The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas Vol. I

By Victor Wolfgang von Hagen

For centuries the strange, exotic civilizations of the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas flowered in total separation from the rest of mankind. Then explorers stumbled on great pyramids and temples hidden in the forests of Guatemala and Yucatan, and fortress cities high up in the Andes, to find ‘things that have never been heard or seen before, or even dreamed about’ (Bernal Diaz).

In The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas, first published in 1960, Victor von Hagen describes the history and cultures of each of these early civilizations, drawing on a lifetime’s experience of their sites, archeology and artifacts. His detailed knowledge of their institutions, economic structures and religious practices enables him to reconstruct the pattern of their daily life, and to explore their distinctive achievements in, for example, engineering, commence and communications. The account is illustrated throughout with numerous photographs, line-drawings, and reproductions from original prints.

‘The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas vividly fulfils the author’s aim “to take these people out of the flow of the purely archaeological and put them back into the human stream of life”.’—Daily Telegraph

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Release date: Feb 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787203921

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen

Victor Wolfgang von Hagen (February 29, 1908 - March 8, 1985) was a world-famous explorer, naturalist, and ethnographer who was involved in continuous fieldwork for more than thirty years. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, his career began with the Mexico Expedition of 1931-1933 and led to the Roman Roads Explorations of Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, and Petra. It was for Central and South America, however, that he developed a special interest during these years; he discovered the ‘extinct’ tribe of Jicaque Indians in Honduras, and undertook explorations of Ecuador, the Amazon, Peru, and the Galapagos Islands (1934-1936), Honduras, the Mosquito Coast, and Guatemala (1937-1938), Panama and Costa Rica (1940), and Colombia and Peru (1947-1948). Victor von Hagen is the author of more than 50 books, among them Ecuador the Unknown (1939); The Riches of South America (1941); The Aztec and Maya Papermakers (1943); Jungle in the Clouds (1945); Maya Explorer, the life of John Lloyd Stephens (1947) El Dorado, The Golden Kingdoms of Colombia (1951); The Four Seasons of Manuela (1952); The Desert Kingdoms of Peru (1965); and The Roads that Led to Rome (1967). He died in Italy in 1985 at the age of 77.

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Text originally published in 1960 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE ANCIENT SUN KINGDOMS OF THE AMERICAS

BY

VICTOR WOLFGANG VON HAGEN

Vol. I.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 6

INTRODUCTION: ‘THE NEWE FOUNDE WORLDE’ 7

I—A GOD-TORMENTED PEOPLE: THE AZTECS 13

1—THE CONQUERORS FROM THE NORTH 15

2—THE FARMER AND HIS FAMILY 32

3—WORK, PLAY, AND PERPETUAL WAR 44

4—‘ONE WHO SPEAKS’: THE KING AND HIS COUNCIL 75

5—THE ENDURING LEGACY 89

6—THE WILL OF THE GODS 119

II—CITIES OF THE JUNGLE: THE MAYAS 140

7—THE MISSING YEARS OF MAYA HISTORY 142

8—THE MAYA MEN AND WOMEN 155

9—A PEOPLE OF CRAFTS AND COMMERCE 170

10—THE LORDS OF THE MAYA 193

11—AN ART RULED BY THE GODS 202

12—THE CULTURE THAT DIED 256

DEDICATION

FOR VICTOR WEYBRIGHT Litt. D.

In gratitude and affection

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victor von Hagen was born in 1908 in St. Louis, USA, and now lives in Italy. A world-famous explorer, naturalist, and ethnographer, he was involved in continuous fieldwork for more than thirty years, beginning with the Mexico Expedition of 1931-3 and going on to lead the Roman Roads Explorations of Italy, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Arabia, and Petra. It was for Central and South America, however, that he developed a special interest during these years; he discovered the ‘extinct’ tribe of Jicaque Indians in Honduras, and undertook explorations of Ecuador, the Amazon, Peru, and the Galapagos Islands (1934-6), Honduras, the Mosquito Coast, and Guatemala (1937-8), Panama and Costa Rica (1940), and Colombia and Peru (1947-8).

