1492 & all that
McCarthy, Abigail
OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy 1492 & ALL THAT A WESTERN OMELET The lines were still long when the "Circa 1492" exhibition closed on January 12 at the National Gallery here...
...Advanced civilizations existed in the Islamic world and in India...
...Fernandez-Armesto points out that the Latin—in particular, the Spanish—conquerors had, at least, two merits: "First, they meant well, sincerely believing they were freeing their victims from a demonic heritage....Second, they showed unique respect for the vanishing native cultures by attempting to record their history and achievements in a systematic way civilizations are omelets made with broken eggs...
...It was the age in which our European forebears had their views of the world changed forever, the age in which they came in contact with other civilizations and cultures, some much older and more developed than their own...
...In comparison to Europe, however, these cultures of the East reflected "an unbroken continuity reflecting past and present unlike the Mediterranean world where Greco-Roman culture had been disrupted during the Middle Ages...
...They are fascinating, of course...
...the chief of the Inkas was said to have thrown the bodies of 20,000 Caranqui into Lake Yahuarcocha a few years before the arrival of the Spanish...
...Why is a creature capable of awesome creative and intellectual achievement also given to violence and a lust for power...
...even more striking is the contrast with modern nations still battling famine and with our own nation's failure to feed and shelter the homeless...
...They were, in that way, a great deal like the succeeding conquistadores...
...They declined, however, as much from cultural exhaustion and internecine warfare as from their encounter with the encroaching West...
...It was an extraordinarily rich exhibition consisting of more than six hundred paintings, works of sculpture, decorative arts, scientific instruments, and other items from five continents...
...But, in truth, popular history has left us with the lingering impression that the age of exploration marked a renewed world and the beginning of progress when a vigorous European culture was launched into the broader world, eventually to supersede the indigenous cultures of the Americas and Africa and to overwhelm the complicated but stagnant cultures of Cathay and India...
...Their art, their architecture, their organization, their science and mathematics— all are impressive but grisly in their association with human sacrifice...
...The emperors had also sponsored voyages to other states as far as the Persian Gulf and the eastern coast of Africa without seeking to extend China's territory...
...I was particularly struck with the exhibition's introduction to an Indian civilization of which our history has taken little note...
...A bloodthirsty neighbor has no moral advantage over an invader from afar," argues historian Felipe Fernan-dez-Armesto in the Economist (December 21, 1991-January 3, 1992...
...Around A.D...
...Some have disappeared with little trace...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy 1492 & ALL THAT A WESTERN OMELET The lines were still long when the "Circa 1492" exhibition closed on January 12 at the National Gallery here in Washington...
...These civilizations were themselves the result of the mingling of cultures after long-past invasions, the movements of nomadic peoples, or the encounters fostered by trade...
...Ming China was ruled under the emperor by a civil service composed of scholar-officials...
...And it was a truth not yet acknowledged by the framers of the U.S...
...1000 in what is now Georgia and Mississippi there existed a network of large, multivillage communities centered by the residences of chiefs, shrines to ancestors, and sacred hearths, all mounted on earthen platforms of great size...
...A strong agrarian economy ensured that its inhabitants were better provided for than those of any other society on earth...
...The scrolls, paintings, furniture, and porcelains exhibited at "Circa 1492" testified to this advanced civilization...
...It strongly supported the arts...
...The subtitle, "Art in the Age of Exploration" underlined the exhibit's thesis that the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century was a period made lustrous by its artists and artisans as well as by its explorers...
...We may know better, but that is what we have long felt as the Commonweal 14 February 1992: 7 heirs (direct or indirect) of the explorers and navigators, the conquerors, invaders, and colonists who broke out of Europe five hundred years ago to dominate the world...
...It was also the age, according to exhibition planners, whose central date, 1492, symbolized "the dawning of a global perspective" and the birth of the modern era...
...The dedication of the Temple in the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was marked by the sacrifice of 80,000 human beings...
...Circa 1492" highlighted the mystery of man and his communities...
...In a time when ethnic groups seek to destroy each other in Europe, when a superpower lies starving and fragmented, when we ourselves have lately acquiesced in raining bombs on women and children, we may well puzzle over that mystery...
...That civilization created a pax Hispanica which extended from the Beagle Channel to the Upper Missouri, adds Fernandez-Armesto...
...Theoretically, our popular sense of history has taken this profound change into account...
...What it did was juxtapose the various cultures in such a way that we could see the exploring nations—the Spanish and the Portuguese, the English and the Dutch—as just other peoples, tribes if you will, in the rise and fall of nations and civilizations...
...What then of the civilizations of the Americas in 1492—the civilizations today's protestors accuse Europeans of destroying...
...It does not detract from preColumbian civilizations to acknowledge the worth of the succeeding LatinAmerican civilization which resulted not from an alien imposition but "was a creation of American peoples with outside interference...
...If we seek for comparisons we discover that the organization was much like that of postRoman Saxon England, a culture which came to an end with the battle of Hastings in 1066, and the Norman Conquest...
...The arts flourished in Japan and Korea as well...
...q 8: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...
...Its command of science and technology far exceeded that of Europe...
...Nevertheless, "Circa 1492," although correcting any such impression, did not underwrite the revisionist historians who protest the celebration of Columbus and what he represents...
...Both created empires in often bloody marches to power and both assimilated the deities, the concepts, and the arts of the people they conquered...
...Of the Aztecs and the Inkas (exhibition spelling), however, we now know a great deal...
...Why do some of his organizations last for millennia and others succumb within a century...
...China in 1492," reads the gallery brochure, "was the oldest, largest, and richest civilization in the world...
...It also comprised the first system in the world in which no human beings of whatever origin, race, or culture were to be excluded from a common juridicial and scientific classification— a truth not previously taken for granted...
...Constitution two centuries later...
...The contrast with a Europe struggling against recurring famine in 1492 is striking...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
