From Oswald Spengler: Reden und Aufsätze. München 1937, S. 137-147.
The Age of American Cultures
The most difficult problem in the study of ancient American cultures is their absolute chronology. Without establishing the course of history according to its tempo and duration, the outward sign of which is only dates, there is no real historical knowledge. We must always seek to bring the buried history of these people and states, with their events, deeds, and leading personalities back to life and do so in the natural sequence of the generations that carry and represent its development. And the development of American cultures does not stand alone, but constitutes one element of world history, in which the events of individual cultures are interwoven according to their time and place. Whether we will ever be able, even from afar, to restore this organically necessary order is more than uncertain – but that is the objective. It is the goal of all higher historiography and determines the individual areas of research, whether they can be solved or not.
In the end, it is not a matter of determining, delimiting, and comparing “layers” of culture, of tracing the designs of utensils and ornaments “in transit”, or of determining how people lived, dwelt, and were buried at any given time – all of this is only a collection and arrangement of material for what is actually to be accomplished. Prehistory and archaeology are preliminary sciences for the historian, and history is what actually happened in the past.
There is no Bronze Age Culture, Mutterrechtskultur, or Bell Beaker Culture; there are only human cultures, which develop and complete themselves in an number of generations, always few in number, and whose accidental remains are only layers and ornamental forms. We must be clear about what they do not tell us. If a prehistorian of the distant future wanted to describe the 19th century as the strata of copper wires and tin cans, he would have forgotten the very thing that drives research into prehistory: human events. The determination of stratigraphic sequence is a means, not an end. It is not ornaments and vase types that migrate, but people, living and working in certain ways of which they themselves are hardly or not at all aware. This is what their remains speak of; once, they held living history, and the question is how much we can still understand of their design language. It will be very little if we have no chronology to place them in the succession of generations. Nor can we deduce much from physical remains or from the character and distribution of living languages. Languages, too, migrate from people to people, spread or die out as a result of historical events which we must already know in order to trace the later stages back to an earlier one. What would one deduce from the current spread of Romance languages in America, Europe, and Southeast Asia if one knew nothing of Roman history and the homeland of Latin in a corner of central Italy? Chronological knowledge is more than just a schema. Dates speak of a life that was once real. Only in this ordering of discoveries is their deeper meaning awakened. It was the fundamental flaw of the Kulturkreis theory that dominated research 20 years ago that it did not associate absolute concepts with its “recent” and “old” and compared older layers without asking whether they were the same age. What is very old on the islands of Fiji is very recent in China.
While we Western Europeans knew nothing about history beyond the Bible, the ancient authors and chronicles, we resorted to biblical chronology from the creation of the world. Everything known could easily be placed within these 6000 years. But with the excavations and the deciphering of original inscriptions in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, China, India a century ago, and above all with the search for prehistoric archaeological finds, this approach to chronology was rendered inadequate.
At that time, due to the lack of real, proven dating and the Germanic penchant for the infinite, an enormous numbers of years were joyfully conceived of for things about which nothing was known for certain. Thousands of years in history and millions of years in prehistory were thrown around as soon as signs of development were found. The secret compulsion to destroy the Christian calendar in its theological sense contributed to this, as did the desperate attempt of Darwin’s school to record the materialistically and causally conceived development of animal and plant species, although nothing of this could be seen in measurable periods of time.
The indulgence in large numbers has come to an end today. As soon as real evidence was found, the series of millennia dwindled to human and natural, very small measures. There is no longer any question of placing the Pyramid of Giza, the first legendary Chinese emperors and Babylonian kings many millennia before Christ, or of setting the Spanish cave drawings back by tens of thousands of years. Even Egyptian chronology, established by Eduard Meyer, was shortened by a few centuries at the beginning by A. Scharff on the basis of data about the lifespan of people who held court offices in the first dynasties, and the grave finds of Ur, dated by their discoverers with a certain sensationalism to around 4000 BC, have rightly been moved up by Weidner and Christian to around 2600 BC, In China, the discovery of oracle inscriptions on bones and turtle shells, as well as Andersson’s excavations, have proven that real history with credible dates and numbers cannot have extended beyond 1400 BC. And de Geer’s method of counting the absolute duration of the Ice Age using the annual layers of Swedish varve has led to an enormous shortening of the usual fantastical approaches. One thus arrives at periods of time that finally correspond to the nature of human life in its tempo and duration. One should have reached this point long ago through historical experience. The great epochs of world history all take place in a short time. Complete transformations of the artistic design language, for which the prehistorian habitually reckoned with dozens of generations, have always taken place in two or three generations in the light of known times. It is psychologically impossible that a few centuries could have passed between Raphael and Bernini, or between Lessing and Hölderlin. The change from Romanesque to Gothic style and from Rococo to Classicism is realized in less than a century. The tremendous spread of Islam, from Mohammed’s flight to Medina to the conquest of Spain and eastern Persia, takes place in hardly three generations. Great cities like the Egyptian El Amarna and the Samara of the Caliphs were built and abandoned in a single generation. For reasons of organic stylistic development alone, it is self-evident that Eduard Meyer is right in his estimate that the interval between the 6th and 12th, and 12th and 18th dynasties in Egypt was about 200 years in each case, and not, as Flinders Petrie would have it, 1700 years. Thus, the actual history of the world – the history of advanced civilizations – is confined to the small period from 3000 BC. Only then does it gain form and inner organic necessity. Only then does the immense size and impact of this event appear in its full, inexorable clarity.Classical, Indian, and Chinese culture begin at about the same time after the middle of the second millennium: this is already proven by the fact that the war chariot appears in all suddenly and decisively as a superior weapon at the beginning. The ancient American cultures must be much younger.
