PLATE XXVII (A).
PLATE XXVII (A).
Colombian gold work. Ornaments in the forms of human and monstrous beings, doubtless mythological subjects. The originals are in the American Museum of Natural History.
PLATE XXVII (B).
PLATE XXVII (B).
Colombian gold work. The human figure apparently holds a staff or wand and may represent Bochica or similar personage. The originals are in the American Museum of Natural History.
The Zipa of Bogotá, at the period of the conquest, was the most considerable of the native rulers in what is now Colombia, having an empire only less in extent than those of the Peruvian Incas and of the Aztec Kings. He also was a recent lord, engaged at the very time of the coming of the whites in extending his power over neighbouring rulers; it is probable that Guatavita, east of Bogotá had fallen to the Zipa not many decades before the conquest and this Guatavita is supposed to have been the scene of the rite of El Dorado; in any case it had remained a famous shrine. Tunja was another power to the east of Bogotá declining before the rising power of the Zipas, its Zaque (as the Tunjan caciques were called) being saved from the Zipa's forces by the arrival of the Spaniards.
Besides these—the Chibcha proper[117]—there were in Colombia in the sixteenth century other civilized peoples, akin in culture and language, whose chief centres were in the elongated Cauca valley paralleling the Pacific coast. Farthest north were the tribes in the neighbourhood of Antioquia—the Tamahi andNutabi; south of these, about Cartago, were the most famous of gold-workers, the Quimbaya; while near the borders of what is now Ecuador dwelt the Coconuco and their kindred. All these peoples possessed skill in pottery, metal-working, and weaving; and the inhabitants of the Cauca valley were the most advanced of the Colombians in these arts. Indeed, the case of Peru seems to be in a measure repeated; for the Chibcha surpassed their neighbours in the strength of their military and political organization rather than in their knowledge of the arts. It is even possible that the Chibcha had been driven eastward by the western tribes, for the inhabitants of the Cauca valley possessed traditions of a northern origin, claiming to be immigrants; while the Chibcha still regarded certain spots in the territories of their western enemies, the Muzo, as sacred. Little is known of the mythic systems of any of these peoples save the Chibcha. The Antioquians preserved a deluge-myth (as doubtless did all the other Colombians); and they recognized a creator-god, Abirá, a spirit of evil, Canicubá, and a goddess, Dabeciba, who was the same as Dabaiba, the Darien Mother of the Creator. Cieza de León says[118]that the Antioquians "carve the likeness of a devil, very fierce and in human form, with other images and figures of cats which they worship; when they require water or sunshine for their crops, they seek aid from these idols." Of the Quimbaya Cieza tells how there appeared to a group of women making salt beside a spring the apparition of a disembowelled man who prophesied a pestilence that soon came. "Many women and boys affirmed that they saw the dead with their own eyes walking again. These people well understand that there is something in man besides the mortal body, though they do not hold that it is a soul, but rather some kind of transfiguration." The Sun, the Moon, and the Rainbow were important divinities with all these tribes, and they made offerings of gold and jewels and children to water-spirits in rivers and in springs. Human sacrifice was probably universal, and too many of the Indians,as Cieza puts it, "not content with natural food, turned their bellies into tombs of their neighbours."
Fray Pedro Simon wrote hisNoticias Historialesin 1623, some four score years from the conquest, giving in his fourthNoticiaan account of the myths and rites of the Chibcha which is our primary source for the beliefs of these tribes. Like other American peoples the Chibcha recognized a Creator, apparently the Heaven Father, but like most others their active cults centred about lesser powers: the Sun (to whom human sacrifices were made), the Moon, the Rainbow, spirits of lakes and othergenii locorum, culture deities, male and female, and the manes of ancestors. Idols of gold and copper, of wood and clay and cotton, represented gods and fetishes, and to them offerings were made, especially of emeralds and golden ornaments. Fray Pedro says that the Pijaos aborigines and some of those of Tunja had in their sanctuaries images having three heads or three faces on a single body which, the natives said, represented three persons with one heart; and he also records their use of crosses to mark the graves of those dead of snake-bite, as well as their belief that the souls of the dead fared to the centre of the earth, crossing the Stygian river onbalsasmade of spiders' webs, for which reason spiders were never killed. Like the Aztec they held that the lot of men slain in battle and of women dying in child-birth was especially delectable in the other world.
