the famous King of Bonny [Nigeria]. The town itself is built on black mud, and the broadest street was far more filthy than the filthiest slum in Westminster. The palace is composed of two or three hovels encircled by a mud wall. In one of these was seated the monarch.5 John Hanning Speke, an English officer in the British Indian Army, was however duly impressed by the Mengo Palace in Buganda. He made a drawing from the hut where he stayed that showed the palace’s location on a hill with its wide, mile-long ceremonial access road, the Kabaka Anjagala Road (TheKing-Loves-Me Road) (Figure 4.4.3): The palace or entrance quite surprised me by its extraordinary dimensions, and the neatness with which it was kept. The whole brow of the hill on which we stood was covered with gigantic grass huts, thatched as

FIGURE 4.4.2  Henry

Morton Stanley in an interview before the chiefs at Wangata in the late 1870s.

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FIGURE 4.4.3  View of King Mutesa’s palace (Uganda), illustrated in John Hanning

Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York: Harper, 1868), 277.

neatly as so many heads dressed by a London barber and fenced all around with the tall yellow reeds of the common Uganda tiger-grass; while within the enclosure the lines of huts were joined together, or partitioned off into courts, with walls of the same grass.6 There is no description of the palace itself, which he was not allowed to enter. (The road still exists, though much modernized and leading now to the Buganda Parliament building.) Given the lack of a more fundamental knowledge about the design and functioning of these places, these buildings often become the site of some imagined splendor, as, for example, in the 2008 exhibition that traveled to various cities in Europe titled “Benin – Kings and Rituals.” A similar exhibition about Versailles would never be called “Versailles: Kings and Rituals.” The problem is that what was shown was looted by the English in 1897, when they were not happy with trade agreements and wanted to take control of the lucrative ivory markets. To pressure Benin, the English gradually brought the bordering areas under their administration as protectorates, removing or exiling unwilling local rulers. In 1897, when Benin attacked a British mission, a retaliatory expedition was organized. The British occupied the royal palace and removed its contents to Europe as spoils of war, where, according to one recent commentator, “they now bear witness to and spread the knowledge of a major West African empire’s long history and

264  Palace Universes

fascinating culture.”7 The booty, some of which is now being repatriated, consisted of massive carved ivory tusks, brass and ivory masks, a large number of brass plaques, portrait heads, stools and scepters, behind all of which there once lay a rich tradition of songs, incantations, proverbs, dances and performances that infused these objects with vitality and gave them magical potency. Among the artifacts is a photo from the inner sanctum of the ancestral shrine.8 It was published in a book entitled Great Benin; its Customs, Art and Horrors (1903) (Figure 4.4.4).9 Though we in the modern world see the palace as a location, the center of power and as a place where decisions are made, in Southeast Asia, indeed in most of ancient Africa, the palace and “the whole” – the whole nation and even the whole universe – are not differentiated. In Southeast Asia, the Sanskrit word prasada could mean either palace or temple and is known as a mandala system that works best during times of prosperity and calm.10 The palace thus served as a model of the universe and even more, it had to “be” the universe.11 These universes, unlike the singular, modern and static universe of today, need to be maintained in complex and particular ways so that

FIGURE 4.4.4  The

ancestral shrine of the Royal Palace of Benin, Benin City; photographer Cyril Punch and first published in H. L. Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (Halifax: King and Sons, 1903), Fig. 84, p 79. ­

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they remained both comprehensible and effective. In the sweet spot world, they were also never isolated polities. On the contrary, their success and affluence depended on their relationships with proximity universes, which only added to the level of risk. Many things could work against the survivability of the palace ­tradition, and not just the conflicts about succession that so dominate historical ­narratives.12 Because the palace was a fortification – whether with walls or not – against inward fluctuations and outward assaults, palace-centered chiefdoms were not at some imagined “stage of development” before proverbial “statehood,” but defenses against outside state actors. The palace had to strike a balance between local and regional forces by keeping the relationship between trade and status from becoming asymmetrical in the favor of trade, which inevitably meant the intrusion of foreign elements and subsequent destabilizations. The growth of the chiefdom profile at the end of the millennium is a testament to the expansive workability of the operation. If today’s historians and ethnographers had lived in the thirteenth century, they might have made the chiefdom palace one of the most important elements of global architecture, just as important as the ports and temples. Whereas the history of palaces in the traditional urban, imperial centers is well known, given the wealth of documents, the further away we travel from these centers into the world of oral cultures, the more foggy the situation becomes. An important but often undiscussed difference revolved around women. In Europe, there were queens, queens regnant, spouses, dowagers and princesses along with maids, ladies-in-waiting and senior female officeholders. However, even these queens’ and princesses’ households included a majority of men with other staff.13 In Southeast Asian and African palaces, the gender proportions would have been vastly different. To be counted were not just the female elites, attendants, dancers, musicians, food preparers and slaves, but also the women who were sent to the palace as some form of tribute, loyalty reassurance or political collateral. Shaka kaSenzangakhona (c. 1787–1828), the ruler of the Zulu kingdom, had an extensive royal household that included a special protected section where the daughters of clan leaders of his alliance were housed. When King Prempeh I returned from exile to reestablish his kingdom under British colonial control, his first measure was to restore the harem, not for his personal indulgence, but as the essential foundation for alliances and marriage exchanges.14 Some women were soldiers. The palaces in Dahomey had not less than 3,000 women, according to one European visitor, including the numerous wives, attendants and female ritual specialists. Several hundreds of these were even trained to the use of arms under a female general.15 Another difference between urban and chieftain palaces is the presence of archives and everything that it implies.16 The need for clerks, storage and

266  Palace Universes

work spaces in the Chinese, Ottoman and Japanese courts was a significant factor in their architecture. At the Chinese court, for example, the ministries worked in specialized areas adjacent to the domestic core, forming ever larger precincts in their own right.17 In the chiefdom world, where there were few archives, and so more of the space would have been dedicated to ceremonial, personal or ritual functions. Unlike the palaces in China and Europe and elsewhere that often ­centered on the throne room, there is no more critical element to the sweet spot p ­ alaces than the ancestral shrine, located if not at the center of the building, then in a special courtyard. Since these were not places where visitors, then or even now, have access, its important role in the success of a kingdom, its life and its economy is rendered completely invisible. The palace shrine was at the spiritual and conceptual center of the kingdom’s economic and cultural life. The photo from the inner sanctum of the ancestral shrine of the palace at Benin is the only record of such a shrine in the nineteenth century. We are fortunate that we have a description of an inner sanctum in the Epic of Sundiata, the famous account of the life of Sundiata who was king of Mali from 1235 to 1255. It involves his griot, the king’s personal advisor and bard. According to the account, this griot, a man known as Balla Fasséké, bravely stole into the secret shrine chamber of a rival king, Soumaoro Kanté, and an early competitor for regional power after the collapse of the Empire of Ghana: When he had pushed the door open he was transfixed with amazement at what he saw. The walls of the chamber were tapestried with human skins and there was one in the middle of the room on which the king sat; around an earthenware jar nine heads formed a circle; when Balla had opened the door the water had become disturbed and a monstrous snake had raised its head. Balla Fasséké, who was also well versed in sorcery, recited some formulas and everything in the room fell quiet, so he continued his inspection.18 There were also owls, seemingly asleep, as well as curved swords and other paraphernalia. Near the door was a large balafon, similar in appearance to a European xylophone, which is still a popular West African instrument today. Balla Fasséké took the instrument and began to play. The Epic relates that it let out a sound of an infinite sweetness with notes as clear as “a purse of gold dust.” Soon, the whole room transformed. The owls came alive and the sculls blinked. Furthermore, regardless of where Soumaoro was in the kingdom, he would hear its music and so when he heard it, he rushed back to town to catch the intruder. When Soumaoro entered, Balla cleverly changed the key to improvise a song in praise of the king and the king’s anger abated, but the

Palace Universes  267

consequence was that from then on Balla was attached to Soumaoro and was not allowed to return to his homeland. This astonishing tale tells of the magic power of the room. Not only was it the living link to the king’s ancestors who could be brought to life by the music of the balafon, but a person who could play that balafon becomes by extension an element of the palace for life. A palace is a condensed, spatial diagram of the entire spirit world/universe of the chiefdom. The Padmanabhapuram Palace in the former capital city of the erstwhile Hindu kingdom of Travancore helps us see into some of its inner workings. One of the oldest of the preserved palace in India, it was constructed around 1601 CE by Iravi Varma Kulasekhara Perumal, who ruled the southwest tip of the Indian subcontinent between 1592 and 1609. The palace is divided in four zones from west to east: a court for ceremonies in front of the entrance, the formal entrance area, the residence and the gardens and water tanks. The formal entrance area included not just the audience hall but also a dance hall with beautiful stone-carved columns. The dance hall had its own small shrine, since the dance, as previously noted, was not entertainment, but essential in establishing the relationship between the divine and the human. Situated at the corner of the complex, the music would waft over the walls into the surrounding community (Figures 4.4.5 and 4.4.6). The residential zone consisted of a series of interconnected areas for the royal family, with a special area for the royal mother. A four-storey structure is at the core of this area. The ground floor housed the royal treasury and the

FIGURE 4.4.5 

Padmanabhapuram Palace, India.

268  Palace Universes

FIGURE 4.4.6 

Dance Hall of Padmanabhapuram Palace, India. Credit: NurPhoto/ Getty Images.

first floor the king’s bedrooms. The top floor served as the sanctum for the royal household. To the east of the residential area, there were the gardens with a water tank and its temple. A special reception hall for European dignitaries was at the northeast corner overlooking the gardens but providing no visual or spatial access to the palace. Turning to the Abomey Palaces in Benin, when Archibald Dazel, an English colonial administrator, described them, all he has to say was that the king has two palaces within the town and another outside it, each enclosed by a mud wall about 20 feet. high.19 Today, we know that 12 palaces were built, each subsequent ruler building a new palace close to that of his predecessor. One of the palace complexes, of King Glèlè and King Guézo, is preserved as a museum, which allows us a better understanding of its layout.20 The northern palace of King Guézo, who ruled from 1797 to 1818, had a two-storied house on a European model that hosted important royal festivals and public meetings. The inner sanctum, in this case a hut protecting the supernatural powers of the king known as the Boho, was in the second more private courtyard. To the north, there was a connected walled enclosure that contained the royal tombs. To the immediate south was the palace of King Glèlè, who ruled from 1858 to 1889, which contained a reception hall for foreign dignitaries, a temple where the king paid homage to the ancestors and to spirits of the land and behind it the king’s council chamber. These two palaces were embedded in a large enclosure, the one seen by Dazel from the outside, which housed the palaces of the earlier kings, the gardens and the servant quarters. UNESCO describes the complex as “a unique reminder of this vanished kingdom” (Figures 4.4.7 and 4.4.8).21 Richard B. Woodward has made extensive study of the ritual buildings of the Pende chiefs in southwestern Congo. They are made for the chiefs who are responsible for mediating with the ancestors, whose care from

Palace Universes  269

FIGURE 4.4.7 

Plan of Abomey Palace compound, Benin.