Victor von Hagen is the author of more than 50 books, among them Ecuador the Unknown (1939); The Riches of South America (1941); The Aztec and Maya Papermakers (1943); Jungle in the Clouds (1945); Maya Explorer, the life of John Lloyd Stephens (1947) El Dorado, The Golden Kingdoms of Colombia (1951); The Four Seasons of Manuela (1952); The Desert Kingdoms of Peru (1965); and The Roads that Led to Rome (1967).

INTRODUCTION: ‘THE NEWE FOUNDE WORLDE’

WHEN the news of Cortés’s exploits in Mexico suddenly burst upon the world in 1519, man in Europe had almost forgotten the very existence of an America. This was understandable. During the years that had passed since its discovery America had provided only false hopes. It had been expected that new foodstuffs would pour out unrestrainedly from the ‘spiceries’ to relieve the monotony of European diet. Broadsides affixed to walls had proclaimed the discovery and books had told of ‘Joyful Newes out of the Newe Founde Worlde’, of ‘rare and singular vertues of divers Herbes, of Trees and Plantes of Oyles and stones...’ Even the discoverer of it all, Cristóbal Colón, now Admiral of the Ocean Sea, had fed the illusions by talking without stint of gold, rubies, and silver, which were to be found there more abundantly than in King Solomon’s mines.

In anticipation of such riches, a convention between Spain and Portugal early in the discovery had, with the Pope’s blessing, divided the Americas; the New World was to be shared between them in exclusivity. The King of France, witty François I, asked to see ‘...that clause in Adam’s will which allowed the kings of Castille and Portugal to divide the earth between them...’ But his irony availed him nothing and these two kingdoms soon settled themselves into the New World. Europe had waited with a certain breathlessness, one gathers from reading the contemporary accounts, and people expected the floodgates of plenty to open up. But, at best, the opening was a timorous settling; the Portuguese merely touched Brazil, and the Spanish confined themselves for the first twenty years to a small piece of the Isthmus of Panama and to the islands of the Antilles. Here was found nothing of the riches so highly vaunted by the original discoverers. Europeans dismissed ‘America’ as yet one more instance of Spanish braggadocio until there arrived in Seville, on December 9, 1519, the first treasure ship from Mexico.

Its arrival caused a tremendous sensation. Cortés had sent four fantastically attired Totonacs from the Mexican coast to accompany the treasures, and in the golden cache there were bells and jewels, earrings and nose ornaments of exquisite workmanship, and feather ornaments mounted in jewels, and there were even ‘books such as the Indians use. But that which stirred most was a golden wheel ‘seventy-nine inches in diameter, of a thickness of four reales,’ an Aztec calendar swarming with strange designs hammered out in repoussé. From the documents now extant one can still feel the contagious excitement of those who saw these treasures for the first time.

They so impressed Charles V that he took them to Ghent. Albrecht Dürer saw them in Brussels and wrote in his diary (August 27, 1520): ‘...I have never seen anything heretofore that has so rejoiced my heart. I have seen the things which were brought to the King from the new golden land...a sun entirely of gold a whole fathom broad; likewise a moon entirely of silver, equally large...also two chambers full of all sorts of weapons, armour, and other wondrous arms, all of which is fairer to see than marvels...these things are so precious that they are valued at 100,000 gulden, I saw among them amazing artistic objects that I have been astonished at the subtle ingenia of these people in these distant lands. Indeed I cannot say enough about the things which were before me...’

The Italian humanist Pietro Martire d’Anghiera himself could not say enough about ‘the two books such as the Indians use.’ He remained ‘wrapped in astonishment,’ for to him the ‘books’ were a greater index to the quality of this new civilization than the gold. ‘The Indians of the golden land write in books,’ he said in his letters to other humanists as he analyzed the technique of the book and the hieroglyphics ‘...which almost resemble those of the Egyptians...among the figures of men and animals are those of kings and great lords...so it may be presumed that they made report of each one’s deeds...’