The worship of mountains, serpents, and lakes was implied in many of the Chibcha rites. Slaves were sacrificed, and their bodies were buried on hill-tops; children, who were the particular offering to the Sun, were sometimes taken to mountain-tops to be slain, their bodies being supposed to be consumed by the Sun; and an interesting case of the surrogate for human victims was the practice of sacrificing parrots which had beentaught to speak. In masked dances, addressed to the Sun, tears were represented on the masks as a supplication for pity; and another curious rite, apparently solar, was performed at Tunja, where twelve men in red, presumably typifying the moons of the year, danced about a blue man, who was doubtless the sky-god. The ceremony of El Dorado is only one of many rites in which the divinities of the sacred lakes were propitiated; and it is probable that these water-spirits were conceived in the form of snakes, as when, at Lake Guatavita, a huge serpent was supposed to issue from the depths to secure offerings left upon the bank.
The same concept of serpentiform water-deities appears in the curious and novel creation-myth of the Chibcha, briefly told by Fray Simon. In the beginning all was darkness, for light was imprisoned in a great house in charge of a being called Chiminigagua, whom the friar names as the Supreme God, omnipotent, ever good, and lord of all things. After creating huge black birds, to whom he gave the light, commanding them to carry it in their beaks until all the world was illumined and resplendent, Chiminigagua formed the Sun, the Moon (to be the Sun's wife and companion), and the rest of the universe. The human race was of another origin, for shortly after the creation of light, from Lake Iguaque, not far from Tunja, emerged a woman named Bachue or Turachogue ("the Good Woman"), bearing with her a boy just out of infancy. When he was grown, Bachue married him; and their prolific offspring—she brought forth four or six children at a birth—peopled the earth; but finally the two returned beneath the waters, Bachue enjoining upon the people to keep the peace, to obey the laws which she had given them, and in particular to preserve the cult of the gods; while the pair assumed the form of serpents, in which they were supposed sometimes to reappear to their worshippers.
The belief that the ancestors of men issued from a lake or spring was common to many Andean tribes, being found farto the south, where the Indians of Cuzco pointed to Lake Titicaca as the place whence they had come. The myth is easy to explain for the obvious reason that lakesides are desirable abodes and that migrating tribes would hark back to abandoned lakeside homes as their primal sites; however, another suggestion is made plausible by various fragments of origin-myths which have been preserved, namely, that the Andean legends belong to the great cycle of American tales which make men immigrants to the upper world from an under-earth realm whence they have been driven by the malevolence of the water-monster, a serpent or a dragon. There are many striking parallels between the Colombian tales and those of the Pueblo tribes of North America—the great underworld-goddess, the serpent and the spider as subaqueous and subterranean powers, the return of the dead to the realm below, the importance of birds in cosmogony, the cult of the rainbow; and along with these there are tales of a culture hero and of a pair of divine brothers such as are common to nearly all American peoples.
PLATE XXVIII.
PLATE XXVIII.
1. Ceremonial dish of black ware with monster or animal forms found near Anoire, Antioquia. The original is in the Museum of the University of Nebraska.
2. Image of mother and child, red earthenware, from the coastal regions of Colombia. The original is in the Museum of the University of Nebraska.
Other Colombian legends of the origin of men include the Pijaos belief, recorded by Fray Simon, that their ancestors had issued from a mountain, and the tradition of the Muzo—western neighbours of the Chibcha—that a shadow, Aré, formed faces from sand, which became men and women when he sprinkled them with water. A true creation-story (as distinguished from tales of origin through generation) was told also by the people of Tunja. In the beginning all was darkness and fog, wherein dwelt the caciques of Ramiriqui and of Sogamozo, nephew and uncle. From yellow clay they fashioned men, and from an herb they created women; but since the world was still unillumined, after enjoining worship upon their creatures, they ascended to the sky, the uncle to become the Sun, the nephew the Moon. It was at Sogamozo that the dance of the twelve red men—each garlanded and carrying a cross, and each with a young bird borne as a crest above his head—wasdanced about the blue sky-man, while all sang how human beings are mortal and must change their bodies into dust without knowing what shall be the fate of their souls.
