A TALE OF TWO CULTURES

A BEIJING SCHOLAR LINKS AN ANCIENT CHINESE DYNASTY TO THE NEW WORLD'S EARLIEST CIVILIZATION

   
[This story is from the US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, Nov, 4, 1996. There's a
small but interesting photo of the hieroglyphics published in the
magazine. The photos are also available at the US NEWS website -- Yuri.]
  
   [IMAGE] Abroad for the first time in his life, Han Ping Chen, a
   scholar of ancient Chinese, landed at Dulles International Airport
   near Washington, D.C., the night of September 18. Next morning, he
   paced in front of the National Gallery of Art, waiting for the museum
   to open so he could visit an Olmec exhibit--works from Mesoamerica's
   spectacular "mother culture" that emerged suddenly 3,200 years ago,
   with no apparent local antecedents. After a glance at a 10-ton basalt
   sculpture of a head, Chen faced the object that prompted his trip: an
   Olmec sculpture found in La Venta, 10 miles south of the southernmost
   cove of the Gulf of Mexico.
   
   What the Chinese scholar saw was 15 male figures made of serpentine
   or jade, each about 6 inches tall. Facing them were a taller
   sandstone figure and six upright, polished jade blades called celts.
   The celts bore incised markings, some of them faded. Proceeding from
   right to left, Chen scrutinized the markings silently, grimacing when
   he was unable to make out more than a few squiggles on the second and
   third celts. But the lower half of the fourth blade made him jump. "I
   can read this easily," he shouted. "Clearly, these are Chinese
   characters."
   
   For years, scholars have waged a passionate--and often nasty--debate
   over whether Asian refugees and adventurers might somehow have made
   their way to the New World long before Columbus, stimulating
   brilliant achievements in cosmogony, art, astronomy and architecture
   in a succession of cultures from the Olmec to the Maya and Aztec. On
   one side are the "diffusionists," who have compiled a long list of
   links between Asian and Mesoamerican cultures, including similar
   rules for the Aztec board game of patolli and the Asian pachisi (also
   known as Parcheesi), a theological focus in ancient China and
   Mesoamerica on tiger-jaguar and dragonlike creatures, and a custom,
   common both to China's Shang dynasty and the Olmecs, of putting a
   jade bead in the mouth of a deceased person. "Nativists," on the
   other hand, dismiss such theories as ridiculous and argue for the
   autonomous development of pre-Columbian civilizations. They bristle
   at the suggestion that indigenous people did not evolve on their own.
   
   Striking resemblances. For diffusionists, Olmec art offers a tempting
   arena for speculation. Carbon-dating places the Olmec era between
   1,000 and 1,200 B.C., coinciding with the Shang dynasty's fall in
   China. American archaeologists unearthed the group sculpture in 1955.
   Looking at the sculpture displayed in the National Gallery, as well
   as other Olmec pieces, some Mexican and American scholars have been
   struck by the resemblances to Chinese artifacts. (In fact,
   archaeologists initially labeled the first Olmec figures found at the
   turn of the century as Chinese). Migrations from Asia over the land
   bridge 10,000-15,000 years ago could account for the Chinese
   features, such as slanted eyes, but not for the stylized mouths and
   postures particular to sophisticated Chinese art that emerged in
   recent millenniums.
   
   Yet until Chen made his pilgrimage to the museum this fall, no Shang
   specialist had ever studied the Olmec. The scholar emerged from the
   exhibit with a theory: After the Shang army was routed and the
   emperor killed, he suggested, some loyalists might have sailed down
   the Yellow River and taken to the ocean. There, perhaps, they drifted
   with a current which skirts Japan's coast, heads for California, then
   peters out near Ecuador. Betty Meggers, a senior Smithsonian
   archaeologist who has linked pottery dug up in Ecuador to shipwrecked
   Japanese 5,000 years ago, says such an idea is "plausible" because
   ancient Asian mariners were far more proficient than they were given
   credit for. [IMAGE] 
   
   
   
   But Chen's identification of the celt markings is likely to sharpen
   the controversy over origins even further. For example,
   Mesoamericanist Michael Coe of Yale University labels Chen's search
   for Chinese characters as "insulting to the indigenous people of
   Mexico." And some scholars who share Chen's narrow expertise are
   equally skeptical. There are only about a dozen experts worldwide in
   the Shang script, which is largely unrecognizable to readers of
   modern Chinese. Of the Americans, Profs. William Boltz of the
   University of Washington and Robert Bagley of Princeton recently
   looked at a drawing of the celts but dismissed as "rubbish" the
   notion that the characters could be Chinese. Those looking for a link
   between the two cultures, Bagley said, are Chinese, and "it no doubt
   gratifies their ethnic pride to discover that Mesoamerican
   civilization springs from China."
   