FIGURE 4.4.8 

Abomey Palace compound. Photo by Karalyn Monteil © UNESCO.

beyond the grave is essential to the well-being of the chiefdom’s kifutshi – the Pende term for the overall environment, including the village and its ­people, domestic and game animals, farmland and forest. To perform this role, a chief used a special house, known as kibulu, where his rituals were performed. Its earthen floor was viewed as an altar, and at times the chief

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slept directly on it to facilitate communication. The house was considered a foyer to the other world and was prescribed to be a square structure with a central pole, the height of which was equal to the length of each side of the house – ­approximately ten feet. The men of the village were responsible for building the house in a single day, starting with a hole in the earth for the central post. The hole was called the stomach of the house and priests deposited food in it before the pole was inserted. This step was taken to assure the proper maintenance of the chiefdom’s relationship to the land. The inner sanctum where the chief’s masks, coffin, certain medicines and power figures were kept is an enclosed space at the back and is off-limits to the chief and his family. Only the priests could enter.22 Given the intimate relationship between ancestrality, chiefly power, building, earth and community, it was quite remarkable when Chief Mbuambua in 1987 proclaimed that he intended to construct his next kibulu out of ­concrete blocks with a tin roof. The announcement raised genuine consternation in the population since a well-maintained thatch roof was a sign of society’s health, its rethatching taking place every decade or so involving important ceremonies, dances, masquerades and feasts.23 Because of their role as mediators between the earth and the cosmos, palaces required elaborate construction protocols, for which, here too, there is a paucity of evidence. Good omens had to be procured and even the materials were special, involving a set of rites that protected the site against evil spirits and in a way gave life to the building. The first operation was the choice of a site. When Raja Marong Maha Podisat, King of Kedah, Malaysia, wanted to construct a new town and palace, as described by Jacques Dumarçay, he traversed his state in search of a site, and on arriving at the mouth of a wide river, saw four islands in the sea, which seemed to him ideal. He fired a silver arrow from his bow called Indra Sakti, saying, “O arrow of the bow Indra Sakti, fall thou on good soil in this group of islands.” Swift as lightning and buzzing like a bee, so the story goes, the arrow disappeared and landed on one of the islands which was thereafter called Pulau Indra Sakti, where a town and a palace were built. When the choice of a site had been determined, the soil was tested to see if it was suitable for construction. First, it had to be fertile and thick, yellow in color but with green tints, and had to smell pleasantly. Next, the contours of the land were scrutinized. Then a rectangular space was laid out with four stakes; a fifth was placed in the center. When these geometric operations were complete, the space marked out was dug out and a clod of earth taken from the freshly dug soil, wrapped in white cloth and placed under the prince’s pillow. The dreams this inevitably caused were interpreted by specialists; if considered favorable, the external perimeter of the building was laid out and then, on a particularly auspicious day, sacrifices were performed and a pillar was raised with a coconut and a double phallus attached to assure the virility and strength of the place (Figure 4.4.9).

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FIGURE 4.4.9 

Amarapura Palace, Myanmar, as depicted in a watercolor with pen and ink and made in 1855 by Colesworthy Grant/Alamy.

The measuring unit to be used in the construction was decided. It could be the first finger joint of the first finger of the master craftsman in charge or more commonly, the cubit equal to the length of his forearm or the measure between the two hands of a man with horizontally outstretched arms. The construction could then begin, but it could be stopped by a bad omen, like lightning striking the building site or if a snake, a tortoise or an iguana got inside the unfinished building that was considered most untoward, but could be overcome by spreading ash over the offending animal. When, in spite of all these diverse difficulties, the palace was eventually finished, everyone who took part in the construction was invited to a feast. This was followed by the introduction of the royal regalia into the palace and by the ceremonies and sacrifices that marked the move into the palace by the court.24 How many of these buildings worked from a more ceremonial point of view is also rarely known, since all we have sometimes are archaeological ruins. Along the east coast of Africa, home to hundreds of trading towns, the richest and most influential at the end of the long millennium was Kilwa Kisiwani, located on an island off the Tanzanian coast. By the twelfth century, under the rule of the Abu’-Mawahib dynasty, Kilwa had become the most powerful city on the Swahili Coast, and by the fifteenth century, the Kilwa Sultanate ruled from Mombasa to its trading posts across the channel on Madagascar. In the early fourteenth century, its leader, Sultan al-Hasan

272  Palace Universes

ibn Sulaiman, constructed a massive palace called Husuni Kubwa. Now just a ruin and only accessible from a worn staircase carved out of the cliff leading up from the water, it was built of jagged blocks of coral. It had a stepped greeting court bordered by guest rooms for visiting merchants, an octagonal pool, a grand audience court and a residence with some 100 rooms. A mosque was built as well, constructed in the eleventh century and considerably enlarged in the thirteenth century, and roofed entirely with domes and vaults, some decorated with embedded Chinese porcelain (Figure 4.4.10). Even when some notable palaces, mosques and shrines had been reconstructed and their functions documented, as at the Jos Open Traditional Nigerian Architecture (MOTNA), the landscaping and gardens as settings for these buildings had been ignored.25 Integrated shrine/palace landscapes are even rarer. One is the palace of Chief John Bawa Zuure of the Talensis people, located in northern Ghana, in a landscape of oddly shaped boulders and rock outcroppings. The palace is the gateway to an extensive and potent shrine-scape, known as the Tongo Hills, which rises behind it on the slopes of the hill. The types of shrines can be broadly categorized as medicine shrines (Tü), ancestor shrines (Yaab), destiny shrines (Yin), soothsayers or diviners’ shrines (Bakolog) and earth shrines (Tongbaan), among others, though not all remain in use today.26 Regarding the impressive Zimbabwe palaces, we know from the ethnographic records studied by Thomas Huffman that they had five components: (1) a palace, (2) court, (3) royal wives’ area, (4) place for followers and (5) places for guards. The palace and the town around it were protected from physical and supernatural danger by concentric rings of guards and medicine (Figure 4.4.11).27 To get a partial sense of how these places worked, we have to turn to more recent descriptions, such as that of the palace of the chiefdom of Ngambe

FIGURE 4.4.10  Reconstruction

of Husuni Kubwa, Tanzania. Credit: Windmill Books/Universal Images Group North America LLC/Alamy.

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FIGURE 4.4.11 

The Great Zimbabwe, aerial view. Credit: Janice Bell.

by David Price. The chiefdom is located in Cameroon close to the Nigerian border. Ngambe, a roughly oval village, is surrounded by several protective trenches. The palace is located along the major East-West route near the intersection with a road that comes into town from the north. About 150 meters in front of the palace along the road there is a large tree, one of several sacred trees, this one said to have been planted by one of the chief’s ancestors when he founded the village. Seven maidens are supposed to have been buried beneath its roots on that occasion. The tree symbolizes the line of chiefs of Ngambe and should a large branch fall from it, the event is considered a portent of impending disaster. The coolness beneath its branches is explicitly likened to the peace and tranquility to be had under the aegis of the chief. And it is the site of many public events, including markets and various ceremonies. There is a clear hierarchy with members of the family and court participating in various ceremonies and have certain rights and titles. The chief is regarded as “father” and the members of the royal line are “children of the chief.” The princes belong to the category “little tree,” “branch” and “twig.” Associated with the palace is the cult of Ngwa, a type of animal who lives in the bush and is extremely powerful. For special occasions, such as the confirming of titles, the priests invite it into a small hunt across from the House of Men in which a special drum is hidden from view. The spirit must approve of the candidate, and if it fails to “roar,” a new candidate must be sought (Figure 4.4.12).28 Miles Clifford and Richmond Palmer have studied the palace of the Igala Chiefdom at the junction of the rivers Niger and Benue, which was administered by a chief who bore the title of Ata Gala and had his headquarters at Idah on the River Niger.29 His divinity was absolute. He was credited with the ability to exercise control over the elements and thus over the harvest. But he was also free from human needs and failings; rage, laughter or grief alike had no part in his life and the royal countenance was at once shielded from

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FIGURE 4.4.12  Plan

of the compound of the king of the Agala, Nigeria, from the mid-1930s. Credit: Miles Clifford and Richmond Palmer, “A Nigerian Chiefdom,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 66 (July to December 1936): 393–435.

Palace Universes  275

view should any such manifestation appear; he was screened even in the act of sitting down and his footprints were effaced. Being a god, he had no need of food and such terms were never used in reference to him. “The Ata has withdrawn his presence” or “he has gone within” are the only indications one receives. His food was prepared and cooked by young virgins bound by a special oath who performed this duty in nudibus, it being served to him at the appointed hour – noon and again at about 6 pm – by two other naked virgins who brought the sacred dishes to the sanctum sanctorum and awaited his signal that he was ready to receive his meal. The main buildings were in the northeast of the roughly rectangular enclosure. The entrance to the compound had to its left an informal reception room. The Ata sat here during the forenoon with his intimates and drinking companions. To the right side of the gate, there is the siesta room to which he withdrew after the midday meal. Further along the courtyard was his sleeping quarters. It was a narrow, dark room with one entrance; wives may only enter this when summoned by him. Next to it was the cooking place. Here, Ata’s food was prepared. Nearby, there was the pen in which sacrificial animals were kept prior to slaughter. A wall separated this part from the second courtyard area. It contained the individual huts for his wives as well as the manejo, the sanctum sanctorum. The word manejo means “One does not pursue the snake into its hole.” With the exception of the Ogbe when specifically summoned and the acolyte whose duty it was to sweep and spread the floor with clean sand, no one had access to this chamber. Next to it was Ata’s treasury and repository. All of this were separated from a third court, which was largely open, but which contained the odogo, a tower from the summit of which the king was able to see all that was going on within the compound and its environs; it was regarded as a very sacred edifice. Here too was the council chamber as well as the site of the original shrine erected by Ayagba in memory of his ancestress Ebele Ejaunu and the shrine where Ata makes sacrifice to the spirits of his predecessors at the annual festival. There were four gates connected to various festivals. The main gate to the east had nine holes cut in the wall on either side that were the “mouths” of the nine-member advisor council that met just inside the walls. When Ata went to war or went to pay a visit to some outlying fief, a temporary accommodation was put up for him on exactly the same plan as his palace, with a member of his household being sent ahead to supervise the work. As soon as Ata vacated the buildings, they were destroyed by fire. The reason that only one half of the compound is in use is because on the death of an Ata, his successor moves into new buildings, arranged precisely in the same manner as the old and built in the unoccupied area, and the buildings of his predecessor were allowed to fall into ruin. One of the most recent palace complexes to be built was the Preah Barum Reachea Veang Chaktomuk Serei Mongko in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which

276  Palace Universes

serves as the residence of the king of Cambodia. It was built in the 1860s after King Norodom relocated the capital from Oudong to Phnom Penh. It was built atop an old citadel called Banteay Kev and is situated at the western bank of the cross division of the Tonle Sap River and the Mekong River called Chaktomuk. The first royal palace to be built at the location was designed by architect Neak Okhna Tepnimith Mak and constructed by the French Protectorate in 1866. Over the next decade, buildings and houses were added, many of which have since been demolished and replaced, including an early Chanchhaya Pavilion and Throne Hall (1870). The royal court was installed permanently at the new royal palace in 1871 and the walls surrounding the grounds were raised in 1873. Many of the buildings of the royal palace, particularly of this period, were constructed using a combination of traditional Khmer architectural features but also incorporating significant European features and design as well. To its left is the Throne Hall constructed in 1917. In the 1930s, King Monivong added the royal chapel, Vihear Suor (1930), and replaced the old royal residence with the Khemarin Palace (1931), which serves as the official residence to this day (Figure 4.4.13).

FIGURE 4.4.13 Audience

Hall of Preah Barum Reachea Veang Chaktomuk Serei Mongkol (Royal Palace), Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Credit: Patricia Young/Alamy.

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Notes 1 There is, for example, not a single reference to a palace in Elizabeth Eldredge, Kingdoms and Chiefdoms of Southeastern Africa: Oral Traditions and History, 1400–1830 (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewe, 2018). 2 Grenville Stewart Parker Freeman, The East African Coast: Select Documents from the First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 129. 3 William Marsden, The History of Sumatra (London: 1811), 361. 4 Brantz Mayer, Captain Canot; or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver (London: George Routledge, 1855), 91. 5 William Winwood Reade, Savage Africa: Being the Narrative of a Tour in Equatorial, Southwestern, and Northwestern Africa; with Notes on the Habits of the Gorilla; on the Existence of Unicorns and Tailed Men; on the Slave Trade; on the Origin, Character, and Capabilities of the Negro, and on the Future Civilization of Western Africa (New York: Harper Brothers, 1864), 57. 6 John Hanning Speke, Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (New York: Harper, 1868), 282. 7 Barbara Plankensteiner, “Benin: Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria,” African Arts 40, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 77. 8 Joseph Nevadomsky and Norma Rosen, “The Initiation of a Priestess: Performance and Imagery in Olokun Ritual,” TDR 32, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 187. 9 The photo by Cyril Punch was published in H. L. Roth, Great Benin: Its Customs, Art and Horrors (Halifax: King and Sons, 1903), Fig. 84, p. 79. 10 See Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20. 11 Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), 1, 38. See also Jeroen Duindam, “The Court as a Meeting Point: Cohesion, Competition, Control,” in Prince, Pen, and Sword: Eurasian Perspectives (32–128), eds. Maaike van Berkel and Jeroen Duindam (Leiden: Brill, 2018). 12 Villages, towns and cities are also key elements in the discussion, but since the emphasis here is on affluence and not on the general terms of domestic or village life, the focus here is on palaces which are often not discussed. In his wide-­ranging and erudite History of Government, Samuel Finer classifies Asian dynastic courts under the rubric of “palace polities,” where “decision-making rests with one ­individual,” influenced by domestics and consorts. But an undue emphasis on decision-making overshadows many of the other necessary components of the court. 13 See Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben, eds., The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston, 2013). 14 Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Agyeman Prempeh’s Return from Exile, 1924–1931,” in The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and Other Writings (43–55), eds. A. Abu Boahen, Emmanuel Akyeampong, Nancy Lawler, T. C. McCaskie, and Ivor Wilks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 51, 52. 15 A. Dalzel, The History of Dahomey, an Inland Kingdom of Africa (London: T. Spilsbury and Son, 1793), xi. 16 Pal Fodor, “Sultan, Imperial Council, Grand Vizier Changes in the Ottoman Ruling Elite and the Formation of the Grand Vizieral Telhis,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, no. 1/2 (1994): 67–85. 17 See J. F. J. Duindam, Dynasties, A Global History of Power, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) for palace grounds plans indicating inner and outer zones. 18 D. T. Niane, Sundiata, 39.