Fray Simon relates an episode of these same Indians which is enlightening both as to the missionary and as to the aboriginal conception of the powers that be. After the first missionary had laboured among the natives of Tunja and Sogamozo, "the Demon there began to give contrary doctrines; and among other matters he sought to discredit the teaching of the Incarnation, telling them that such a thing had not yet taken place. Nevertheless, it should happen that the Sun, assuming human flesh in the body of a virgin of the pueblo of Guacheta, should cause her to bring forth that which she should conceive from the rays of the sun, although remaining virgin. This was bruited throughout the provinces, and the cacique of the pueblo named, wishing to prove the miracle, took two virgins, and leading them forth from his house every dawn, caused them to dispose themselves upon a neighbouring hill, where the first rays of the sun would shine upon them. Continuing this for some days, it was granted to the Demon by Divine permission (whose judgements are incomprehensible) that the event should issue according to his desire: in such manner that in a few days one of the damsels became pregnant, as she said, by the Sun." At the end of nine months the girl brought forth ahacuata, a large and beautiful emerald, which was treated as an infant, and after being carried for several days, became a living creature—"all by the order of the Demon." The child was called Goranchacha, and when he was grown he became cacique, with the title of "Child of the Sun." It is to be suspected that the story of the virgin-born son of the Sun was older than the first preaching of the Incarnation, and that Spanish ears had too eagerly misheard some tale of rites or myths which must have been analogous to the Inca legends of descent from the Sun and to their consecration of virgins to his worship.
Like the other civilized American nations the Chibcha preserved the tradition of a bearded old man, clothed in long robes who came from the east to instruct them in the arts of life and to raise them from primeval barbarism; and like other churchly writers Fray Pedro Simon regarded this as evidence of the preaching of the Gospel by an apostle. Nempterequeteva, or Nemquetheba, and Xue, or Zuhé, are two of the names of this culture hero, worshipped as the god Bochica. He taught the weaving of cotton, the cultivation of fruits, the building of houses, the adoration of the gods; and then he passed on his mysterious way, leaving as proof of his mission designs of crosses and serpents, and the custom of erecting crosses over the graves of the victims of snake-bite—to Fray Pedro an obvious reminiscence of the brazen serpent raised on a cross by Moses in the Wilderness. One of the epithets of this greybeard was Chiminizagagua, or "Messenger of Chiminigagua," the supreme god; and when the Spaniards appeared they were called Gagua, after the light-giver; but later, when their cruelties had set them in a different context, the aborigines changed the name to Suegagua ("Demon with Light") after their principal devil, Suetiva, "and this they give today to the Spaniards." Piedrahíta says the Spaniards were termedZuhá, but he identifies the name as belonging to the hero Bochica.
A curious episode follows the departure of the culture hero. Among the people appeared a woman, beautiful and resplendent—"or, better to say, a devil in her figure"—who taught doctrines wholly opposed to the injunctions of Chiminizagagua. Dancing and carousal were the tenets of her evangel; and in displeasure at this, Chiminizagagua transformed the woman (variously known as Chie, Huytaca, or Xubchasgagua) into an owl, condemning her to walk the night. Humboldt says that Bochica changed his wife Chia into the Moon (chiasignifies "moon" in the Chibchan tongue, says Acosta de Samper); and it seems altogether likely that in the culturehero, Messenger of Light, and the festal heroine, with their opposite doctrines, we have a myth of sun and moon.
The Chibcha, of course, had their deluge-legend. In the version given by Fray Pedro Simon it is associated with the appearance of the rainbow as the symbol of hope; and since the rainbow cult was important throughout the Andean region, it may everywhere have been associated with some such myth as the friar recounts. Chibchachum, the tutelary of the natives of Bogotá, being offended by the people, who murmured against him and indeed openly offended, sent a flood to punish them, whereupon they, in their peril, appealed to Bochica, who appeared to them upon a rainbow, and, striking the mountains with his staff, opened a conduit for the waters. Chibchachum was punished, as Zeus punished the Titans, by being thrust beneath the earth to take the place of the lignum-vitae-trees which had hitherto upheld it, and his weary restlessness is the cause of earthquakes; while the rainbow, Chuchaviva, was thenceforth honoured as a deity, though not without fear; for Chibchachum, in revenge for his disgrace, announced that when it appeared, many would die. In the version of this tale given by Piedrahíta, Huytaca plays a part, for it is as a result of her artifices that the waters rise; but Bochica is again the deliverer, and the place opened for the issuance of the waters was shown at the cataract of Téquendama—"one of the wonders of the world."