Today, there are still some dreamers, more or less dilettantes in the field, who do not refrain from indulging in speculation about large numbers. It is that learned and barely-learned group which sees primitive man as engaged in a constant adoration of the sun, moon, and all the stars, and think that he though of nothing but the building of “observatories”. It is then gathered from these installations that they date from times when the sun still rose in the constellation of Taurus, that is, an inspiring number of millennia ago. But today no sensible person believes that Stonehenge in England was a prehistoric observatory. It is a burial site like the Cromlechs in Brittany, built around 2000 BC, when there were not yet Germanic tribes there. And likewise the belief in an accomplished ancient astronomy of the Babylonians and Chinese, whose scientific observations of the heavens are quire recent, has disappeared.
So how old are the American cultures? They had no historiography of their own, and if they did, it is lost to us. In Mexico, where the Mayans and Aztecs form a unit of historical development, Spinden and other American scholars have tried to establish a relationship between the Mayan and Western European chronology from the chronological data on Mayan steles, and I am convinced that they have succeeded. By doing so, we arrive at purely post-Christian times for the history of this culture. This is however lacking for all peoples further south, and so the only hope of obtaining definite starting points for the history of this world lies in datable reports from outside it, i.e., from East Asia. If this possibility also fails, we must forever do without a historical chronology, other than that of the last days of the Incans. What Spanish monks have written down in the form of lists of kings’ names and dynasties is pure fantasy.
Now, relations of some kind between China and the west coast of America have always been suspected, but there is as yet no proof. In fact, Chinese culture was completely self-contained. It was unaware of the existence of Japan even at the beginning of the Han period (200 BC). A direct relationship with Mexico is out of the question. Moreover, Chinese culture is much older than Mexican culture. The living development of the latter was already complete at the beginning of our era, while the latter was only beginning its ascent at the time, and the Chinese historical works contain no trace of even the most superficial knowledge of the great continent in the East. In addition, however, it is probable that in South America no advanced civilization with a uniform historical development of over a millennium was formed. We see only partial beginnings of this everywhere, lying next to and on top of each other. It is utterly impossible to derive absolute data from them. And a succession of layers is, as I have said, not history.
And yet I believe that there is a last weak possibility. If it fails, we must forego the actual goal of historical knowledge. I want to make nothing less than propositions here; nor do I in any sense have the necessary knowledge in the field of South American archaeology to prove certain connections. I can only indicate in a few words the direction in which a chronological connection to the history of the ancient world can perhaps be achieve, and I must wait and see whether other pursue this path and whether they happen upon useful results.
All around the edge of the Pacific Ocean and on its islands there are “cultures” of great inner affinity: in Northwest America, where the Kuroshio Current meets the coast coming from Japan, those of the Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimschiam, in Western Mexico those of the Zapotecs, in Western Nicaragua those of the Chorotegs, on the coast of South America, along with various smaller ones, those of Nazca. Among the islands in the south, New Zealand, Neumecklenburg, parts of New Guinea, the Fiji and Admiralty Islands come into consideration. That race and language are very different should not be a concern today. We know, or should know, that the “race” of immigrants is rapidly assimilated by the founding population and that, more importantly, each landscape possesses powers in its geological, climatic, and biological conditions which irresistibly assimilate each “race” to a permanently native type. And as far as language is concerned, philologists too easily forget that what exists proves nothing of what once existed. Of course, all American tribes speak “Indian” today, but how did those immigrants – if they immigrated by sea – speak when they landed?
The affinity of form extends to everything that can be compared even today – from house construction, especially roof shapes, cult pillars, ornamentation in general, to myths and legends, to the custom of tattooing, of which it has long been recognized that there is a unity in meaning and type from south-east India to Peru and Japan, and finally, to seafaring with ship forms that clearly go back to a certain basic type.
It seems to me that a “Pacific spread” must have taken place. Everywhere on the coasts of the oceans these “cultures” appear already formed. One can probably observe a certain development, which is perhaps nothing but a progressive acclimatization, but in which case the beginnings are missing. Some events must have taken place, probably in the south-west Pacific, which led to this expansion across the sea, the greatest we know from earlier times. Of course, it is nonsense to speak of millennia and sunken continents. The Polynesian island cultures are very young compared to India and China. But can anything be determined about the absolute age of this expansion, which must have taken place everywhere at around the same time?
I think it can. One main area of this “coast culture” has not yet been mentioned: ancient Japan. Here we find the same types of Polynesian stilt-dwellings and roof forms that have been strictly preserved in Japanese temple construction, clearly distinct from the North Chinese and which have long since been considered to have derived from the “Malays”, the same custom of tattooing that has struck Chinese travellers since the 3rd century AD as a characteristically foreign custom of the “Wa”, a profound kinship of myths and sagas, especially in the saga cycle of the southern island of Kyushu , formed around the sun goddess Amaterasu in contrast to the sun god of Izumo in the north, which points to relations with Korea and beyond. Ocean navigation was completely unknown to Chinese culture until the beginning of our era and has remained foreign and unsymbolic to this day. People had no idea of Japan’s existence even at the beginning of the Han period (200 BC) and only learned about it a few centuries later by way of their Korean vassal states. At that time, the Japanese were still in a state of culture similar to that of the South Sea Islanders of Cook’s time. Japanese shipping, which was already powerful enough for military expeditions to Korea and Hainan in the 3rd century AD, thus had its relations exclusively with the south and southeast. In Japan itself, a distinction is made between the southern Satsuma type, which is said to be “Malay” influenced, and more northern forms in the racial mixture that is the nation of today, and in the language, a strangely worn product of historical fate, a very strong “Malay” element is suspected alongside allegedly North Asian (Altaic-Mongolian) elements, which will probably never be possible to establish clearly due to the fact that old Japanese words were written in Chinese characters. The only certainty is that many names and designations are clearly considered foreign. The term “Malay” here expresses a search more than a definitive conclusion. One could also say “Oceanic” or something else.
Now, in early Japanese history, the possibility of chronological determinations is real. The narratives of the beginning of the empire handed down in the Kojiki and Nihongi (both c. 720) are lost in the mists of myth, as they are everywhere else, and the traditional chronology, which begins with the legendary Jimmu around 700 BC, is incorrect. Nevertheless, it was possible to deduce a whole series of reliable dates from these and other sources, above all from the genealogies of the ancient noble families, make them usable, and reconcile them with Korean and Chinese historical works. This has been done above all by Yoshido Togo, and also by Wedemeyer in his "Japanische Frühgeschichte" (Tokyo 1900). It is certain that the beginnings of the Yamato Empire (today the Osaka area) date back to the beginning of our era, that in southern Kyushu there was still the kingdom of a Queen Himiko, apparently of “Malay” race, in the 3rd century, and that from there significant influence were exerted on the formation of Japanese culture. That Japan received much less from Korea in historical times than is usually assumed is already evident from the fact that cavalry and war chariots remained unknown to it, in sharp contrast to the Chinese style of warfare. It is precisely the means of warfare that are a much more certain “leitmotif” in early historical research than beaker forms and tools, something that has never before been noted. If Wedemeyer’s findings are confirmed and my assumption of a Pacific spread is confirmed, early Japanese history would provide a reliable means of chronological comparisons with South America. At the very least dates would be available before which certain form strata in Peru could not be placed.
But from these connections follows another possibility of certain historical comparisons. How did the pressure from the west on the tribes of these coasts and islands come about? Here, the histories of the old Javanese empires (the Babas) which have been studied very little, could provide surprising insights. The history of these states begins with the date of an unknown event which took place in 78 AD, and must have had some relation to maritime conquests from southern India. Indian civilization in the centuries after Buddha conquered the whole non-Aryan Deccan Plateau, and beyond that, lead massive military campaigns into Indochina and Southeast Asia. In the historical consciousness of later times in Java, they lived on in the image of a Buddhist, Brahmanic, and perhaps Dravidian “pagan” mission that led to the founding of the mighty Javanese empires with their magnificent temples. How far did this eastward thrust carry? Traces of Indian myths, in any case more Dravidian than Aryan – Vaishnavism no longer has the character of the Vedas – can be found deep into Polynesia, as well as customs, ornaments, weapons, and perhaps also words from Indian languages, just as Portuguese words have been preserved in many languages of Southeast Asia as the last reminder of the former global power. Is it possible that Polynesian-Japanese shipbuilding was developed from here? That it owes its existence to a foreign stimulus seems to me to follow from the fact that everything that the Spanish conquistadors and the English have seen in Peru and Polynesia since Cook was clearly the last remains of a dying art. The outrigger boats of Polynesia appear in misunderstood form as ornaments on the bronze drums southern China and Annam (French Vietnam), supposedly from the first centuries AD.
If all this should prove correct, it would provide a means of gaining at least approximate chronological approaches to the ancient cultural regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia, and thus perhaps of initiating a historical order of the “cultural strata”. In any case, it would be proven that here, as in Mexico, the actual development did not cover much more than a millennium and essentially belonged to the first millennium AD.
But I repeat: I have only wished to indicate possibilities, in the conviction that chronological comparisons are the last key to order and to understanding the history that once happened here. Perhaps in this way some certainty can be achieved.