The Ancient Sun Kingdoms of the Americas Vol. II

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: 9781787203938

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. II.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

III—KINGDOM OF GOLD: THE INCAS 4

13—THE PAST THAT THE INCAS ‘FORGOT’ 6

14—BROAD BASE OF THE PYRAMID: THE WORKER 27

15—PRODUCTS AND PLEASURES OF THE PEOPLE 43

16—THE ROYAL INCA 60

17—‘SWEAT OF THE SUN, TEARS OF THE MOON’ 73

18—THE HIGHWAYS OF THE SUN 92

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ANCIENT SUN KINGDOMS 120

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 132

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 134

III—KINGDOM OF GOLD: THE INCAS

The whole Inca story through European eyes is depicted in this engraving by the 16th century historian Theodore de Bry, with the emphasis, of course, on gold. In the upper part of the picture the Indians are shown digging the ore and washing it. Below is the Inca himself, supported on a litter and seated on a splendid but suspiciously Baroque throne, while in the background is an equally historical version of Pizarro’s landing at Tumbes.

13—THE PAST THAT THE INCAS ‘FORGOT’

THESE IS not one Peru but there, and all these Perus lie parallel to each other: coastal desert, high mountain, and low-lying jungle. It is these three discordant geographies that the Incas coalesced into an Empire. In few other places in the world have climate and geography been such vital factors in shaping the culture of human lives.

First there is the strange sea. The coast of South America from Antarctica to the Equator is curiously modified by the presence of a cold stream of water, deep and extended: the Humboldt current—a cold mass within a tropic sea which has had marked effect on the land; normally rain never falls and along the extended coast-line the land is reduced to extreme waterless desolation.

Although along the 2000-mile-long desert coast there are more than forty valleys, between each lies a lifeless void of desert. Rivers, some large and perennial, others small and occasional, which have created these valley oases cut through the towering Andes and rapidly descend into V-shaped valleys bringing every year a renewal of fertile silt.

Early South American men filtered into these valleys and formed into tribes; in time they extended these valleys by careful irrigation, increasing artificially and unnaturally the areas of fertility.

Since trees were relatively rare here, the idols of these coastal dwellers were of wood; since mud and sand were the base of their material culture, they built of sun-dried brick, and their most fabulous cities were in reality only plastic mud. Since here the sun was always menacing and was not to be appeased, they selected as their principal deity the moon, which controlled the sea.

Yet the Incas did not originate in this environment; they first appeared in a high, treeless tableland, a region of long grass, a land which is seared by the noonday heat and made frigid by night. This was the land of the Keshwas (or Quechuas), the ‘warn-valley people’; their name in time was to be given to the language of the Incas.

The empire of the Incas stretched for over 300 miles down the west coast of South America. It covered coastal desert, high mountain and low-lying jungle.

The temperate zone in the Andes lies in the grass areas at a land height above 9,000 feet; it is a region that is capable of sustaining an intensive agriculture. Here in this purlieu, trees were also rare but there was rock, so stone became the source of these Andean peoples’ culture. The sun here was the source of life, so the sun became their principal deity.

The deep valleys of the Cordilleras (as the first Spaniards called the mountains) take the run-off of the water and form it into numerous rivers, which emerge into the gigantic rivers Huallaga and Ucayali, both tributaries of the Amazon. This is the jungle, the third of the three Perus.

Actually the forest begins as montaña at 6,000 feet altitude, for it is ceaselessly wetted from the rain-bearing trade winds which collide with the Andean spurs that slant sharply east. The montaña is heavily matted with forest, and wildly plunging rivers; this is the yungas, a Quechua word applied both to the hotlands and to the people living there.

The eastern slopes of the mountains are inexorably flattened until they become finally a vast carpeted forest broken only by rivers which flow through the green mansions of trees, propelled by the eastern slant of the land into the Amazon. Here to plant one tree you must first cut down twenty. In this terrifying luxuriance a totally different people lived—fierce, independent, cityless warriors who were armed with poison-tipped darts. They were jungle farmers and resisted any form of organization; only the margins of the jungle yielded to the soldiers of the Inca.

These, then, are the three Perus, and out of these three contrasting geographies—desert, mountain and jungle—the Incas hammered their fabulous realm. No matter what form of society that lived in this ancient Peru—whether it was the effete Chimú, who surrounded himself on the desert coast with gold and ease, or the head-hunters in the jungle—all were brought into the orbit of the Incas.

But what of the long history of the region before the Incas arrived to transform it into the civilization that we know? The story that archaeology tells us in Peru is this: a succession of cultures endured for millennia, and in many instances died out, before the Incas arrived to engulf the whole land and to organize its conquest-acquired inheritance into an empire.

That we have almost no history of many of these pre-Inca cultures other than that which archaeology reveals, we owe principally to the Incas themselves, for in their conquests they snuffed out the others by an effective ‘selective manipulation of remembered history.’

For not only were the earth and the peoples in Peru organized by the triumphant Incas but memory as well, and the theme of the Inca as the ‘civilizer’ became their dominant theme. Their thesis was that before their arrival all of South America was a cultural void. And this official history was forced upon all those conquered. Memory of past peoples and cultures was systematically purged and subjected to a ‘sort of editing and selective distortion not entirely unlike the tendentious distortion to which the Spanish themselves subjected it [the Inca history] in their turn.’ An ‘official’ Inca history was created, local oral traditions of the tribes whom they had conquered supplanted and allowed to lapse. The official ‘rememberers,’ who were the Incas’ historians, no longer bridged the gap between legendary man and those innumerable pre-Inca cultures, so that this ‘selective manipulation of history’ which was to represent the Incas as being alone the culture bearers, emerged as the history of preliterate Peru. All the rest of the pre-Inca histories were allowed to be lost in