What Happened to Ancient Civilizations?

I'm quite interested in ancient history and archeology; and I continually come across names of peoples, kingdoms, empires, civilizations that are "lost"—that is, they disappeared, and many of the names of these cultures are not even widely known today.

What happened to these peoples? Well, in one case it's pretty well known what happened. Take the Celtic people known as Britons, who inhabited England before England was invaded by the Angles and Saxons (German peoples) around 450 A.D.

These Britons were driven west, into what is now Wales and Cornwall; and also many of them fled across the English Channel to Brittany (now you know how Brittany got its name).

Also, undoubtedly, many stayed where they were and lost their cultural (and linguistic) identity by being absorbed through intermarriage or acculturation. This might be somewhat similar to what happened to native peoples in the U.S. and some other countries, except that the process had a longer time to operate so it could have been accomplished more thoroughly.

Sadly, a very common scenario is conquest where many people are killed. In the case of many kingdoms and empires of the past, it's clear that the capital city fell in war. Surviving remains show evidence of siege and burning. For example, Alexander the Great (4th century BC) wanted to avenge the Persians' conquest of Greece. So when he, in his eastward march of conquest, came to the Persian capital of Persepolis, he was quite merciless in his destruction. Pretty much any conquest involved destruction: sacking, looting, burning. Many great cities were pretty much reduced to piles of rubble.

So what became of the people? Again, many doubtless were killed: by the sword, or they perished in the widespread conflagration of their city. As one example: Genghis Khan was renowned for his ruthlessness, and when he conquered a kingdom in what is now Afghanistan, he slaughtered nearly every last inhabitant.

Consider those who might have survived: What would you do if your house was burnt along with all your possessions? You'd pick up your family and try to escape and flee to some place that you considered safe, or that you knew about (and had an idea in what direction it lay) or where you might have had friends or relatives.

Of course the people who fled war and found refuge somewhere else would have been immigrants in their new home and would have eventually been absorbed, learning the new language and customs and so losing their original cultural identity.

The last scenario for the fall of an empire or kingdom might be called internal collapse. Two examples are the Hittites and the Maya. In these instances, the people did not necessarily or literally simply disappear off the face of the Earth.

The Hittites had a great kingdom in Anatolia (roughly modern Turkey) up to around 1100 B.C. Why their empire fell has only recently come to be understood, and it looks like it's pretty much a matter of internal strife, more or less civil war. In this case we know that the Hittite Empire was succeeded by smaller "Neo-Hittite" kingdoms. In other words, the people were still there, and they tried to pull things together after the great tragedy of the fall of their empire and get an organized society going again.

The Maya, who had a complex civilization in Mexico and Central America, are another case to look at. They (like a great many peoples) built "city-states." Some of these were rivals so again there was war and conquest. But even before the Spanish arrived to do their conquest thing, some of the great Maya city states apparently simply collapsed, their great ceremonial cities abandoned. Exactly what happened is not completely clear (one idea is that the people just sort of kicked out their kings). But the people, the race and language, are very much still alive.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

A Few Spaniards Destroyed Two Mighty Empires

This is not going to discuss how small bands of Spaniards were able to defeat much larger Aztec and Inca armies and conquer these great New World civilizations. This has been discussed often. (One interesting modern idea is given in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.) Rather, I am going to look at some of the motives of the Conquistadors.

According to the written accounts they have left us—mostly written by priests in their band—the Spanish Conquistadors who conquered the New World's great civilizations (notably the Aztec and Inca but also the Maya) found, in the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan, a city bigger and more grand than anything they knew in Europe.

Yet they had no scruples about conquering and destroying these civilizations, destroying their monuments (often using the stone from Aztec temples to build their Christian cathedrals), and slaughtering or enslaving the people.

If, on the one hand, they (perhaps grudgingly) admitted respect for the material cultures they were conquering, how were they able to rationalize the attitudes shown by their destroying these cultures, burning their books, and so forth?

I think the main answer lies in the fact that they were able to regard these peoples as pagans and "heathens." Anyone who was not Christian of course would be so regarded. The Conquest was all about God, glory, and gold: converting the peoples encountered (that was why priests were brought along); the personal glory of the soldier/adventurer and of the King; and the gold that would be sent back to Spain as booty.

As to the role of conversion as a motive, or of the non-Christianness of the native peoples: Because of Spain's rivalry with Portugal for trade and control of new territories, the Papacy endorsed Spain's control of the lands Columbus had discovered with the understanding that Spain would spread Christianity into the new lands.

As I have seen the encounter of the Spanish with the native ruler (I think this was Atahualpa, the Inca ruler) depicted: when he was told that the book he was presented with—a Bible—was the word of the Spaniards' god, he said he did not hear it speaking to him at all. (Of course he had no notion of writing.) Thus he threw it to the ground in disgust, and that was a pretext for an attack by the Spaniards. (I admit that one probably should not take a TV depiction as accurate history.)

Historians may argue which of the three motives was most important. And, as a footnote, I am not a historian. Maybe historians know more about all this than I do (and, of course, the medium of the blog permits anyone to post comments on what I write). Still, I feel that history is at least as much about interpretation as about "facts." Certainly plenty of scholarly argumentation and conflict goes on. Even if there are unambiguous, established "facts," it's not always clear what factors were most important in bringing down an empire, for example, or causing a war, or in fact any of the big events of history.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein