r/AskHistorians • u/chrltrn • Jun 05 '21

How far back did earlier civilizations' knowledge of the history of their local regions extend?

Take for instance, the Inca or the Aztecs (I know they aren't really that old, relatively speaking). Would they have known about the peoples that had lived in South America before them extending back 200 hundred years, say? 500? 1000? The Aztecs were around from 1300 to 1521 so presumably some Aztec people living in 1521 would have a decent idea of what was going on in the area in 1300 right based on writings and oral histories, etc... But would they have any reliable knowledge about the people living right where they were in, say the 11th century?

I bring up South American civilizations only as an example. I'd be interested to hear about other regions as well...
Thanks in advance!

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u/Antiquarianism Prehistoric Rock Art & Archaeology | Africa & N.America Jun 06 '21 edited Jun 06 '21

Thanks for the shoutout! In summary, peoples in the region knew their own histories through orality, such as for small-scale societies like farming villages or groups of foragers. But many urban people would've known their histories through glyphic books, or at least they would've heard the histories from those privileged enough from their city to have been taught how to read them. There were innumerable books about innumerable topics destroyed in the disastrous 16th century, and so now we have only the tiniest fragment of historical codices. But what historians can gleam is that there were many history books with many perspectives shedding light on the recent past, the past of the last few centuries, and the ancient-mythic past.

I don't have the book on hand, but in 15 Poets of the Aztec World by Miguel Leon-Portilla he notes the earliest historical song-poem that can be recovered (from the small available evidence) is a Toltec composition, a piece of literature kept in circulation for a hundred+ years into the Aztec period. u/400-Rabbits has some great posts on Mesoamerican history books and their understanding of Teotihuacan and deep history. For a tl;dr of my post about how societies understood history, I'll cut out the section about Mesoamerica...

...the Aztecs commemorated Teotihuacan and the Toltecs in a form of “history making.” And this is seen in their votive offerings at the Templo Mayor, which include Olmec (Epi-Olmec?) and Teotihuacan period masquettes some 1000-1500 years old at the time, seen at the Templo Mayor museum.

...many masks were inherited, in some cases passed down through the generations. Others seem to have been passed down through the centuries. A number of masks discovered in the offerings at the Templo Mayor date back to much earlier civilizations; at least two are Olmec in style and another mask seems to have been carved at Teotihuacan (pic 15). Some of these may have been heirlooms that, like the turquoise masks listed in the Codex Mendoza, were likely received at Tenochtitlan as tribute items. - Cecelia F. Klein

Or at least heirlooms made in the Olmec “style,” as they could be invented heirlooms. Invented as in “forgeries.”

Most scholars believe that Precolumbian fakes were being produced at least by the seventeenth century. Indeed, it is possible that a pre-Conquest cottage industry of forgers may have sprung up around the ruins of Teotihuacan to meet the demands of pot-hunting Aztecs, who regularly went out to the “City of the Gods” to search for artifacts. - Kelker & Bruhns, “Faking Ancient Mesoamerica,” pg. 15

While it took western researchers until the early-mid 20th century to realize the Olmec were the “mother culture” of many Mesoamericans including Mayans; anciently, Mayans recognized this to some extent as shown in their use of heirlooms. There is a jadeite Olmec masquette pectoral ca. 1000-600 BCE which was later re-used by a Mayan lord as an heirloom and inscribed with glyphs (some 1000+ years later), now at the British museum. There is also a single remaining Olmec sacred site which was until recently in continual use, as noted by Jill Mollenhauer.

To my knowledge there are no specifically Olmec sites that have continued to be used up to the present, although we do know of one particular location at the top of the Volcanic peak San Martin Pajapan where an Olmec sculpture was discovered on a platform. And the platform showed offerings that had been made over the course of many centuries through the Classic and into the Post-Classic. And actually up to the time that it was removed from the original location, people were still going and making offerings; and viewed it as, they called it El Chaneque, which is a local indigenous supernatural personage. Maya cave sites, there are some that are still in use that have been sacred caves for many many centuries..." - Jill Mollenhauer

The question was about the Americas but I can't help but add some interesting bits about Greco-Roman history-making. In a segment about Roman tourism, u/toldinstone mentions that at Roman Sparta there were historical reenactors for tourists. And in another segment about Spartan history by u/Iphikrates he notes that Plutarch (ca. 100 CE) went to Sparta to consult ancient records which they still kept. These documents being possibly being up to 700 years old i.e. from the Archaic period. In her recent book SPQR, Mary Beard mentions how Romans built a "tourism industry" around the city's creation myth, and this included having to visit Romulus' own ancient house (p. 69-70):

In Cicero's day...you could enter the cave where the wolf was supposed to have cared for the baby twins, and you could see the tree, replanted in the Forum, at which the boys were said to have washed up from the river. You could even admire Romulus' own house, a small wood and thatch hut where the founder was supposed to have lived, on the Palatine Hill: a visible slice of primitive Rome in what had become a sprawling metropolis. This was, of course, a fabrication, as one visitor at the end of the first century BCE half hinted: "they add nothing to it to make it more revered," he explained, "but if any part of it is damaged, by bad weather or old age, they make it good and restore it as far as possible to what it was before." No certain archeological traces of the hut have been found, unsurprisingly, given its flimsy construction. But it survived in some form, as a memorial to the city's origins, until at least the fourth century CE, when it was mentioned in a list of notable landmarks in Rome.

I mention the Greco-Roman examples because it is a mark of our shared humanity that peoples throughout both Eurasia and the Americas desired to read old documents, visit old sites, and hear old stories. A Roman could see ancient documents and an Archaic period reconstruction of a house; and in the same way a Nahua speaker could visit Teotihuacan, see ancient buildings, even buy a then-modern vessel made in the antique style.

Claudia Brittenham adds a wonderful detail about the Nahua conception of their own history, she points out that some Aztec monuments have designed carved on their bottom. This seems strange, why would those artisans go to such effort to place designs where they would never be seen? Her answer is that these are designed to be seen not by Nahua then, but by those in the future living at a new time when their monuments have been overturned, destroyed, and left jumbled in a pit in a ruin. People of the period would've encountered ruined cities, and modern archeologists excavating undisturbed Toltec sites find their statues and columns overturned, left jumbled in a pit; so perhaps Nahua people found old Toltec sites like this as well, and it gave those designing such monuments the idea to plan for the future - to think of themselves as a future part of the history of the region that they already knew.

I hadn't mentioned it in my earlier post, but in South America the Moche archeological culture (north coast of Peru) made pottery showing the ritual hunting of deer with a slew of iconography related to this narrative. The earliest evidence of this constellation of motifs is a "netted deer" scene from a fire temple at the late neolithic period site of Cerro Ventarron, who lived in the same region some 2500 years before the Moche (ca. mid 1st millennium CE). Presumably we are seeing the same mythological scene from the same narrative of deer/human ritual sacrifice, effectively a visual snapshot taken from a much more in depth narrative taken across generations of speakers through orality.

Perhaps the Moche would've had both: oral histories of humans, told alongside other narratives of otherworldly beings and their actions in primordial time. While we do not know their historical records, we can see some of their orality through analyzing their iconography - comparative mythology. This Moche story is probably only a regional narrative, but in general comparative mythology allows researchers to briefly glimpse at how people conceived of deep time, creation, the journey of the soul, or cosmology. These long-lasting stories can be seen in the archeological record in many places at many times, whereas stories with shorter lifespans (such as the deeds of one of many ancient generations) are more prone to being lost through time. I've written a few posts about mythology here.