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19 Archibald Dazel, “Account of Dahomy and its Inhabitants. From a History of that Country by Archibald Dazel, Esq. Governor at Whydah, and afterwards at Cape Coast Castle” (293–304). Travels in Africa, from Modern Writers, with Remarks and Observations; Exhibiting a Connected View of the Geography and Present State of that Quarter of the Globe, ed. William Bingley (London: John Sharpe, 1891), 300. 20 http://www.epa-prema.net/abomeyGB/architect2.htm#. 21 https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/323/video. 22 Richard B. Woodward, “Visions from the Congo, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, A Rising of the Wind: Art from a Time of Rebellion in the Congo,” Blackbird Archive 11, no. 1 (Spring 2012). https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v11n1/gallery/ woodward_r/balot.shtml. 23 Z. S. Strother, “Architecture against the State: The Virtues of Impermanence in the Kibulu of Eastern Pende Chiefs in Central Africa,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 63, no. 3 (September 2004): 272. 24 Jacques Dumarçay, The Palaces of South-East Asia, Architecture and Customs, trans. Michael Smithies (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), 82, 83. 25 J. B. Falade, “Nigeria’s Urban Open Spaces: An Inquiry into Their Evolution, Planning and Landscape Qualities,” Ph.D. diss., Department of Architecture Edinburgh University, 1985), 167–170. 26 M. Fortes, Religion, Morality and the Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26. See also Timothy Insoll, “Talensi Animal Sacrifice and Its Archaeological Implications,” World Archaeology, 42, no. 2 (June 2010): 231–244. 27 Thomas N. Huffman, “Mapungubwe and the Origins of the Zimbabwe Culture,” African Naissance: The Limpopo Valley 1000 Years Ago, Goodwin Series 8 (December 2000): 14–29, 27. See also Joost Fontein, “Silence, Destruction and Closure at Great Zimbabwe: Local Narratives of Desecration and Alienation,” Journal of Southern African Studies 32, no. 4 Heritage in Southern Africa (December 2006): 771–794. 28 The paragraph is condensed from David Price, “The Palace and its Institutions in the Chiefdom of Ngambe,” Paideuima 31 (1985): 85–103. 29 The following is condensed from Miles Clifford and Richmond Palmer, “A Nigerian Chiefdom,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 66 (July to December 1936): 393–435.

5 LOOKING AND SOUNDING THE PART

When anthropologist Clifford Geertz discussed the kingdoms of Bali, he introduced the idea of “theater state.” Struggles for power, he pointed out, were inseparable from the devotional performances that define the configuration of reality, a reality as deeply rooted in models of the cosmos as in lived experience: Court ceremonialism was the driving force of court politics; and mass ritual was not a device to shore up the state, but rather the state, even in its final gasp, was a device for the enactment of mass ritual. Power served pomp, not pomp power.1 We can certainly see that many “great’ works” of palaces have theater-state aspects. But we should be careful. Courts required considerable maintenance efforts, not to mention revenue, so as to carefully balance obligations to the spirit world with those to the more political and mundane. Pomp was not just theater, but also a type of infrastructure, a palace’s line of defense against internal and external stresses. It was part of its autoimmune system, designed around predictability or what one now calls “tradition.” An important element was “looking the part.” Once again, though the palace was a center of this universe, the more power and wealth, the greater the pomp and theater as the visible, and as we shall see, acoustical, manifestation of divine blessing, and this had a direct implication in the spatial articulation of the palace with its feasting halls, dancing pavilions, gardens, reception rooms and special enclosures, all embedded in well-known and well-followed procedures of courtly etiquette (Figure 4.5.1).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003278481-25

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FIGURE 4.5.1 

King Rama V photographed at his coronation in 1873, Thailand.

Protocols of speech, dress and ritual played important roles in all registers of palace culture. Many European colonial visitors documented their frustration at having to deal with what they saw as seemingly silly protocol. When Magellan arrived in Borneo, he found it curious that the only way to communicate with the sultan was indirectly. Should he wish to say anything, he was to inform a servant, who would pass it on to an official of slightly high rank, who would then tell the governor’s brother, who would whisper the message through a speaking tube passing through the wall, where another servant would intercept it and relay it to the sultan.2 Needless to say, it would have been no easier for the sultan of Borneo to have seen the emperor of China or a king of England; but because the territorial area controlled by these chiefdoms was so comparatively small, Europeans had a difficult time understanding the proportionate scale of palace ritual to consequence. They did not understand that the palace and its associated ceremonies were carefully designed and choreographed universes. Hugh Clapperton (1788–1827), a Scottish naval officer who traveled through West and Central Africa, visited Kuka (now Kukawa in Nigeria), the capital of the Bornu Empire, where he was received by Sultan Sheikh al-Kaneimi. He arrived bearing the articles from the government, consisting of a double-barreled gun, a pair of pistols in

Looking and Sounding the Part  281

a case, two pieces of superfine broad cloth, red and blue, to which he added a set of porcelain ware and two bundles of spices: The ceremony of getting into the presence was ridiculous enough, although nothing could be more plain and devoid of pretension than the appearance of the sheikh himself. We passed through passages lined with attendants, the front men sitting on their hams; and when we advanced too quickly, we were suddenly arrested by these fellows, who caught forcibly hold of us by the legs, and had not the crowd prevented our falling, we should most infallibly have become prostrate before arriving in the presence. Previous to entering into the open court, in which we were received, our papouches, or slippers, were whipped off by these active though sedentary gentlemen of the chamber; and we were seated on some clean sand on each side of a raised bench of earth, covered with a carpet, on which the sheikh was reclining.3 Another typical description was from the notes of Captain Harrison of the British navy on his early nineteenth-century visit to the Island of Bioko, just off the coast of Cameroon: I was directed to stand on one side of the entrance to the court, which the chief and the whole of his party entered, with the addition of some hundred visitors of both sexes from the neighboring townships. I was now led into [a] large hut facing the entrance to the yard, round, which the assembled crowd had congregated; it was with difficulty that a passage was made for my entrance. In the center of the hut, I found the chief seated on an ornamented block of wood, in the form of a coffin, scooped out. One of his wives was employed anointing his person with a layer of clay, which appeared to have been burnt, and mixed up with pal-wine instead of oil. This ceremony over, another wife came in and stuck some small green twigs into every part of his motley dress. This finished, the head men took their seats … I was seated on a small block of wood on the right of the chief, who now commenced an energetic speech to those assembled…. Being unfortunately seated close to a fire, of which there were three burning in the hut, I found myself nearly suffocated… so I got up and made a hasty retreat, much to the astonishment of the assembled crowd. After an absence of five minutes, I was sent for and obliged to resume my seat, greatly to my annoyance and misery. What with the stench from the bodies of those inside, conjoined with the fires, and the stoppage of all circulation of air by those without, I was nearly fainting, when fortunately for me, the chief finished his harangue.4 As noted throughout this book, it is a huge challenge to try to reconstruct the meaning and protocols of ritual and other behaviors within palaces and

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ceremonial structures from the limited and often suspect perspective offered by colonial descriptions. European colonial observers had a particularly difficult time understanding the cosmological significance embodied in the personhood of rulers. In 1886, when François Coillard, on an Evangelizing mission, met Lewanika (1842–1916), the Lozi King of Barotseland, he noted that the man “like all small African potentates, …. has an extraordinarily exaggerated idea of his own dignity….They attribute to him a magic power: he can render himself invisible and invulnerable, and ensure success in hunting by certain medicines known to himself.”5 More modern era descriptions are often no more helpful, since they are written after the general destruction of the chieftain world as a political system. Nonetheless, we know that in Vietnam, the imperial court of Hué (which was set up in 1802 and lasted until the nineteenth century) had elaborate visiting requirements and ceremonies. The audience granted to the French ambassador in 1875, for example, required a rehearsal the day before to make sure that the French would make no blunders. The next day, the ambassador went through various gates, passing the emperor’s two elephants, sumptuously decked out, their tusks decorated with gold rings. He went through a special pavilion to a courtyard where there were soldiers carrying banners, shields and lances, and in front of them hundreds of mandarins in the finest silk robes were attended by pages with incense burners. The sovereign appeared in the interior throne room, thus beginning the audience and exchange of presents.6 The Akans, who occupy the greater part of southern Ghana, have a palace language that is restricted to the palaces of the lesser chiefs, paramount chiefs and kings, who are in charge of the traditional political and administrative systems of the region. It is full of linguistic politeness and it also embodies Akan law, tradition, philosophy, religion, norms and values. This specialized language, which puts a premium on rhetoric, oratory and discourse, serves as a preserver of social stability and cohesion.7 Palace language was an efficient means of maintaining the distinction between the elites and commoners. Examples of its existence survived well into the modern era at the royal court of Thailand.8 Music and percussion play a critical role in the life of a palace. Palace drums are, in fact, the literal “voice” of authority and social organization and do everything from welcoming guests to announcing various types of important events. In many parts of Africa, such drums, revered and symbolic of royalty, are a safeguard and a talisman for luck and victory.9 Their possession substantiates the claim to the throne, and on the reigning king’s retirement, the sacred instruments must be handed down to his successor to prove, in turn, his legitimate royalty. On the day of coronation, the drums are the feature of the parade to the palace. They signify imperial authority: the king himself tapping a few beats on them before declaring himself to be

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the eldest son and the legal heir. After his death, the drums are played at his shrine – to release his spirit from their power – beating the words “I am now free.” When not in use, the drums are stored in a drum yard or special hut, which is guarded by persons of the highest integrity. In East African palaces, the drum yard is itself considered holy.10 Though much has been lost over the decades, the Royal Drummers of Burundi have developed a cult following in recent years and are part of Burundi’s national identity, touring even outside of their country at festivals around the world (Figure 4.5.2). Here too, colonial era European visitors failed to understand the nature and meaning of sound. When Henry M. Stanley, journalist, soldier and colonial administrator, who famously sought out David Livingstone, met the King of the Buganda, Muteesa I, he wrote that “On entering this court, I am greeted with a frightful uproar; a thousand instruments, each one more outlandish than the other, produce the most discordant and deafening sounds.”11 James August Grant and English Captain James, who visited the same palace in 1864, had a more positive insight. “Night and day, in the palace precincts, the sound of drums was heard from the hill-sides.”12 An engraving from 1862 shows the moment Muteesa met another European, John Speke, in his i­mposing reception hall with the drummers and musicians to the left (Figure 4.5.3). In Southeast Asia, the sound from open-air columnar, dance halls would have drifted out over the walls of the palace into the surrounding areas,

FIGURE 4.5.2 

The Royal Drummers of Burundi. Credit: guenterguni/iStock.com.

