Center and surrounding villages were home to perhaps 10,000 people, many of whom probably labored for decades to construct the complex. To build the great cone itself they had to pile up some 3,500,000 cubic feet of clay. Nearby, in the linear layout typical of earlier sites, they raised a number of huge earthen platforms using different colors of clay — red, yellow, and purple — to face the sides, which were buttressed with wood and cut stone. On the platforms they erected temples with walls of cane or wattle and daub, and floors of colored clays. Spacious plazas stretched out from the temples and were adorned with stone altars, large stone bas-reliefs, and, of course, the colossal heads.
Olmec society at this time may have directly influenced the lives of some 350,000 Mesoamericans, most of them common folk who in the tropical climate probably wore only minimal clothing, perhaps cotton breechcloths. The men of the ruling elite, their retainers, and the merchants and artisans of La Venta and other centers sometimes wore breechcloths that formed short skirts, held in place by belts, and occasionally donned tunics or mantles. Women wore only skirts and belts. Clothes were made of cotton and other vegetable fibers, such as those of a cactus called the century plant. On ceremonial occasions, most of the citizens wore simple turbans; in contrast, priests and chiefs sported extraordinarily complicated headdresses apparently fabricated of cloth and leather over frameworks of reed and held on their heads by chin straps. Some instead wore straw hats decorated with tassels or hanging beads, which perhaps represented seeds.
Indeed, the Olmecs paid much more attention to adornment than to their basic clothing. They wore ornaments of jade and other colored stones, and they pierced their earlobes and the septums of their noses to wear intricately carved jade earrings and beaded, tubular nose pins. They also loved bracelets, anklets, necklaces, and pendants. Olmec artisans produced articles decorated with both abstract and extremely realistic motifs, including parts of the human body — hands, legs, fingers, ears — the jaws of animals, and the tails of stingrays. The priests and chiefs wore as pendants concave magnetite mirrors, remarkable pieces of precision-polished stonework. The wearers may have used the concave mirrors to start fires in ritual ceremonies by focusing the rays of the sun, a trick that would certainly have left the populace impressed with their leaders' magical powers.
This vase of terra-cotta, crafted in the Olmec style around the year 1000 BC, may represent a shaman performing a ritual somersault intended to magical-iy transform him into a jaguar. The vessel contained liquid, which could be poured from an opening in the left knee. Priests may have used the vase for libations offered during ceremonies honoring the rain god or some agricultural deity.
The Olmec elite possessed other special skills and knowledge that in all probability were not understood by the masses. They knew enough about astronomy to calculate the length of the year and the lunar month, and to devise the first calendar in the Americas, which was most likely as accurate as any in use elsewhere during the period. The calendar enabled priests and chiefs to schedule seasonal ceremonies and to direct farmers in the timing of agricultural activities, abilities that doubtless enhanced the leaders' power over their subjects. The Olmecs could keep chronological track of more than just the passing year: Like
That of the later Maya, their calendar measured time in a continuous count from some seminal occurrence in the distant past, perhaps the birth of the gods. They memorized the dates of significant events, enabling them to pass on to future generations a chronological ly correct sequence of their history. The importance of this form of calendar — which people in the twentieth century AD would take for granted — can be seen by comparing the Olmec dating system to that used by the Aztecs a millennium and a half later. The Aztecs did not use what scholars would one day call the "long count" of the Olmecs and could ascribe dates only within a fifty-two-year cycle, which was as extensive a period as their calendar covered. It was as if modern people could differentiate between years but not between centuries: Would "It happened in '49" mean 1949, 1849, or even 1549?
Obviously the Olmecs could not maintain a calendar without some system of writing and numbering. Like the ancient Egyptians, they used pictorial symbols, but they did not leave many examples of their hieroglyphs for scholars of the future to study, probably because most of their inscriptions were carved into wood that rotted away in the humid heat when the jungles eventually reclaimed Olmec land.
While that conquest by nature would not be complete for another 700 years or so, the Olmec world began to crumble much sooner. The ceremonial center at Copalillo was abandoned around 600 BC. Two centuries later. La Venta, like San Lorenzo before it, was deliberately and violently demolished; twenty-four of its forty, major monuments were mutilated and ritually buried, perhaps by vengefully triumphant rebels. A complex at a site later named Tres Zapotes apparently somehow escaped destruction, and Olmecs hung on there until about 200 BC. But they were a faded reflection of their vigorous, glorious ancestors. They ceased to produce colossal heads and reduced their ambitions to mere commercial enterprise, living off the old trade routes and the Olmec reputation for fine crafts.
As the Chavm culture had for Peru, the Olmec society served as a foundation upon which other Mesoamerican civilizations would build. The Maya adopted and improved the Olmec calendar; they also developed Olmec hieroglyphs into a more flexible, mixed semantic-phonetic script. And the Aztecs, who many hundreds of years later established an immense military-mercantile empire in Mexico, would write poetry about a legendary "land of rain and mist" called Tamoan-chan on the eastern sea. There, long before the founding of the Aztec capital, "in a certain era, which no one can reckon, which no one can remember, there was a government for a long time." Tamoanchan might have been the name that the Olmecs gave to their land.
Though desolate and covered with weeds, neither Copalillo nor La Venta ever lost its significance as a holy shrine. For centuries, through all the civilizations that followed, the Indians in the mountains of southwestern Mexico and the jungles of the Gulf Coast traveled to the sites, bringing with them their offerings, now in a Maya, now in an Aztec, now in a colonial vessel. Even in the twentieth century, archeologists examining the ruins would observe Indians coming in the night to make their offerings and pray in ancient tongues. These worshipers may not even have known they were praying to strange, forgotten gods who were once the secret forces behind a great civilization that never discovered the wheel, never harnessed a beast of burden, never codified a system of laws on stone or paper, but endured for a thousand years. -
1500 BC
1400 BC
1300 BC
1200 BC
1100 BC
Assyria becomes a vassal of the Mitanni for eighty years.
Hittite king Suppiluliuma I creates an empire that includes most of Asia Minor.
Under Adad-narari I and his son Shalmaneser I, Assyria expands into an internationally recognized power.
Long-standing hostilities between the Hittites and the Egyptians erupt into the Battle of Kadesh.
Assyrian governors rule Babylon as Babylonia enters a period of political instability.
Invasion of the Sea Peoples puts an end to the Hittite empire.
Nebuchadnezzar I takes charge in Babylonia and restores national morale.
Tiglath-Pileser I of Assyria defeats the Mushki in the north and wages continuous war against the Aramaeans, who are finally subdued around 900 BC.
World History
