A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [184]
Our little gold llama is so small that it can stand comfortably in my hand – it is only a little over 6 cm (2½ inches) high. It’s hollow, made up of hammered-out thin leaves of gold, and therefore very light. It’s an engagingly sprightly figure – straight neck, ears upright and alert, large eyes and a mouth that’s clearly smiling, making an unusually cheerful-looking example of a creature from a species which usually seems to veer between amused condescension and a spitting sneer. Many little figures like this have been found, in gold and silver, all over Inca territory, frequently buried as offerings on mountain peaks.
That territory was on three distinct levels: there was the flat coastal strip; then the mountainsides, with the famous Andean terraced fields producing crops on very difficult terrain; and then the mountain plateaus with high grasslands, 3,500 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The llama unified these three disparate Inca worlds and held this vast empire together. It was a world of different peoples, languages and gods, whose communities had often been at war with each other, and the full range of imperial techniques was deployed to control this swiftly created state. Some local elites were ruthlessly eliminated; others were co-opted, given private land and excused taxation. Late-conquered territories, in northern Ecuador for example, could operate more as client states instead of being fully incorporated into the Inca system. This cultural mosaic was welded together into a powerful empire by the Inca military machine, which depended on thousands upon thousands of llamas to provide portage and food. We know that after an early battle against the Spanish, the defeated Incas abandoned 15,000 of the animals.
Our little llama is made of gold, a key substance in Inca myth. Gold was the attribute of the great Inca sun god and represented his generative powers – gold was described as the ‘sweat of the Sun’, while silver was the ‘tears of the Moon’. Gold was therefore related to masculine power, above all to the power of the Inca himself, the emperor, child of the Sun. Today, Inca objects in gold and silver are rare survivals: tiny scraps of the dizzying opulence that was described by the Spanish when they arrived in the 1520s. They wrote of palaces walled with sheets of gold, of gold and silver statues of humans and animals, and of miniature golden gardens inhabited by glittering birds, reptiles and insects. All of these would be surrendered to or seized by the Spanish. Nearly all were melted down for bullion and sent to Spain.
As in all societies, planting and harvesting were accompanied by rituals and offerings to the gods, and with the Inca this often involved sacrifice of living beings, from guinea pigs to children of the elite. And as the Peruvian Inca expert Gabriel Ramon explains, llamas were sacrificed by the thousand:
There were two calendars during the Incan period. One was the official imperial calendar, and at the same time they have lots of small calendars from the provinces or territories that they conquered. But in the official calendar they tried to match the agricultural calendar, the main times for harvesting and planting, with the main ceremonies, and it’s in this official calendar that you have several ceremonies with the llama. There is one mentioned by Guaman Poma, a colonial writer, in October, and for that ceremony, to bring the rain, you need to kill white llamas.
The greatest Inca religious rite was the Festival of the Sun. A Spanish chronicler has left us a full description:
Then came the Inca priests with a great number of young, female and male llamas of all colours, for the Peruvian llama is found in all colours, like horses in Spain. All the llamas belonged to the Sun. The first sacrifice of a young black llama was intended to observe the auguries and omens of the festival. They took the llama and placed it with its head facing