Unfortunately, while the learned debated the Aztec civilization, speculating as to its origin, it was already being overwhelmed and destroyed. Thousands more of these golden Aztec objects, brought to the king as his royal fifth, were melted down and minted into coin to pay off his immense debts incurred by European wars. As for other Aztec ‘books,’ and exquisitely made golden ornaments, as well as these other objects of Aztec culture, they perished in the Conquest. In the process of being taken, Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital was utterly destroyed. ‘One of the most beautiful cities in the world,’ wrote Cortés, his eyes brimming with simulated tears as he walked through the stench of the fires and singed flesh. In the end that which survived of Aztec architecture was torn down to build churches and mansions for the victor, and what was not destroyed by man was overwhelmed by the insults of time.

Six years later, in 1527, the Mayas found themselves on the agenda of conquest: Francisco de Montejo, the would-be conqueror, promised much to Charles V, his liege lord, more gold than he had received as his royal fifth from the rape of Mexico. At that time Charles V had full need of it; he was at war again, this time with France, and moreover, Sultan Solyman of the Turkish Empire had seized Budapest and was threatening Vienna. At that moment no one in the Spanish court could pay too much attention to the happenings in America.

The Maya conquest went off badly. After conquest and pillage, slavery followed. Those chieftains and priests, ‘in whom all learning reposed,’ who were not killed took refuge either in flight or silence. No intellectual in Europe ever saw a Maya ‘book,’ and since there was little or no gold to act as stimulant, the learned of Europe never had any communication about those marvellously contrived stone cities which the Mayas had built. This was not the fault of the participators in conquest nor the priests nor the administrators who followed. They penned voluminous reports; yet they went unpublished.

New Spanish cities were fashioned out of the rubble of Maya ruins; other unruined temples were torn down to supply building material for Spanish churches, mansions, and administrative centres. Ancient Maya Tìho became Mérida, the Yucatán capital ‘on account of the singularity of its buildings,’ the size of which, said a Spaniard in 1550, ‘fills one with amazement.’ As mere building material Bishop Landa doubted that ‘it will never come to be entirely exhausted.’ It was ‘exhausted’ in two decades. Those Maya structures which survived man’s destruction were slowly over-run by jungle verdure until, in time, all of these magnificent cities had vanished.

Peru, the real Kingdom of Gold, appeared on the horizon just as the Maya civilization was in its death throes. On May 16, 1532, Pizarro set out from the coast of Peru with his 130 foot soldiers and 40 mounted cavaliers, following the Inca royal road to seek the capital. In the varied history of man, was this not the most quixotic of journeys—170 men against three million, 170 men dedicated to conquer what was then one of the largest empires on earth? The sequence is known to every schoolboy, how Pizarro seized by stratagem the person of the Inca in the midst of his thirty thousand armed warriors and within one half hour—certainly among the most famous thirty minutes in history—subdued his whole empire.

On January 9, 1534, the galleon Santa Maria del Campo wharfed in Seville. Officials there who believed they had seen almost everything to be seen in these last fabulous years could not take in with their eyes the treasures that lay there: gold and silver lay piled on the dock, ingot upon ingot, all stamped with the royal seal. In a separate inventory to the king was a list of objects so beautiful that not even the most hardened conquistador in Peru could commit them to the crucible—thirty-four jars of gold, a golden stalk simulating maize, two golden platters, an idol of a man, life-size, over one hundred silver objects, the largest piece weighing 167 pounds. The total was worth twenty million dollars in bullion, and equal to twenty times that amount in terms of modern purchasing power. Never in history had so much bullion arrived at a single moment in Europe. The effect of that treasure ship on the human imagination never quite wore off; even now in Italy when one speaks of something of fantastic value it is a ‘Perú.’

At this golden moment Charles V still had greater preoccupations. He was undertaking the conquest of Tunis, so that ships, men, and money were of supreme importance. This time he did not even stop to look at the fabulous golden ornaments. He did that which for instinctive aesthetic reasons even the most debased of his subjects had not done; he ordered the whole of the Incas’ treasure to be melted down into ingots. Of the long ton of original golden ornaments from the Inca’s ransom not a single example exists in Spain today.