   Others would like to see the celts before taking sides. David
   Keightley, University of California--Berkeley professor of history,
   said some characters on the celts "could, of course, be Shang, though
   I don't at present see it that way." His Chinese colleagues, he said
   "may just be onto something," and he noted that "it's important that
   scholars from China examine this material."
   
   Chen, 47, is uninterested in the Mesoamericanists' war. When Prof.
   Mike Xu, a professor of Chinese history at the University of Central
   Oklahoma, traveled to Beijing to ask Chen to examine his index of 146
   markings from pre-Columbian objects, Chen refused, saying he had no
   interest in anything outside China. He relented only after a
   colleague familiar with Xu's work insisted that Chen, as China's
   leading authority, take a look. He did and found that all but three
   of Xu's markings "could have come from China."
   
   Xu was at Chen's side in the National Gallery when the Shang scholar
   read the text on the Olmec celt in Chinese and translated: "The ruler
   and his chieftains establish the foundation for a kingdom." Chen
   located each of the characters on the celt in three well-worn Chinese
   dictionaries he had with him. Two adjacent characters (detail,
   above), usually read as "master and subjects," but Chen decided that
   in this context they might mean "ruler and his chieftains." The
   character on the line below he recognized as the symbol for "kingdom"
   or "country": two peaks for hills, a curving line underneath for
   river. The next character, Chen said, suggests a bird but means
   "waterfall," completing the description. The bottom character he read
   as "foundation" or "establish," implying the act of founding
   something important. If Chen is right, the celts not only offer the
   earliest writing in the New World but mark the birth of a Chinese
   settlement more than 3,000 years ago. [IMAGE] 
   
   
   
   At lunch the next day, Chen said he was awake all night thinking
   about the sculpture. He talked about how he had studied Chinese
   script at age 5, tutored by his father, then director of the national
   archives. But Chen's father did not live to enjoy the honors the son
   reaped, such as a recent assignment to compile a new dictionary of
   characters used by the earliest dynasties--the first update since one
   commissioned by a Han emperor 2,000 years ago.
   
   Color nuances. Chen was so taken with the Olmec sculpture that he
   ventured beyond scholarly caution. The group sculpture, he said,
   might memorialize "a historic event," either a blessing sought from
   ancestors or the act of founding a new kingdom or both. He was
   mesmerized by the tallest figure in the sculpture--made from red
   sandstone as porous as a sponge, in contrast to the others, which are
   highly polished and green-blue in hue. Red suggests higher status,
   Chen said. Perhaps the figure was the master of the group, a
   venerated ancestral spirit. The two dark blue figures to the right
   might represent the top noblemen, more important than the two others,
   carved out of pale green serpentine.
   
   The Smithsonian's Meggers says that Chen's analysis of the colors
   "makes sense. But his reading of the text is the clincher. Writing
   systems are too arbitrary and complex. They cannot be independently
   reinvented."
   
   Whether Chen's colleagues ultimately hail him or hang him, his theory
   yields a tale worthy of Joseph Conrad. And like Conrad, he cannot
   resist offering yet another footnote from the past: More than 5,000
   Shang characters have survived, Chen says, even though the soldiers
   who defeated the Shang forces murdered the scholars and burned or
   buried any object with writing on it. In a recent excavation in the
   Shang capital of Anyang, archaeologists have found a buried library
   of turtle shells covered with characters. And at the entrance lay the
   skeleton of the librarian, stabbed in the back and clutching some
   writings to his breast.
   
   The Olmec sculpture was buried under white sand topped with alternate
   layers of brown and reddish-brown sand. Perhaps it was hidden to save
   it from the kind of rage that sought to wipe out the Shang and their
   memory.
   
   
   
   BY CHARLES FENYVESI

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