The myth of Chibchachum, shaking the world which he supports, has its analogue not only in the tale of Atlas but also in the Tlingit legend of the Old Woman Below who jars the post that upholds the world. It would seem, however, not impossible that the story is an etymological myth, for Fray Pedro Simon says that Chibchachum means "Staff of the Chibcha," a name which might easily lend itself to the mythopoesy of the deluge-tale; nor is it unreasonable from the point of view of cultural advancement, for the Chibcha were beyond the stage in which it is profitable to refer all deifications tonatural phenomena. Chibchachum, says the friar, was god of commerce and industries—a complex divinity, not a mere hero of myth—and Bochica, the most universally venerated of Chibchan deities, was revered as a law-giver, divinity of caciques and captains; served with sacrifices of gold and tobacco, he was worshipped with fasts and hymns, and his image was that of a man with the golden staff of authority. There was a fox-god and a bear-god, but Nemcatacoa, the bear-god, was patron of weavers and dyers, and, oddly, of drunkards; in his bear's form he was supposed to sing and dance with his followers. Chukem, deity of boundaries and foot-races, must have been an American Hermes, and Bachue, goddess of agriculture and of the springs of life, was, no doubt, a personification of the earth itself, a Ge or Demeter. Chuchaviva, the Rainbow, aided women in child-birth and those sick with a fever—and we think of the images of the rainbow goddess on the sweat lodges of the Navaho far to the north, and of the rainbow insignia of the royal Incas in the imperial south. Certain it is that here we have to do with a pantheon that reflects the complexity of a life developed beyond the primitive needs of those whom we call nature-folk.
The most picturesque account of the landing of gigantic strangers on the desert-like Pacific coast, just south of the equator, is that given by Cieza de León.[120]"I will relate what I have been told, without paying attention to the various versions of the story current among the vulgar, who always exaggerate everything." With this proclamation of modesty, he proceeds with the tale which the natives, he says, have received from their ancestors of a remote time.
"There arrived on the coast, in boats made of reeds, as big as large ships, a party of men of such size that, from the knee downwards, their height was as great as the entire height of anordinary man, though he might be of good stature. Their limbs were all in proportion to the deformed size of their bodies, and it was a monstrous thing to see their heads, with hair reaching to the shoulders. Their eyes were as large as small plates. They had no beards and were dressed in the skins of animals, others only in the dress which nature gave them, and they had no women with them. When they arrived at this point [Santa Elena], they made a sort of village, and even now the sites of their houses are pointed out. But as they found no water, in order to remedy the want they made some very deep wells, works which are truly worthy of remembrance, for such is their magnitude that they certainly must have been executed by very strong men. They dug these wells in the living rock until they met with water, and then they lined them with masonry from top to bottom in such sort that they will endure for many ages. The water in these wells is very good and wholesome, and always so cold that it is very pleasant to drink it. Having built their village and made their wells or cisterns where they could drink, these great men, or giants, consumed all the provisions they could lay their hands upon in the surrounding country, insomuch that one of them ate more meat than fifty of the natives of the country could. As all the food they could find was not sufficient to sustain them, they killed many fish with nets and other gear. They were detested by the natives, because in using their women they killed them, and the men also in another way; but the Indians were not sufficiently numerous to destroy this new people who had come to occupy their lands.... All the natives declare that God, our Lord, brought upon them a punishment in proportion to the enormity of their offence.... A fearful and terrible fire came down from heaven with a great noise, out of the midst of which there issued a shining angel with a glittering sword, with which, at one blow, they were all killed, and the fire consumed them. There only remained a few bones and skulls, which God allowed toremain without being consumed by the fire, as a memorial of this punishment."
Cieza de León's story is only one among a number of accounts of this race of giants, come from the sea and destroyed long ago by flame from heaven for the sin of sodomy. To these legends recent investigations have added a new interest; for during excavations in the coast region to the north of Cape Santa Elena the members of the George G. Heye Expeditions (1906-08) discovered the remains of a unique aboriginal civilization in this region, among its monuments being stone-faced wells corresponding to those mentioned by the early narration. Another and peculiarly interesting type of monument, found here in abundance, is the stone seat, whether throne or altar, carved with human or animal figures to support it, and reminiscent of theduhosof the Antilles and of carvedmetatesand seats found northward in the continent and beyond the Isthmus. It is the opinion of the excavators that these seats were thrones for deities; possibly also for human dignitaries, especially as clay figures represent men sitting upon such seats—images, perhaps, of household gods; while the figures of men, pumas, serpents, birds, monkeys, and other figures crouching caryatid-like are, no doubt, depictions of supporting powers, divine auxiliaries or gods themselves. Monstrous forms, composite animals, and grotesquely frog-like images of a female goddess in bas-relief on stele-like slabs—mute emblems of a forgotten pantheon—add curious interest to the vanished race, remembered only in distorted legend when the first-coming Spaniards received the tale from the aborigines.