With that conquest, the animus, the soul, of the Peruvian was forever lost. The physical remains of that immense civilization, the buildings and temples of varying forms and functions that spread over two thousand miles along the Andes and the coast went the way of the conquest. Those which were not destroyed then were later toppled by the civil wars fought between the conquistadors over the carcass of the Inca Empire. As with the Aztecs and Mayas, so with the Incas—churches were either built out of the rubble or were set over the temples; Inca buildings were torn down to provide the stone to build manorial dwellings, and administration buildings were set up among the ruins. The lands being depopulated, a road system nearly as fine as that of the Roman Empire went into decay. The tampu resthouses which had appeared along the entire length and breadth of the network were reclaimed by the earth, and the suspension bridges which had spanned the awesome canyons along the route rotted and fell. The ingenious acequias, which had conducted water for irrigation into the desert, were neglected. The land was reclaimed by sand.

It was the Age of Reason that brought about a renaissance of archaeological interest in the Americas. In 1773 the Maya ruins of Palenque lying in the tangled tropical forests of Chiapis, Mexico, were discovered. Its discovery was brought to the personal attention of Charles III of Spain. He ordered his officials to explore the ruins carefully, to make drawings and preserve all the artifacts found so that they could form the basis for an Ancient History of America. Italian scholars were sent from Spain to Mexico to seek out ancient documents in order to prepare such a history. In 1777, a Mexican, Antonio Alzate, found the ruins of Xochicalco, and a few years later, in 1790, while excavations were going on to alter the foundations of the Cathedral of Mexico City, the workmen came across a gigantic monolith—the Aztec calendar stone. Carved out of a single piece of volcanic trachyte, it was eighteen feet in diameter with its centre dominated by the figure of Tonatiuh, the sun god, sculpted in large dimensions; ringed about it were symbols of calendric day-signs. In a previous time the archbishop would have ordered it to be smashed and worked into church masonry; now it was brought intact to the museum.

In Mexico those whose vocation was the antique hopefully believed that the Aztec calendar stone might be another Rosetta stone; such a speculation was still current when Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Mexico City on April 18, 1803. Already well-known—his letters to scientific associates in Paris had been published in various journals—Humboldt had, since 1799, travelled and explored in South America with his friend, Aimé Bonpland, botanist and physician. The Spanish viceroy, José de Iturrigaray, himself welcomed Humboldt and let it be known that since Humboldt carried the King of Spain’s rubric whatever he wished to see in Mexico was to be placed at his disposal.

Humboldt has been fully and rightfully extolled for his immense contributions to botany, geography, geology, astronomy, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and zoology; yet there is more to him. It was he who brought the buried American cultures into focus. His volume on American archaeology was contained in one large folio and published in Paris in 1810 with the title of Vues des Cordillères et Monuments des Peuples Indigènes de L’Amérique. This gave the world for the first time a panorama of ancient American history, displayed as never before in accurate scale drawings of Inca buildings, calendar stones from Colombia, bas-reliefs of Aztec sculptures, coloured engravings of pages of the Maya Dresden Codex; and drawings of the Aztec calendar stone with detailed explanations and numerous illustrations of Aztec, Zapotec and Mixtec manuscripts with learned commentaries. Under this immense authority America was seen as a civilization with its art placed on the high levels of culture. That volume went through four editions in eight years.

During the 19th century various fantastic theories were elaborated. Viscount Kingsborough, for instance, devoted his life and fortune to proving that the American Indians were Jews. His eight huge folio volumes, the Antiquities of Mexico, were published between 1830 and 1848.

Such attitudes were still popular when, in 1840, William H. Prescott began to write the History of the Conquest of Mexico. Few then believed that the Aztecs had reared the buildings ascribed to them; few accepted the fact that the American Indian had ever been capable of producing the civilization described by the early Spaniards. So Prescott went to the original unpublished records that lay in Spanish archives. With the appearance of his Conquest of Mexico in 1843, the evidence he had amassed was so formidable and the style of his writing so impressive that Prescott in that one book succeeded in giving America back to the Indians. At the same time, his friend John Lloyd Stephens, a New York lawyer who had travelled ‘for his health’ through Egypt, Arabia Petraea, Poland, and Russia, was then exploring Central America and helped to provide factual evidence. Frederick Cather-wood, an architect, was his companion. Cather-wood had taken part in some of the earliest English expeditions to Egypt and, being thoroughly immersed in the art of the Old World, he was prepared to evaluate what had been discovered in the