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FIGURE 4.5.3  Muteesa

1 of Buganda receives explorers John Speke (at right) and James Grant in 1862.  Engraved from a drawing by Grant.

forming a type of conspicuous display of sound. This was certainly the case in the Javanese courts, which are one of the few that have survived continuously into the modern age – largely because it was subsumed under the administration of the Dutch colonial government. The nobility were powerless against the Dutch, but were allowed to retain their social position among their own people. The kingdom was made a special region with provincial status, the sultan being designated as its governor for life. Since 1989, his son has ruled as Sultan Hamengku Buwana. The palace of Yogyakarta governs only its own internal affairs and perpetuates traditional Javanese ­ceremonies  and rituals. Once the elite fortress of the Javanese nobility, the palace offers daily tours of its grounds to people from all strata of society. The Javanese developed a musical instrument known as the gamelan that, according to Javanese mythology, was created by Sang Hyang Guru, the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.13 The earliest image of such instruments in a musical ensemble is found on the bas-relief of the ninth-century Buddhist monument of Borobudur. Gamelans are not instruments in the modern sense, but living entities that must be accorded the proper respect and salutation. Some have even been given names in which at least one component is a word often used in aristocratic names like Harjamulya

Looking and Sounding the Part  285

(harja = comfortable, prosperous), Harjanegara (negara = kingdom) and Madukusuma (kusuma = flower, beautiful, aristocracy). Their color is also connected to the palace. The dark red, green, dark green, brown, gold and dark brown that are used as the primary colors of the palace gamelans are the same colors used to paint the main structural pillars and beams of the palace’s most important architectural structures. Agustini Ismur, an astute observer of Javanese palace culture, explains that the various colors used in the decoration of the palace structures make reference back to specific epochs of Javanese cultural history. In particular, the dark red color that is widely used for the palace gamelan sets, especially the archaic ones, is associated with Hinduism, the religious/cultural model that was so central to the development of Javanese statecraft and worldview between the fourth and fifteenth centuries CE. Yellow and gold make reference to Buddhism, which impacted the Javanese elite almost as early as Hinduism did. Green is symbolically associated with Islam, which came to supplant Hinduism as the state religion in the fifteenth century and which remains the dominant religious force in contemporary Indonesia. The medium brown symbolizes the color of skin; dark brown the color of soil/earth. This color symbolism mixes together in a single structure some combination of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and indigenous Javanese sources (Figure 4.5.4).14 To truly enter the palacescapes of the chiefdom world at the end of the long first millennium would require that I leave the already shaky ground of history to become a historical-fiction writer. But it does not take historicalfiction to envision the scale and richness of that world. Global time travelers would have had to dedicate a large portion of their observations to chiefdom palaces. Yes, they would speak of the marvels of architecture that were to be found in Islamic Spain, Damascus, Byzantium and in the great cities of China and India, but they would speak no less of the many other places in the far flung parts of the globe.

FIGURE 4.5.4 

Javanese Gamelan. Credit: Benjamin Hollis.

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Among the surviving living traditions of palace/dance/feast centers is in Zambia, a celebration of the Lozi people that focuses on its king, known as Litunga. It takes place every year with the rising of the water when the king is brought from his palace at Lealui in the Barotse Floodplain of the Zambezi

FIGURE 4.5.5  Map

of the route taken by the Litunga royal barge, Barotseland, Zambia.

FIGURE 4.5.6  The

Litunga royal barge, Barotseland, Zambia. Credit: Dietmar Hatzenbichler.

Looking and Sounding the Part  287

River, the Lozi homeland, to another palace in Limulunga on higher ground, about 11 miles to the east. Called kuomboka (“to get out of the water”), it involves two days of dancing to drumming. It is an impressive river spectacle attended by thousands. The barge holds over a 100 people, mostly courtiers who do the paddling, and has on the roof of its cabin a replica of a huge black elephant, the ears of which can be moved from inside the barge. There is also a fire on board, the smoke from which tells the people that the king is alive and well. For his wife, there is a second barge. This one has a huge cattle egret (Nalwange) on top. The trip from Lealui to Limulunga moves along a special canal. The royal musicians sing in Luyana, the archaic language, unlike the songs of the commoners which are in the vernacular Lozi – thus distinguishing royal music and its associated history from commoner’s music.15 The movement of the king from low water to high water is certainly an old one and was just as certainly associated with ceremonial framing even in the days before recorded history, but one should not see today’s ceremony as a static state holdover from an ancient practice. What we see today is a living event that has been elevated to national and even touristic importance, endangered however by the global warming that has begun to dry out the rivers of the region (Figures 4.5.5 and 4.5.6). Notes 1 Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) 4, 13. 2 Laurence Bergreen, Magellan: Over the Edge of the World (New York: Roaring Briok Press, 2017), 134. 3 Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton, and Walter Oudney, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, Vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1928), 214, 215. 4 Captain Harrison, “Fernando Po: Third Excursion from the Ship and Settlement to Another Native Town,” The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, Etc no. 596 (Saturday, June 21, 1828): 392. 5 François Coillard, On the Threshold of Central Africa a Record of Twenty Years’ Pioneering Among the Barotsi of the Upper Zambesi, trans Catherine Winkworth MacKintosh (London: Hodder and Stoughton St., 1897), 223. 6 Dumarçay, The Palaces of South-East Asia, 69–71. 7 Kofi Agyekum, “The Ethnoprogramatics of the Akan Palace Language of Ghana,” Journal of Anthropological Research 67, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 573. 8 H. G. Quaritch Wales, Siamese State Ceremonies (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1931), 40. 9 For an excellent discussion, see Sylvia A. Nannyonga-Tamusuza, Baakisimba: Gender in the Music and Dance of the Baganda People of Uganda (London: Routledge, 2005). 10 James Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History (Westport, CN: The Bold Strummer, 1992), 63. 11 Henry M. Stanley, Through the Dark Continent, or the Sources of the Niles, Around the Great Lakes of Equatorial Africa and Down the Livingstone River, Vol. 1, (Hamburg: Karl Graedener, 1878), 65.

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12 August Grant, Walk Across Africa or Domestic Scenes from my Nile Journey (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1864), 245. 13 R. T. Warsodiningrat, “Serat Weda Pradangga,” cited in A. R. Roth, “New Compositions for Javanese Gamelan,” doctoral diss., University of Durham (1986), 4. 14 Roger Vetter, “More than Meets the Eye and Ear: Gamelans and Their Meaning in a Central Javanese Palace,” Asian Music 32, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2001): 42, 43. 15 The Concise Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Vol. 1, ed. Ellen Koskoff (New York: Routledge, 2008), 99.

CODA Death by a Thousand Cuts

By the end of the first millennium, the sweet spot systems of the world had reached their maximum delivery capacity. The thresholds of the constraints that impacted these systems were piling up. From an ecological point of view, in an age before humans began to move plants around the globe, cinnamon, frankincense, camphor, agarwood and pepper all existed in narrow ranges of production. There were also only a small set of people who had privileged access to them. Even where production or extraction was well organized, there were limits to how many bodies could be put into the effort. Silent trade, where it existed, was limited to what the forest people could – or wanted to – gather or produce. Elephants and musk deer could be hunted only in certain places and at certain times. Boats could only go so fast and carry so much. Then, of course, the materials that were moving upstream in the reverse direction had their own set of restraints. Malaria and pests put a lid on certain types of productivity that, in turn, impacted the delicate mesh of realities that made it all work. There was, in other words, a wide array of braking mechanisms to the expansion of extraction and exploitation that were governed by forces relating to ecology, politics, technology and human resources. Climate might have played a role in the transformations. The decline of the Đại Việt in Vietnam, for example, is explained by some scholars specifically as associated with climate.1 But as I tried to stress before, climate is only one factor of many. In some cases, the changes we see were also the result of shifting procurement patterns of luxury commodities. The gold mines in Borneo, for example, came to be depleted. The introduction of coins in South Asia reduced the demand for beads and shells. And in Europe and elsewhere, imitation gems flooded the markets (Coda 1).

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CODA 1 

The decline of the various sweet spots.

The first sweet spot to disappear was in the North Sea Latitude. The e­xtinction of walrus population in Iceland because of its overhunting by around 1000 CE, the improved defenses by the Europeans against raiding, the changing demographics of Scandinavia, the institutionalization in Norway of coinage, Christianization and the end of slaves as exports all played their part in integrating Scandinavia with the more normative market and political realities that had been established in Europe since the eighth or ninth century. As people came to live in villages and towns on the continental model, the longhouse tradition disappeared, as did the longhouses themselves. The destruction of the shrine at Uppsala in Sweden was a major blow to the older ways. The building was described by eleventh-century chronicler Adam of Bremen in his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg, ca. 1075). The site hosted a festival lasting nine days and had a large wooden temple that was the home to three deities, the principal one being Thor. The center of attraction was a sacred evergreen tree and an equally sacred well. A woodcut from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555) that images the Temple at Uppsala as a rather substantial building included the golden chain around it, the well and the tree. In the process of Christianization, the huge holy tree was felled, the well filled in, the sacred grove chopped down and a cathedral built on the site (Coda 2).2

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  291

CODA 2 

Temple at Old Uppsala, Olaus Magnus, 1555.

One by one, shrines like this fell until there was only one left of any major consequence. It was located on Cape Arkona (Germany) on the island known as Rügen. A cult site for the Rani, a Slavic chiefdom, it was dedicated to their god Svantovit. Non-Christian refugees from the south had begun to gather here beginning already in the eleventh century. It was not just a religious site, but also a well-used trading site, protected on three sides by cliffs and from the land side by a formidable wall. An early thirteenth-century Danish writer and chronicler, Saxo Grammaticus, who is thought to have been a clerk to the archbishop of Lund, wrote that inside there was an elaborately carved wooden statue of Sventovit with four heads. He also wrote about a divinatory ritual related to harvest requiring sacrifices of animals before the ceremonial feast.3 The inner temple was so holy that even a priest had to hold his breath when entering. With the influx of refugees, the site grew in importance and became one of the last great centers of resistance. Finally, in 1168, Danish king Valdemar I conquered Rügen. The temple was destroyed, the four-meter-high wooden statue of Svantovit was hacked to pieces and burned and churches were established. A modern-day attempt at a reconstruction is now on the site (Coda 3). What was at stake in this history is not just the proverbial advancement of Christianity, but the need to control productive land and trade routes. Rügen was the last great holdout. From henceforth “paganism,” as it was called by the Christians, drifted into the capillary system of what we today call folk religion or superstition, revived now through ethnographic museums and neo-pagan nationalism. Perhaps one can say that the success in the de-chieftainization of Europe, culminating with the Christianization of the Vikings in the tenth and

292  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

CODA 3 

Svantevit statue made by Marius Grusas at the cape Arkona on the island Rügen (reproduction). Credit: Lapplaender/Wikimedia Commons.

eleventh centuries, gave the subsequent European colonialists a false sense of ­confidence when they arrived at the shores of distant continents. After all, by the time these colonialists went forth in the sixteenth century, Europe had been de-chieftainized for 300 or so years, allowing the Europeans to more or less assume that the world of pagans, heathens and savages would simply collapse in other places as well. In many places it did. But by the midtwentieth century, it was clear that the chieftain world – even deprived of economic standing – was still so expansive that European colonialism could only “manage” the problem until even that proved too costly. The arrogance of the universalist philosophy that underpinned it was undone in the context of its planetary-scale encounters.4 The Indonesian Seaway Sweet Spot, by way of contrast to the Scandinavian north, survived well into the modern era. It was difficult to control even in the best of circumstances, beset as it was by a variegated terrain, political contestations and piracy. In 1292, the Yuan dynasty under Kublai Khan attempted to invade. Technically, it was a failure and is portrayed as a victory for the new state, Majapahit. But the damage was done. Though the Majapahit were

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  293

able to hold things together, the region had become a classic shatter zone with multiple confusing and shifting alliances. Nonetheless, the Majapahit were still able to draw on the deep reservoir of wealth that the region produced. The western slope of Mount Lawu received several impressive Hindu temples such as Ceto. Mattiussi (1286–1331), an Italian Franciscan friar who passed through the area, noted that the king had a grand and luxurious palace. The stairs and palace interior were coated with gold and silver and even the roofs were gilded. But a few generations later, the palace was gone and where it was located is not even known (Coda 4). The intrusion of Islam into Indonesia meant that the building of animist shrines across the landscape, the classic index of affluence, came to a halt. Existing ones fell into decline or were even removed. This loss is rarely accounted for in the discussion of the region, even though it makes attempts to get a fuller picture of the pre-Islamic world difficult to reconstruct. In this context, the nominally Islamic kingdom of Brunei on the northern coast of Borneo was able to establish itself, but its capacity was diminished by the Spanish in the Philippines and, in the nineteenth century, by various invasive British enterprises. When the British in 1848 forced the sultan to sign a treaty ceding the offshore island of Labuan to Britain, someone made a drawing of the event showing the grand loggia of the palace looking out toward the harbor. It is the only representation of the building, the actual structure having long since disappeared (Coda 5). The Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Sweet Spot went through several stages of decline and transformation. Chinese records describe its various military campaigns in the protracted attempt to exert control. One of the results was the migration of people from Guangxi in what is now the southern part of China to the mainland of Southeast Asia between the eighth and tenth centuries. In 1250, the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty was able to finally conquer the area outright, incorporating the Kingdom of Dali into the newly

CODA 4 

Candi Ceto Temple. Credit: Arterra Picture Library/Alamy.