PLATE XXIX.
PLATE XXIX.
Scene from a vase, Truxillo, showing balsa. The drawing is in the Chimu style. After Joyce,South American Archaeology, page 126.
Juan de Velasco,[121]in the beginning of his history of Quito, places the coming of the giants about the time of the Christian era; and six or seven centuries later, he declares, another incursion of men from the sea appeared on this coast, destined to leave a more permanent trace, for the present city of Caraques not only marks the site of their first power, but bears the name of the Cara. These invaders are said to have comeonbalsas—the strange boats of this coast, formed of logs bound together, the longest at the centre, into the form of a hull, on which a platform was built, while masts bore cloth sails; and it is stated that the Spaniards encountered such craft capable of carrying forty or fifty men. The Cara were an adventurous people, and after dwelling for a time upon the coast, they advanced into the interior until, about 980a. d., according to Velasco, they eventually established their power in the neighbourhood of Quito, where the Scyri (as the Cara king was called) became a powerful overlord. From that time until Quito was subdued by the Incas Tupac Yupanqui and Huayna Capac in the latter part of the fifteenth century, the Scyris reigned over the northern empire, constantly extending their territories by war; but their power was finally broken when the Inca added the emerald of the Scyris to the red fringe of Cuzco to complete his imperial crown.
The followers of the Scyris, Velasco says, were mere idolaters, having at the head of their pantheon the Sun and the Moon who had guided them on their journeys; and he describes the temples built to these deities on two opposite hills at Quito, that to the Sun having before the door two pillars which served to measure the solar year, while twelve lesser columns indicated the beginning of each month. Elsewhere in their empire were the usual local cults,—worship of animals and elements, with tales of descent from serpentiform water-spirits and with adoration of fish and of food animals—while on the coast the Sea was a great divinity, and the islands of Puna and La Plata were the seats of famous sanctuaries, at the former shrine prisoners being sacrificed to Tumbal, the war-god, by having their hearts torn out. The neighbouring coast was the seat of the veneration of the great emerald (mentioned by Cieza de León and Garcilasso de la Vega) which was famous as a god of healing; and it is altogether probable that the Scyris brought their regard for the emerald from this region in which the gem abounded, though thismay well have been merely a local intensification of that belief in the magic of green and blue gems which is broadcast in the two Americas.
Besides the stories of the giants and the Cara, there is a third legend of an ancient descent of seamen upon the equatorial coast. Balboa[122]is the narrator of the tale of the coming of Naymlap and his people to Lambeyeque, a few degrees south of Cape Santa Elena, and the story which he tells is given with a minuteness as to name and description that leaves no doubt of its native origin. At a very remote period there arrived from the north a great fleet ofbalsas, commanded by a brave and renowned chieftain, Naymlap. His wife was called Ceterni, and a list of court officers is given—Pitazofi, the trumpeter; Ninacolla, warden of the chief's litter and throne; Ninagentue, the cup-bearer; Fongasigde, spreader of shell-dust before the royal feet (a function which leads us to suspect that the royal feet, for magic reasons, were never to touch the earth); Ochocalo, chief of the cuisine; Xam, master of face-paints; and Llapchilulli, charged with the care of vestments and plumes. From this account of theentourage, one readily infers that the chieftain is more than man, himself a divinity; and, indeed, Balboa goes on to say that immediately after the new comers had landed, they built a temple, named Chot, wherein they placed an idol which they had brought and which, carved of green stone in the image of the chief, was called Llampallec, or "figure of Naymlap." After a long reign Naymlap disappeared, leaving the report that, given wings by his power, he had ascended to the skies; and his followers, in their affliction, went everywhere in search of their lord, while their children inhabited the territories which had been acquired. Cium, the successor of Naymlap, at the end of his reign, immured himself in a subterranean chamber, where he perished of hunger in order that he might leave the reputation of being immortal; and after Cium were nine other kings, succeeded by Tempellec, who undertook to movethe statue of Naymlap. But when a demon, in the form of a beautiful woman, had seduced him, it began to rain—a thing hitherto unknown on that dry coast—and continued for thirty days, this being followed by a year of famine, whereupon the priests, binding Tempellec hand and foot, cast him into the sea, after which the kingdom was changed into a republic.
