Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [227]
Machu Picchu and the Incas who built it are fascinating, but a lot less exotic than the stories and theories that grew up around this fabled “lost city.” As New York Times science correspondent John Noble Wilford recently wrote, “Bingham, a historian at Yale, advanced three hypotheses—all of them dead wrong…. The spectacular site was not, as Bingham supposed, the traditional birthplace of the Inca people or the final stronghold of the Incas in their losing struggle against Spanish conquest in the 16th century. Nor was it a sacred spiritual center occupied by chosen women, the ‘virgins of the sun,’ and presided over by priests who worshiped the sun god. Instead, Machu Picchu was one of many private estates of the emperor and, in particular, the favored country retreat for the royal family and Inca nobility. It was, archaeologists say, the Inca equivalent of Camp David, albeit on a much grander scale.”
But nobody’s is making pilgrimages to the presidential getaway to absorb its psychic energies.
The people who constructed the architectural marvel of Machu Picchu also built what was the greatest and largest civilization in the Americas before Columbus arrived (or “pre-Columbian,” as the textbooks like to call it). Based in the capital of Cuzco (also spelled Cusco),* in the 12th century CE, the Incas began to expand their land holdings until they occupied a vast region. With a brilliantly engineered system of terraced agriculture and linked by a magnificent road system, this empire stretched more than 2,500 miles (4,020 kilometers) along the west coast of South America, from present-day Colombia, through parts of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. With an estimated 10 million subjects, according to National Geographic, this empire was really a loose confederation of tribes ruled by a single group, the Incas. It was a theocracy to a degree greater than any other American civilization—very much in line with the empires of the ancient Near East. The ruler or the “Inca” was considered divine and a direct descendant of the sun god. Below him were his family, a large ruling aristocracy, and an elaborate priesthood that practiced both human sacrifice and mummification. A great deal of recent archaeology has added considerably to the understanding of the Incas, especially in the discovery of numbers of mummified children who had been sacrificed.
But with their highly centralized government, the Incas at their height were easy pickings for the Spanish. When Francisco Pizarro landed on the South American coast, the Incas were already divided by an internal war and a leadership crisis, and weakened by a smallpox epidemic that had arrived from the north. In 1532, Pizarro—described by historians as “an illiterate pig breeder”—marched about 160 men into the mountains, kidnapped the Inca ruler, Atahualpa, briefly held him hostage, then executed him despite the ransom that had been paid, said to be history’s largest, a substantial roomful of gold. (Pizarro later became involved in a series of intrigues and was himself beheaded by rival Spaniards in 1541. Maybe there is some “rough justice.”)
While Incan insurrections and rebellions flared for nearly thirty years afterwards, the handwriting was clearly on the wall. In the end, “guns, germs and steel” were again brutally effective. But the Spanish cannons, swords, and vicious mastiff war dogs did not kill most of those Incas. Smallpox did.*
In Plagues and Peoples, a compelling account of the role of disease in history, William H. McNeill points out that this onset of deadly sickness had more than just the practical effect of killing large numbers of natives throughout Central and