294  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

CODA 5  The

signing of the Treaty of Labuan between the Sultan of Brunei and the British delegation on December 18, 1846 at the Brunei palace/ Alamy.

created Yunnan province. The Chinese then brought in their own people to settle there, with military campaigns across the border keeping things in check. As one scholar phrased it, the Chinese takeover of the south had the objective “to keep the entire region of Southeast Asia broken and fragmented.”5 Trade could still flow, but it was no longer possible for a local mountain kingdom to build on its imperial desires. The last inscription at My Son dates to the thirteenth century. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the Mongols invaded Burma, forcing the Bagan Empire to collapse. Temple building came to a halt and the city of some 200,000 became a small settlement. The Myinsaing Kingdom that picked up the pieces and relocated itself to Inwa more to the south did its best to keep up appearances. In 1511, the city got a new palace, but little of it remains. The Khmer in Cambodia felt the impact of the shatter zone to its north. They were also facing an ecological disaster of their own making. By the thirteenth century, they had chopped down too many trees and the sandy soil could not support the hundreds of miles of patiently and carefully constructed canals and conduits, and once those fell apart, it was increasingly difficult to keep the system together. No new major buildings were attempted after the 1280s, and when the neighboring Ayutthaya kingdom invaded in the fifteenth century, the site had already been more or less abandoned.

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  295

It would remain cloaked by the forest until the end of the nineteenth century when French naturalist Henri Mouhot “discovered” it and made the first drawings. Even today, it is only partially excavated and its complexity not fully understood (Coda 6). One of the reasons for the Chinese interest in the south was that tea had become a major part of its economy. Though tea was an ancient plant in China, it was only during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) that we see the proliferation of teahouses with the use of elegant porcelain teacups. Though the Chinese produced their own tea, mostly in the newly formed Yunnan province, tea also came to be developed by the thirteenth century in Laos and northern Thailand. For a while, these areas became the region’s nouveaux riches. Lan Na Kingdom, for example, built a small but richly endowed temple known as Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, founded in the 1380s in the forested slopes above Chiang Mai. It represents one of the last of the important architectural accomplishments in the Sub-Himalayan – YunGui Plateau Interaction zone prior to the modern age. To the south of the Lan Na Kingdom, the Sukhothai Kingdom that lasted until 1430 also was able to profit from the cross-mountain trade. The city, Sukhothai (meaning Dawn of Happiness) that had been laid out by the Khmer in the middle of the thirteenth century as a military outpost was now fitted with a palace compound and numerous Buddhist temples such as Wat Mahathat (1340s). In the early fifteenth

CODA 6  Ruins

of Ta Prom, Siem Riep, Cambodia. Photo: Marcin Konsek/ Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0.

296  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

century, the kingdom fell apart. Another kingdom sprang up further to the south, Ayutthaya, which lasted until the 1760s. By that time, it had a population perhaps of a million, making it one of the world’s largest cities. Lan Na, Sukhothai and Ayutthaya were able to thrive because they consolidated the cross-mountain trade that went north-south and east-west without direct interference from either the Chinese or colonial powers. In fact, Thailand remained quite distinctive, in that it never came to be colonialized by the Europeans (Coda 7). Meanwhile, Anuradhapura had already been abandoned in the twelfth century because of the onset of malaria that had sweeping through. Even into the nineteenth century, the area of northern Sri Lanka was largely depopulated. It is quite likely that the Chola played a role in the region’s demise. Their invasion of the island in the eleventh century was a success on paper, but the disruption in the rice paddy areas – creating large bodies of stagnant water – created or at least enhanced the malaria outbreak that weakened Sri Lanka’s economic energy.6 When the Chola retreated back to their homeland, they left the island governed by a series of small, contesting

CODA 7 

Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, Chiang Mai, Thailand. Credit: JJ Harrison.

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  297

kingdoms. The first photographs of Sri Lanka from the late nineteenth ­century show the great monuments of Anuradhapura overgrown and falling apart. In South India, in the fourteenth century, armies of the Delhi Sultanate had begun to invade and pillage South India, creating a shatter zone throughout the south. In all of this, the Vijayanagara Kingdom was able to consolidate much of the region’s pent-up energy as the site of last resistance. Its kings turned the city into a major Hindu religious center. Vijayanagara had been important to the Hindu worldview well before the fourteenth century, but with the destruction and looting of other temple cities such as those in Halebidu, Belur and Somanathapura, the Vijayanagara, for a while at least, could produce a new culture of affluence, attracting not just the refugees from other parts of the south, but merchants and traders. Domingo Paes, a trader from Portugal who came in 1522, said of the city that is as “large as Rome and very beautiful to the sight”; it is full of charm and wonder with its innumerable lakes and waterways and fruit gardens. It is “the best-provided city in the world” and “everything abounds.” The chambers of the palace were a mass of ivory, “with roses and lotuses carved in ivory at the top… It is so rich and beautiful that you would hardly find anywhere, another such.”7 Paes also describes abundant vegetation, aqueducts and artificial lake and a busy market dedicated to precious stones, comparing it to Rome. To this, he adds: Roses are sold everywhere. These people could not live without roses, and they look upon them as quite as necessary as food…. Each class of men belonging to each profession has shops contiguous the one to the other; the jewelers sell publicly in the bazaars pearls, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. In this agreeable locality, as well as in the king’s palace, one sees numerous running streams and canals formed of chiseled stone, polished and smooth.8 Vijayanagara’s astonishing architectural assemblages are sorely undervalued in the history of architecture. Think of Florence in the fifteenth century; Vijayanagara would be of comparable importance, yet few people outside of India know about it. The Vijaya Vittala Temple – dedicated to Lord Vitthala, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu – from the 1440s was not only a beautifully carved temple but had columns that became musical instruments when drummed by hand. The slender pillars that surround the pier emit different notes. When the British arrived, they were so puzzled that they cut two columns off to discover that they were not hollow as they suspected. How the columns were made and used is still a mystery. It is one of the great accomplishments of the fifteenth century, yet hardly anyone has ever heard

298  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

CODA 8  Ruins

of Vijaya Vithala Temple, Hampi, India. Credit: Prashmob/ Wikimedia Commons.

of it. The road leading to the temple was a thriving marketplace, the Vittala Bazaar, famous for horse trading (Coda 8). In 1565, it all came to an end. The Deccan sultanates of the north defeated the army of the Vijayanagara and looted and destroyed the city. The area became a much fought-over region claimed by the local chiefs as well as by the competing northern kingdoms of Hyderabad and Maratha. Today, Hampi’s main economy is tourism. Regarding the Niger River, the sub-Saharan Sweet Spot, the Songhai’s empire went into decline in the fifteenth century, and in 1590, the Saadi Sultanate based in Morocco saw its opportunity and crossed the desert to seize control of the trans-Saharan trade in salt and gold. But as is so often in cases like this (the Romans invading Dacia at the beginning of the second century CE, the Yuan Dynasty invading Indonesia in 1292, the Deccan sultanates invading Vijayanagara in 1565, etc.), the Saadi were not able to hold the territory for long, even though they did succeed in creating their own version of a shatter zone. The Pashalik of Timbuktu, though nominally independent of the Saadi Sultanate, made no significant architectural contributions to architecture. The Great Mosque of Djenné fell into ruin, as did other buildings. The first photographs show it as a stump of a building (Coda 9).

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  299

CODA 9 

The ruins of the mosque of Djenné as seen in a French postcard of c.1900, Djenné, Mali.

The weakening of the sweet spot economies in the Global South in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries meant that they were unprepared for the coming assaults that go under the various headings of colonialism, modernization, nationalization, industrialization, monotheism-ization, settler colonialism and assimilation, whether forced or unforced. The Dutch took the diamond fields in Borneo to make Amsterdam the new global center for the diamond market. Natural camphor – also from Borneo – was replaced by a manufactured product. Histories do not mention the consequences for the Borneo tribes, who were now cut off from wealth making. Amber was replaced by red bakelite, a form of plastic, and even ivory could come in artificial form. In South Africa, gold mining activity, which had been part of the economy of eastern Africa from the tenth century if not earlier, was destroyed by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century who attempted to locate and commandeer the sources.9 In South India, the business of weaving gunny bags had been a monopoly of the Goniga people of Mysore, until the British began ruling the area. The import of a chemical substitute for saltpeter (potassium nitrate) affected the Uppar community. The camel-based Tuareg who brought gold and salt to the Mediterranean have been replaced by urban entrepreneurs with big trucks, who drive across of the desert in a fraction of the time. The wealth of the Nuodeng in the highlands of what is now the Yunnan province in southwest China that derived from its salt with high potassium content, used by the Chinese for their famous glazes, came to

300  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

an end when China’s salt industry was nationalized upon Mao Zedong’s rise to power in 1949. Pepper, which had once been the prime export of South India, is now grown around the globe. The English viewed the Sri Lanka elephant as a pest and dislocated them from their traditional habitat or hunted them down so as to make way for coffee and tea plantations. Here and there, the colonizers propped up kingdoms and chiefdoms as long as they could be integrated into the power structures of the colonialists. Some of their palaces have survived, though most are now museums. In Africa today, only a few palaces are active, perhaps a dozen or so, though most, like the N’zima Kotoko royal palace in Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast, were built since the nineteenth century.10 This cumulative disenfranchisement reflects itself in the make-up of the UN. It currently consists of almost 200 nations and zero chiefdoms.11 Death by a 1,000 cuts (Coda 10). One of the first of such cuts seemed relatively innocuous at the time. In 1515, Portuguese ships arrived at Timor to buy pepper. Arab, Malaysian and even Chinese ships had been arriving there for centuries. One more ship would not change much. But as we know, it did. It was the first time an industrialized power had sent a ship to the far-distant source of a luxury commodity with an eye to monopolize its trade. Not even the Muslim Arabs who controlled the oceanic routes of the Indian sea had made such a move. They were content to remain on the coasts near their ports, using local intermediaries and marriages to make the upstream exchanges. The great Chinese fleet of Admiral Zheng He during the early fifteenth-century Ming dynasty were impressive shows of commercial strength, but no one on the fleet is recorded to have ventured inland. Nor was there any attempt to set up forts. The Europeans came with a more invasive attitude. At Timor, however, the Portuguese built a fort, brought in canon and equipment and in 1702 declared it a colony. As the centuries progressed and the strength of the new arrivals increased, a geopolitical transformation was inevitable. In the nineteenth

CODA 10 

N’zima Kotoko royal palace, Sud-Comoé, Grand-Bassam, Ivory Coast.

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  301

century, the colonial powers further enforced their reach into  the interior with their railroads. India and Africa became cyborg continents. The complex, capillary, organic systems of old were now being penetrated by a growing steely apparatus that shortened delivery time from months to days. Though this history is well known and though we no longer see this as the advancement of technology and civilization, often left out was the gradual evaporation of the world’s dark matter economy. It was not just the traders of old and their multiple connections across water and land that disappeared or that came to be reassigned according to the rules of the colonizers, but the entire – and vast – culture of interdependency that had intimate reaches into remote forests and along distant shorelines. The terms of luxury have also changed. Nowadays, luxury commodities are almost all manufactured and engineered: a watch, an automobile or airplane. Even gold and diamonds are industrial products. And as modernization becomes more pervasive, industry can bear down even on the last vestiges of nonconforming environmental conditions, pushing the residual chieftain world ever further into economic and political oblivion (Coda 11). The “theoretical” view that was created by European observers played into the narrative. In the nineteenth century, the words use to describe people who once belonged to old ways of seeing the world were primitives, savages, heathens, troglodytes and natives. The words we use today are less charged, but not without their own ideological biases: hunter-gatherers, ethnics, aboriginals and tribals, all of which embody assumptions about the superiority of states over chiefdoms, a view that was common in modernist anthropology well into the 1970s.

CODA 11 

Diagram of the Long Millennium.

302  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

The end of dark matter economies should, of course, not be interpreted as a collapse. Instead, the economy in these zones transitioned. The winners saw the change as a success, bringing governance, law, jobs, modern appliances, religion and imported food to remote communities. What did collapse, however, were the more vulnerable parts of the system, namely those cultures that had depended so exclusively on delivery, many that go under the heading today of hunter-gatherers, foragers or mountain tribes. Their decoupling from the production of affluence meant that by the time European colonial observers caught up with them in various parts of the world, most had already retreated to a simpler and more isolated lifestyle. A typical late nineteenthcentury viewpoint held that, for example, “isolated tribes each gaining their separate knowledge through means of the repeated hard knocks to which their own ignorance of the working of natural laws had rendered them liable, must have undergone the severest trials.”12 And well into the late twentieth century, economic historians were describing the economy of these worlds as “primitive” or “archaic,” reinforcing the idea that the modern, state-based capitalism was the ultimate endgame. The very term “hunter-gatherer” that came to be adopted in the 1970s seems to suggest that these people existed almost solely around the anxiety of food procurement. Perhaps we should replace that term with “forest dwelling commodity extraction experts.” Astonishingly, the forest people of Borneo – characterized still today by their government as “isolated people” – held on well in the twentieth century despite persistent intrusions from Islam (beginning in the fourteenth century CE), the Malay, the Chinese, the English, Protestant missionaries and ­plantation growers, despite the introduction of disease and opium and despite being put to global ridicule as “headhunters.” Now, miners and loggers are destroying the forest, which also obliterates the habitat of the birds on whose oracles the Borneo tribes had depended since time immemorial. Their culture is now “celebrated” in remnant, touristified longhouses.13 Religions oiled the systems of disenfranchisement. Christians are still evangelizing in African and Asia in ways that are now rarely newsworthy, dismantling the spirit world from its association with affluence. The Joshua Project maintains a vast ethnologic database to track and promote evangelism among 17,446 groups worldwide, aiming in particular to identify “unreached tribes.”14 But the accusatory fingers should not point to them alone. The attempt by Islam to reconcile tribalism with the principles of the prophet remains one of the explicit goals of the Wahhabi, followers of an Islamic religious movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), who have variously been described as austere or puritanical. Even so, the instruments of monotheism were – and remain – only the thin edge of a very big wedge that inevitably allied itself with colonialism and the nation-state. The Bamum in the Cameroon are typical. With their conversion to Islam, masquerades, usually performed in connection with calendric celebrations,

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  303

were discontinued; soon, the scepter held by the king lost its meaning. In 1933, when the Bamum came under French control, the colonial administration put all the royal objects usually hidden from public sight on public display, destroying their aura of secrecy as a way to further detach pro-­ chiefdom sentiments from their political/spiritual base.15 In fact, the museumification of so-called “anthropological artifacts” was one of the ways in which Europeans disguised de-chieftainization processes. Even recently, in 2021, a bishop in Nigeria began collecting cult objects from decommissioned local shrines. “These are cultural artifacts and nothing more.”16 Decolonialization – in its embrace by nation-states – righted many wrongs, but the difference between principles and reality was huge. In 1960, when the UN General Assembly passed the “Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,” it argued that “all peoples have the right to self-determination and independence” and that “subjugation to alien domination constitutes a serious impediment to the maintenance of international peace and security.” But it also argued that, in the manner of John Locke, a nation’s inhabitants have the “inalienable right … to the enjoyment of the natural resources of their Territories.”17 This is a basic Enlightenment era proposition where it is assumed that the word “inhabitants” implies a large group of like-minded, culturally connected people. The truth of the matter was that even if these actually existed (which was probably nowhere), they were dominated by elites who, in turn, controlled – or tried to control – resources which were often located on land of indigenous populations who were not given a say in wealth extraction. As a recent news report explains: The Penan tribe have seen logging companies, licensed by Taib Mahmud’s government, devastate huge tracts of the forests they rely on. One Penan woman told Survival, “Our land and our river have been destroyed by the logging company, by the oil palm plantation. Everything has been destroyed our sago, our fish, our river – all the jungle’s produce that we depend on has been destroyed. It brings hardship and suffering to our land.18 These globally scaled, multidimensional forces succeeded in separating “economy” from “culture,” leaving the latter as a type of booby prize of survival. “Culture” would have to find a new value into the market place of politics and capitalist interest. In South India, for example, the great deity, Murugan, began as a mythic hunter-chieftain presiding over the spirits of the hills.19 Today, his temple at the Batu Caves near Kuala Lumpur is one of Malaysia’s top attractions for tourists and devotees. But we should be under no illusion. The hope for a fully de-chieftainized world is still very much in play. In 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, building on the arguments

304  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

of none other than Georg Friedrich Hegel, remarked during a state visit to Senegal that: The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history…They have never really launched themselves into the future…. The African peasant only knew the eternal renewal of time, endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words… In this realm of fancy …there is neither room for human endeavor nor the idea of progress.20 Efforts at containment and management use code words like progress, poverty amelioration and literacy campaigns. Today, few would argue that these concepts along with law, constitutionality and incarceration are the instruments of neutrality that they are made out to be, but their fundamental position within the power regimes of modernity is not going to be challenged. But the view back in time is now often one of strategic nostalgia to an age of presumed greatness often constructed through national museums and ethnographic installations and reinforced through political clichés.21 In many places around the world, entire museums are dedicated to reenacting premodern village life. Heritage is now an “industry” all unto itself. Modernity, however, is a guiltless teleology of conquest. The very word modernity already suggests that the battle is already over, even if here and there unfinished. In reality, it is unfinishable. Residues of the sweet sport worlds, with all their troubles, fanfares and illusions, permeate the cultural landscape of contemporary life. The inefficiencies of colonialism, of the nation-state, of conversion and even of modernization have given certain areas the time and space to survive, even if in altered, modified and marginalized form. But where modernity has been most successful was in hastening the destruction of the dark matter economy. If that world at the end of the first millennium was defined by a complex interblending of people and agencies, of ancestral spirits and divine prognosticators, of sacred springs and dance platforms, of millionaire lakes and stupendous architectural productions, the economic world of today, though not without its own claims to complexity, seems by comparison quite simple. The problem we face as scholars is that our tools of understanding are not suited to that ancient world. We separate things that were once bound together: economy and devotionalism, power and landscape, hunter-gatherers and global trade. When it comes to domestic architecture, we tend to box it into categories like “tradition” and “vernacular.” When we talk about monumental architecture, we talk about “UNESCO sites” and their abstract value to “the history of humanity.” What I have tried to argue is that we have to see the sweet spot worlds and their dark matter economies at the end of the first millennium CE as a horizon unto itself, one that was – or that least tried to be – outside the military and even theoretical reach of the urban, bureaucracy and river-based

Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts  305

empires. As cultural/economic continuums, they were permeable to some degree by traders, but they were designed to be mostly inaccessible to outsiders. The nonnormative nature of the ecology helped, as did distance, but so too the formidable internal cultures of palace-based chiefdoms and kingdoms that fronted for the more remote tribes that they controlled or tried to control. When the system worked in certain places and in certain periods, it set itself in a position where its place in the global exchange of luxury commodities was nothing less than foundational. The results were not always spelled out architecturally in great works. If only the rivers, lakes, mountains and ancestral shrines and tombs had ledgers. And yet, there can be no doubt that by whatever means, this was a world that produced some of the most impressive architectural works of the time. Many of these are now duly appreciated and many are even preserved or rebuilt, but as I have been trying to emphasize, these are just bones without flesh, our appreciation itself a symptom of guiltless modernity. Notes 1 Ben Kiernan, Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Time to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 177. 2 Jennifer Westwood, On Pilgrimage: Sacred Journeys Around the World (Santa Monica, CA: Hidden Spring; 2002), 78. 3 G. Labuda Słowiańszczyzna starożytna i wczesnośredniowieczna. Antologia tekstów źródłowych (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskiego PTPN & Wydawnictwo Sorus, 1999), 179. 4 As in so many places around the world, the splitting of culture from economy has allowed “culture” to become recalibrated in recent years by ethnographic ­nostalgia that in the case of the “Vikings” runs the spectrum from scientific reconstruction to right-wing neo-pagan radicalism. 5 Maung Htin Aung, A History of Burma (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 83. 6 The Chinese developed a cure for malaria out of Qinghao, the Chinese name for Artemisia annua L., also known as sweet wormwood. Today, it is the basis for the drug artemisinin. But how widely this cure was distributed in South Asia is not known. It was certainly expensive and so not used for broad populations. 7 Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar): A Contribution to the History of India (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1900), 265, 266. 8 Ibid., 136. 9 Duncan Miller, Nirdev Desai, and Julia Lee-Thorp, “Indigenous Gold Mining in Southern Africa: A Review,” Goodwin Series 8 (December 2000): 91. 10 These include Mugaba royal palace located at Kamukuzi hill in Mbarara city, Uganda, built in the 1950s; the royal palace of the Emir of Bauchi emirate in Bauchi state, Nigeria, built at the end of the nineteenth century; the royal palace at Grand Bassam for King of Nzima Kotoko people of Ivory Coast and Ghana and others. Studies of any of these buildings from an architectural history point of view are nonexistent. 11 The various chiefdoms that still exist in Africa are all subsumed into a nationstate. There are even about 100 or so kings. Some have regular day jobs, some are figureheads, some participate in governmental affairs, but are all framed by nation-states. In diagrammatic terms, the long first millennium that saw the

306  Coda: Death by a Thousand Cuts

chieftain ascendancy was followed by a short millennium that saw its destruction, at least in political and economic terms. See the wonderful photographic essay: Daniel Lainé, African Kings (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2000). 12 William Elliot Marshall, A Phrenologist Amongst the Todas, Or, The Study of a Primitive Tribe in South India History, Character, Customs, Religion, Infanticide, Polyandry, Language (London: Spottiswoode and Co., 1873), 101. 13 For an excellent study, see Lars Kaskija, Images of a Forest People Punan Malinau  – Identity, Sociality, and Encapsulation in Borneo (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2012). 1 4 https://joshuaproject.net. 15 Christraud Geary, “Bamum Thrones and Stools,” African Arts 14, no. 4 (August 1981): 33. 16 Seun Sanni, “Nigerian Priest Saves Traditional Artefacts from Christian Converts,” Reuters (December 1, 2021) https://www.reuters.com/world/africa. 17 For a discussion, see Hollis W. Barber, “Decolonization: The Committee of Twenty- Four,” World Affairs 138, no. 2 (Fall 1975): 128–151. 18 “Borneo Tribes: 30-Year Regime ‘Has Destroyed Everything’” (March 24, 2011) (Accessed June 2, 2021). http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/7111. 19 Fred W. Clothey, The Many Faces of Murukan: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God (New Delhi: Pvt Ltd., 1978), 36. 20 Diade Ba, “Africans Still Seething Over Sarkozy Speech,” Reuters (September 5, 2007). 21 See: Mark Jarzombek, “The Identitarian Episteme: 1980s and the Status of Architectural History,” in After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research, eds. Helene Frichot, Gunnar Sandin, and Bettina Schwalm (London: Actar Publishers, 2018): 99–109.

INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abu-Lughod, Janet: Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 4 Abu’-Mawahib dynasty 271 Adam of Bremen 155, 290; Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg 290; Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum 290 administered trade 198n1 affluence 2, 5–7, 8n5, 8n6, 38, 41, 43, 59, 60, 90, 92, 93, 119, 120, 125, 146, 173, 183, 188, 190, 192, 197, 209, 229, 265, 277n12, 293, 297, 302; dark matter 23–32; Sri Lanka 78–79; zones of 5 Africa 4, 18; Atlantic coast of 178; and Bantu 38, 170; bead culture in 183; chiefdoms 306n11; dance in 243; palaces 260, 265, 283, 300; ports in 53; Portuguese colonialization of 187; southern savannas of 143; vodun 189 African slaves 29, 54 Africanus, Leo: Descrittione dell’Africa 59 agarwood 40–45, 40, 41, 48n12, 98, 111, 118, 129, 132, 133, 289 Agbeni Shango shrine 223

agriculture 132, 167, 180, 191; and extraction 82; large-scale/ hegemonically controlled 38; normative ecology of 168; and palace-based chiefdoms 33n8; Roman 193 Agro-industrialized civilizations 175 Aksumite Kingdom 136 Al-Bakri 22n15, 24; Kitāb alMasālik wa-al-Mamālik 22n15 Alexander the Great 167–168, 177 Alkas 213 Al-Masʿūdī 202 Almeida, Ma de 137 Al-Tartushi 160 Al-Tuedjinto, Ishak 19, 30 Al-Zuhri, Ibn Shihab 14 amber 3, 46, 53, 113, 150–155, 299; Amber Trail 152; and Bagan 125; beads 155; Burmese 125, 126; and Christian Europe 155; cross-border trade of 150; exotic Baltic 125; hunting for 151; map of amber route during Roman times 153; Roman era amber rings 154 Amber Trail 152 Anawrahta, king of Bagan Empire 125

308 Index

ancestrality 2; and chiefly power 192; and earth and community 192; and grove 192 Angkor Wat temple 129, 246, 256 anthropological artifacts 303 anthropology 5, 7, 9n7, 33n8, 301 Arabian Nights 40 Aretas IV, Nabatean King 236 “The Artist of the Chief Mourner” 180, 181 The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Scott) 5 Asoka, Maurya Emperor 171 atectonic institutionality 193 Augustus, Vespasianus 67, 74, 80n4 autoimmune system 279 Ayutthaya kingdom 294 Bagan Empire 125, 294 Bahuma 214 Bambandyanalo 143–145, 161 bambuta 212 Bantu 170; Bambandyanalo 143; ethnic groups 212; farmers 148n13; kingdoms 143; language 142; people 4, 38, 143, 219 Barth, Heinrich 26 Battuta, Abu Abdallah ibn 15, 67, 181, 225 Beccari, Odoardo 104 Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (AbuLughod) 4 Belinga, Samuel 188 Belitung shipwreck 179 Belkusi 245 Benedict, Laura Watson 181 Bengal Sultanate 126 “Benin – Kings and Rituals” exhibition 263 Benjamin, Criag: The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria 8n2 Benjamin of Tudela 51 Beowulf 231–232 bezoar stones 96, 97, 97 Bhadravarman, King of Champa 42 birds nests 3, 5, 99–102, 99, 106n13, 106n24, 107n28 Birmingham, David 148n17 Bloom, Jonathan 22n20 Bombay Devadasi Protection Act 248n15

Book of the Dead 215 Borneo 29, 36, 95–105, 105n4, 114, 184, 194; bezoar stones 97; camphor 179, 299–300; camphor hunters in 62; forest cultures 96; forest peoples in 183, 203, 302; gold and diamonds from 98, 203, 289, 299; longhouse on 103, 182; long-tailed monkeys 96; Magellan expedition landed in 182–183, 280; remote rain forests of 56 Borneo Company 99 Bornu Empire 280 Bowring, John 106n21 Brahma 44 Brahmaputra River 121, 124 Brahmin-Hinduism 170 Brahminism 93n1 Buddhism 119, 139, 170, 215, 256 Bulgars 156 bulk goods networks (BGNs) 65n44 Campbell, Colonel W. 72 camphor 1, 4, 5, 36, 41, 5, 51, 56, 58, 61–63, 61, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105, 111, 112, 178–180, 184, 205, 289, 299 Catalan Atlas 14, 20 Cato the Elder 193 ceremonial dance 198n16, 245 Chanchhaya Pavilion 276 Charles V of France 21n1 Chase-Dunn, Christopher 65n44 Chew Bahir Basin 141, 141 Chi-chang Em 253 chiefdom(s) 33n8; complex 33n8; confederation 33n8; corporate 33n8; diamorphic 33n8; maximum 33n8; palace-centric 260; pristine 33n8; secondary 33n8; simple 33n8; societies 258n5; supercomplex 33n8 chieftain geographies 201–208 Chi-li Em 253 China 1, 4–5, 118–119, 121–122, 179; Buddhism in 111; cowries, used in 126; Mongolian conquest of 37; Muslim Arabs in 57; palace craft specialists in 46; porcelain, exports of 179; shipping lanes between India and 34; tax revenue in 75

Index  309

Chongsheng Temple 120 Christianity 94n10, 139 Christianization 161, 290 Chung-chang 253 Cilappatikāram 52 cinnamon 1, 39, 45, 52, 53, 67, 72, 78, 81n17, 86, 92, 110, 203, 289 Circassians 192 Claessen, Henri J. M. 252 Clapperton, Hugh 176, 280 Clifford, Miles 273 Coedes, George 97, 100–101; The Indian Ocean in World History 101; The Making of South East Asia 101 Coillard, François 282 Colson, E. 220 complex chiefdom 33n8 Conti, Nicolo di 45 corporate chiefdom 33n8 cowries 110, 122, 126–129, 127, 133, 134n17, 143, 193 craft: craft-based economies 46; refinements 29; specialization in chiefdom societies 258n5 Cresques, Abraham 21n1 Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 174n14 Criton of Heraclea 150 Cross-cultural Trade in World History (Curtin) 8n1 cross-ecological delivery economies 34–47 cross-ecological systems 63 cross-polity: systems of exchange 63; interactions 8n4 cultural cubism 173 cultures 305n4; Pre-Colombian Mayan 252; Przeworsk 152; Scandinavian 189 Curtin, Philip D. 8n1, 32n4; Crosscultural Trade in World History 8n1 Dalfovo, Albert Titus 225 Dalton, George 28 dance 229–247; ceremonial 198n16, 245; Karagaattam 239 dance-enjoyment 240; see also Rangabhoga Dapper, Olfert 146 dark matter affluence 23–32 dark matter economy 2–4, 7, 9n7, 27– 29, 31, 39, 138, 176, 184, 187, 206, 218, 235, 301, 302, 304

Dazel, Archibald 268 death 62, 73, 99, 189–190, 192 decolonialization 303 Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg (Adam of Bremen) 290 delivery mechanisms 2 De Rebus Bellicis (On the Things of Wars) 168 Descrittione dell’Africa (Africanus) 59 Devadasis 240–241, 248n15 devotionalism 2, 247, 304 devotional labor 252 Dewi Danu 257 Dewi Sri 256 diamonds 1, 4, 45, 52, 75, 83, 98, 183, 297, 299, 301 diamorphic chiefdom 33n8 Dietler, Michael 232 Diocletian, Emperor 81n19 disproportionate grandeur 252 downstream relationships 8n4 drums 282–283 Dumarçay, Jacques 270 Dutch colonial government 284 Dutugemunu, King of Anuradhapura Kingdom 76 Du Zhong 106n11 East African Coastal Sweet Spot 135–147 East India Company 191 Ebele Ejaunu 275 ecology 2, 180, 289 economic circulatory system 1 Egyptians 168, 175, 242, 243 Elison, William 226 Elizabeth I 219 Emir Abu Bakr 41 Empire of Chola 173 Empire of Mali 173 Enlightenment 32n4, 303; historiography 172 entrepreneurial feasts 232 Epic of Sundiata 20, 266 Eucommia bark 106n11 Eucommia ulmoides 106n11 European colonialists 116 European Palaces 260 Everett, A. H. 98 extraction 35, 45, 46, 61, 63, 70, 73, 82, 100, 118, 122, 178, 207, 289 Fasséké, Balla 266 Fatimid period 141

310 Index

feasts 19, 30, 229–247, 247n1, 250; boisterous 234; communal 179, 229; entrepreneurial 232; huge distribution 154; Hunnic 230; in nomadic worlds 230; patronrole 232; for Vikings 230, 232; village 229 feathers 2, 3, 14, 46, 73, 110, 118, 130, 133, 135, 180 Finer, Samuel: History of Government 277n12 “fire-repelling pearls” 111 First Society people 175 Flavian dynasty 74 Fled Bricrenn (Bricriu’s Feast) 231 Frobenius, Leo 223 fur 1, 39, 155–156, 158, 160, 162n17; trade 156 Gable, Eric 211 Geertz, Clifford 279 Geography (Strabo) 195 German Limes 169 Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum (Adam of Bremen) 290 Giant Rocks of Singida 219, 220 gift labor 252 Gimbutas, Marija 152 Glele, King of Dahomey 268 glesum 151 god-shelf 222 gold 1, 2, 5, 14, 15, 19–21, 23, 24, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38–40, 44, 46, 46, 52, 53, 61, 67, 75, 77, 79, 91, 97, 98, 100–103, 105n5, 107n28, 110, 113, 122, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 135, 138, 143–146, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 165, 176, 177, 183, 194, 195, 201–203, 205, 231, 242, 282, 285, 289, 293, 298, 299, 301 Golden Bog of Cullen 194 governmental zones 169 Grant, James August 283 Gray, Richard 148n17 Great Benin; its Customs, Art and Horrors 264 “Great Chronicle” 76 Great Wall of China 169 Great Works 250–258; and prestige 257 Greece 55–56, 74, 195, 199n24, 217, 229

Greeks 3, 55, 84, 87–88, 168, 177–178, 213–214, 230; intermediaries 175 Gregory of Tours 193 Grierson, Philip James Hamilton 202 groves: ancestrality and 192; sacred 191, 199n24 Guezo, King of Dahomey 268 Guyer, Jane 188 “habitually criminal forest-folk” 171 Hadrian’s Wall 169, 193 Hall, Thomas D. 65n44 Hamengku Buwana, Sultan 284 Han dynasty 168, 253 Haniwa 251 al-Hasan ibn Sulaiman, Sultan of Kilwa Kisiwani 271–272 Hegel, Georg Friedrich 304 henna 22n15 Herodotus 31 “hill Pandārams” 172 Hinduism 72, 87, 90, 285 Hindu kingdom of Travancore 267 Hiram, King of Tyre 254 Histoire ancienne des états hindouisés d’Extreme-Orient 100 Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (Magnus) 290 History of Government (Finer) 277n12 Hiuen Tsiang 70–71, 78 Holy Quran see Koran honey 60, 61, 99, 101, 118, 155, 171–173 Hopkins, Terence K. 47n4 horse trade 122–123 Huffman, Thomas 272 Hunnic feast 230 hunter-gatherers 4–5, 175, 301, 302 Husuni Kubwa 272 Ibn al-Khatib 21 Ibn Fadlan 156 Ibn Ḥawqal 23 Ibn Khaldun 19 Ibn Khordadbeh 41 India 1, 13, 53–57; ancient Brahman tradition 111; and China 121– 123; gods of 44; Roman-Indian trade 75; sacred areas in 88; shipping lanes between China and 34 The Indian Ocean in World History (Coedes) 101

Index  311

Indian pearl fishery 94n9 Indonesian Seaway 108–116; and collapse of trans-Asiatic Silk Route 112; diagram of 109; Indonesian Seaway Sweet Spot 109, 292; and Japan 111–112; and regional conflict 112 Indonesian Seaway Sweet Spot 109, 292 Indus Valley civilization 66 information networks (INs) 65n44 institutionality: atectonic 193; institutions without 187–198 institutions without institutionality 187–198 Iravi Varma Kulasekhara Perumal 267 Irrawaddy River 123, 176 Ise Shrine 255 Ishanavarman, King 129 Iskandar Muda, Sultan of Aceh 254 Islamic empires 161 Islamic nobility 155 ivory 1, 4, 38, 45, 56, 71, 81n19, 135–138, 142–147, 176, 187, 299, 300 jade 3, 3, 4, 99, 110, 165 Jankowiak, Marek 156–157 Jayavarman VII, King of Khmer Empire 245 Jianzhen (Chinese monk) 111 Johnston, Harry H. 196 Julio-Claudian dynasty 74 kami house shrines 222 Karagaattam folk dance 239 Karikala, Chola King 254 Karpuradvipa (Camphor Island) see Borneo Kashyapa I, King of Sri Lanka 79 Kaup 152 Keita, Sundiata 13, 20, 24 Keller, Christian 157 Kenyatta, Jomo 212 Khan, Kublai 292 kibulu 269–270 Kimek–Kipchak confederation 162n17 King, Anya H. 57 Kingdom of Bagan 125 Kingdom of Dali 118, 293 Kingdom of Kamarupa 125 Kingdom of Kush 135 Kingdom of Nanzhao 118, 121 Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (AlBakri) 22n15

Kopytoff, Igor 211 Koran 20, 58, 245 Kothari, Komal 216 kuomboka 287 kylikes 230 Lalibela, Ethiopia 138–141 landscape potency 2 Lattimore, Owen 38 Laws (Plato) 168 Lewanika, Lozi King of Barotseland 282 Limba of Sierra Leone 196 Limpopo River 144 Lingaparvata (Linga Mountain) 117 Lithuania 152, 156 Litunga 286 Livingstone, David 283 llaveyiniyar 172 llyn Cerrig Bach (England) 194 lobster 180 Locke, John 44, 303 long-distance trade 175, 201 Lugian Federation 152 Lugnasad 229 luminous moon pearls 108 Ma Duanlin 129 Magellan 98, 182, 280 Magnus, Olaus: Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus 290 Mahābhārata 40 Majapahit Kingdom 256 The Making of South East Asia (Coedes) 101 malabathrum 86–87, 94n13 Maldive cowries 129, 133 Malkki, Liisa 173n3 Mamallapuram shrines 215 Manguin, Pierre-Yves 114 Mao Zedong 300 Mapungubwe Kingdom 143 Marcellinus, Ammianus 44 Marco Polo 81n30, 225 market exchange 8n6 Marsden, William 262 Mataram Kingdom 214 Mattiussi 293 maximum chiefdom 33n8 Mbuambua 270 megarons 230 Mekong River 118, 130, 133, 276 Mesopotamians 168 Michels, Joseph W. 252 Middle Ages 155

312 Index

migratory forest people 5 Ming Dynasty 59, 99, 300 Mitchell, Timothy 173n1, 173n3 modernist anthropology 301 monarchy 33n8 Mongolian Yuan Dynasty 293 Monivong, King of Cambodia 276 “the most outlying lands” 51–63 Mouhot, Henri 295 Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab 302 Munza, King of Mangbetu people 243, 243 Musa I 13–21 musk 3, 53, 56–59, 58, 63, 72, 73, 98, 111 al-Mustansir, Imam 142 Mutapa Kingdom 146 Muteesa I, King of the Buganda 283 Myanmar 70, 125, 181, 185n15, 213, 218 Myinsaing Kingdom 294 mysterium tremendum 192 Nandi Shrine 240 Nan zhou yi wu zhi (Wa Zhen) 41 nature spirits 222 Nestor, Homeric King 229 Niger River Sweet Spot 161 night-illuminating pearls 111 night-shining pearls 108 nitsunono 190 nomadic association 148n17 non-governmental oraganizations (NGOs) 245 Norodom, King of Cambodia 276 North Africa 73, 160 Northern Song period 184 North Sea Latitude Sweet Spot 150–161 Oberg, Kalervo 33n8 oceanic systems 6 O’Connor, Richard A. 172 omens 84, 103–104, 192, 252, 270 Opoku, Albert M. 244 Oran 192 outlying lands 51–63 paddy irrigation 256 Padmanabhapuram Palace 267, 267 Paes, Domingo 297 palace-centric chiefdoms 260 “palace polities” 277n12 palace universes 260–276 Pallava Dynasty 113, 173

Palmer, Richmond 273 Pancha Rathas or Five Rathas competition 88 Panembahan Senopati 214 Pantheon (Rome) 238, 238 Parantaka Chola I 87 Pashalik of Timbuktu 298 patron-role feasts 232 Paulina, Lollia 74 pearls 1, 3, 36, 52, 53, 68, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 84, 87, 94n9, 100, 103, 108, 110–113, 122, 129, 165, 177, 179, 180, 203, 297 pepper 3, 52, 53, 66, 67, 72, 73, 84, 84, 86, 87, 110, 181, 203, 204, 205, 289, 300 The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea 53, 86, 136, 175 Periya Tirumoli 52 Pesaren, Truna 256 Phoenicians 254 Plague of Justinian 138 Plains Indians 198n16 Plato: Laws 168 Plautus (Greek playwright) 43 Pliny the Elder 43–44, 72, 75, 154 Plutarch of Chaeronea 167 poetic landscapes 171 Polanyi, Karl 198n1 political-military networks (PMNs) 65n44 porcelain 179–181 Port of Martaban 185n15 Portuguese 94n10; and African trade 183; colonialization of Africa 187; junco 114; in Sri Lanka 80n9; in Timor 300 Porus, ancient Indian king 177 prasada 264 Pre-Colombian Mayan cultures 252 Prempeh I, King of Ashanti Empire 265 prestige 29, 57, 59, 122, 146, 187; and dark matter economy 235; economy 2, 7; and entrepreneurial feast 232; goods 187–189, 206, 229; and Great Works 257; as multidimensional/ multi-temporal force 188; and power 187–188; systems 28 prestige goods networks (PGNs) 65n44 Price, David 273 Price, Neil 158 Priscus 230

Index  313

pristine chiefdom 33n8 Prophet Muhammad 17, 58, 244 Prussians 155 Przeworsk Culture 152 Pulau Indra Sakti 270 Pura Beji Sangsit, Bali 256, 257 Purananuru 52 pura subak 256 Pura Ulun Danu Batur 257 Pyrard de Laval, François 60 Qianxun Pagoda 120 Qinghao 305n6 quasi-discrete bodies 9n7 Raffield, Ben 158 Raja Marong Maha Podisat, King of Kedah, Malaysia 270 Rama V, King of Thailand 280 Ramayana 78 Rangabhoga 240; see also dance-enjoyment Rashidun Caliphate 138 Rashtrakutas 57 Reade, William Winwood 262 reciprocity 8n6, 230 redistribution 8n6, 206 regional trade 26, 201 Reid, Anthony 188 rice 37, 41, 42, 52, 54, 60–63, 66, 68–70, 79, 82, 83, 88, 92, 95, 100, 101, 103–105, 117, 118, 120–122, 125, 128–132, 142, 170, 176, 178, 222, 247, 250, 251, 256, 296 Richard, Francois G. 29 Rig Veda 53 risk management 2, 100 ritual 83, 216; bathing 93n1; divinatory 291; female ritual specialists 265; functions 266; misdemeanors 190; obligations 100, 216; and palace culture 280; purification 256; scarifices 31; sites 152, 154; and Vimose (Denmark) 194; Yadnya Kasada 197 Roberts, Allen 170 rob wayfarers 171 rock crystal 77, 86, 140–142, 142 rock-cut technique 139 Rock Edict 171 Roman Empire 74–75, 97, 155, 168, 175 Roman Forum 150

Romans 150, 152, 155, 168, 175, 183, 192, 212 roses 17, 19, 22n15, 51, 86, 135, 297 Royal Drummers of Burundi 283 Rügen 291, 292 sacred groves 191, 199n24 Sahel 20, 143 salt 15–17, 20, 23, 45, 102, 107n28, 112, 122, 123, 123, 143, 159, 172, 176, 181, 298–300 sandalwood 51–53, 58, 73, 205 Sangam Landscape 171 Sang Hyang Guru 284 Sanjaya Dynasty 256 Sarkozy, Nicolas 303 Saxo Grammaticus 291 Scandinavian cultures 189 Schneider, Jane 47–48n4 sciurus vulgaris 155 Scott, James C. 5, 169; The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia 5 secondary chiefdom 33n8 sedentarist metaphysics 173n3 segmentary state 33n8 semangat 188–189 Senwosret II 242 Shaka kaSenzangakhona, ruler of Zulu kingdom 265 shatter zone 145, 169, 293, 294, 297, 298 Sheikh al-Kaneimi, Sultan 280 Shintoism 215, 222 Shiva 44, 90, 129 Shone, William 219 Shortt, John 191, 240 shrine-intensified landscapes 218 shrine landscapes 211–227, 250 shrines 7, 18, 27, 30, 216; ancestor 211, 272, 305; animist 221, 293; destiny 272; as dynamic places 216; earth 272; exquisite/rockcut cave 78; forest 15; house 213, 218; humble spirit 217; interactional agents of 216; kami house 222; medicine 272; and monotheism 221; mountaintop 236; in Mumbai 226; Nat Shrines 125–126; outdoor 214; of the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia 220; rock-cut representations of 215; sacred

314 Index

236; soothsayers or diviners’ 272; Vaishnava 52; village 218 silent trade 14, 21n5, 201–203, 206, 289 Silk Route 4, 124, 169, 174n7, 179 silphium 43 Sima Qian 168 simple chiefdom 33n8 Sisowath, King of Cambodia 243 skill-based labor 252 slave labor 135, 252–254 slavery/slave trade 2, 32n4, 114, 147, 156, 157, 225 Song Dynasty 57, 113, 295 South Africa 30, 299 South India 45, 52, 66, 74; Delhi Sultanate invading 297; Kakatiyas dynasty 57; Karagaattam folk dance 239; kingdoms 88–89; Mamallapuram shrines 215; port cities in 80n2 South India – Sri Lanka Sweet Spot 83 Southwest Silk Route 121 Speke, John Hanning 31, 262, 263, 283 “spheres of interaction” 6 spiritual potency 58 Spring Jasmine 245 squirrel furs 162n17 Sri Kesari Warmadewa 256 Sri Ksetra 121–122 Sri Lanka 97, 100, 110–111, 250–251, 296–297; affluence 78–79; Buddhism 70; Buddhists in 68, 88, 121; as center of easy money 67; chiefdoms 33n11, 80n7; Chola invading 87; Cinnamomum verum 67; early chiefdoms 80n7; early traders to 72; elites 78; gem mining in 68; kingdomization of 70; pearl fisheries in 87; pearl fishery 94n9; Portuguese landed in 80n9; wealth rush 66–80 Stanley, Henry M. 262, 262, 283 Strabo 74; Geography 195 structural asymmetries 175–184 St. Winefride’s Well, England 219–220, 221 Sub-Himalayan – Yungui Plateau Sweet Spot 117–133, 121, 293; see also Southwest Silk Route Suetonius, Governor of England 221 sulfur 3, 36, 45

supercomplex chiefdom 33n8 Susneyos, Emperor 137 Suvaṇṇabhumī 105n4 Swahili 142, 143, 147, 271 sweet spot systems 5–6, 23–32, 170, 173, 251, 260 symbolic labor 252 Tacitus, Cornellius 152, 221 Taib Mahmud, Abdul 303 Taizu, Emperor of Northern Song dynasty 179 Tamil animist religious practices 93n1 Tang dynasty 124, 185n15 Tapper, Richard 169 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 83 tea 122, 124, 124, 125, 133, 178, 181, 295, 300 tekton 193 temple dances 240 temple-water system 255 temple women 248n14 Tenggerese Hindus 197 Theodosius II, Emperor of Constantinople 230 Thierry, Solange 246 Throne Hall 276 tianxia 168, 171 Tiberius, Emperor 75, 80n4 The Times 221 Tirta Empul 256 Tomb of Askia Muhammad I 25, 25 Tonle Sap River 276 Trajan, Roman emperor 150 tribute/tax labor 252 Trokosi Festival 224–225 tsuono 190 Twelfth Dynasty 242 Tzfi-ch’iao Em 253 UNESCO 268, 304 “The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige Is Ruining Your Life” 187 upstream relationships 8n4 urbanization 66, 80n2 Valdemar I, Danish king 291 Vat Phou 117, 118, 133n1 Vedas 97–98 Vendel Period 155 “Versailles: Kings and Rituals” 263 Vihear Suor 276 Vijaya Vittala Temple 297

Index  315

Vikings 155, 157–159, 161, 188, 193, 230, 305n4 Vishnu 44, 84, 90, 117, 118, 257, 297 vodun 189

Wilding, Richard 141 William Henry Furness III 194 Wolf, Eric 205 Woodburn, James 201 Woodward, Richard B. 268

Wahhabi 302 Walker, H. Wilfrid 100 Wallerstein, Immanuel 47–48n4 Wang Gungwu 110 water-repelling pearls 111 Wat Mahathat 295 Wat Phra That Doi Suthep 295 Wa Zhen: Nan zhou yi wu zhi 41 West Africa 244 Western gaze 227n1

xylophone 266 Yuan dynasty 292 The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria (Benjamin) 8n2 Zeitlyn, David 5 Zhao Rugua (Chao Ju-kua) 123 Zheng He 300