This tale bears all the marks of authentic tradition. We may well suppose that Naymlap and his successors were magic kings, reigning during the period of their vigorous years and then sacrificed to make way for a successor who should anew incarnate the sacred life of Llampallec. Such rulers, as corn-spirits and embodiments of the communal soul of their people, have been made familiar by Sir James G. Frazer's monumentalGolden Bough; and in this case it would appear that the sacred king was regarded as a marine divinity, probably as the son of Mother Sea. Certainly this would not merely explain the shell-dust spread beneath his feet, but it might also account for the punishment of Tempellec, who had brought the cataclysm of water to the land and so was cast back to his own element; while it is even possible that the worship of the emerald, which all writers mention in connexion with this coast, may have here received its especial impetus from the colour and translucency of the stone, suggesting the green waters of the ocean.
"In this land of Peru," wrote Cieza de León,[124]"are three desert ranges where men can in no wise exist. One of these comprises themontaña(forests) of the Andes, full of dense wildernesses where men cannot live, nor ever have lived. The second is the mountainous region, extending the whole length of the Cordillera of the Andes, which is intensely cold, and its summits are covered with eternal snow, so that in no way can people live in this region owing to the snow and the cold, and also because there are no provisions, all things being destroyed by the snow and the wind, which never ceases to blow. The third range comprises the sandy deserts from Tumbez to the other side of Tarapaca, in which there is nothing to be seen but sand-hills and the fierce sun which dries them up, without water, nor herb, nor tree, nor created thing, except birds which, by the gift of their wings, wander wherever they list. This kingdom, being so vast, has great deserts for the reasons I have now given.
"The inhabited region is after this fashion. In parts of the mountains of the Andes are ravines and dales, which open out into deep valleys of such width as often to form great plains between the mountains; and although the snow falls, it all remains on the higher part. As these valleys are closed in, they are not molested by the winds, nor does the snow reach them, and the land is so fruitful that all things which are sown yield abundantly; and there are trees and many birds and animals. The land being so fertile, is well peopled by the natives. Theymake their villages with rows of stones roofed with straw, and live healthily and in comfort. Thus the mountains of the Andes form these dales and ravines in which there are populous villages, and rivers of excellent water flow near them, some of the rivers send their waters to the South Sea, entering by the sandy deserts which I have mentioned, and the humidity of their water gives rise to very beautiful valleys with great rows of trees. The valleys are two or three leagues broad, and great quantities ofalgorobatrees [Prosopis horrida] grow in them, which flourish even at great distances from any water. Wherever there are groves of trees the land is free from sand and very fertile and abundant. In ancient times these valleys were very populous, and still there are Indians in them, though not so many as in former days. As it never rains in these sandy deserts and valleys of Peru, they do not roof their houses as they do in the mountains, but build large houses ofadobes[sun-dried bricks] with pleasant terraced roofs of matting to shade them from the sun, nor do the Spaniards use any other roofing than these reed mats. To prepare their fields for sowing, they lead channels from the rivers to irrigate the valleys, and the channels are made so well and with so much regularity that all the land is irrigated without any waste. This system of irrigation makes the valleys very green and cheerful, and they are full of fruit-trees both of Spain and of this country. At all times they raise good harvests of maize and wheat, and of everything that they sow. Thus, although I have described Peru as being formed of three desert ridges, yet from them, by the will of God, descend these valleys and rivers, without which no man could live. This is the cause why the natives were so easily conquered, for if they rebelled they would all perish of cold and hunger. Except the land which they inhabit, the whole country is full of snowy mountains, enormous and very terrible."
Cieza de León's description brings vividly before the imagination the physical surroundings which made possible the evolutionand the long history of the greatest of native American empires. Divided from one another by towering mountains and inhospitable deserts, the tribes and clans that filtered into this region at some remote period were compelled to develop in relative isolation; while, further, the conditions of existence were such that the inhabitants could not be nomadic huntsmen, nor even fishermen. Along the shores are vestiges of ancient shell-heaps, indicative of utterly primitive fisher-folk, and the sea always remained an important source of food for the coastal peoples; yet even here, as Cieza de León indicates, the growth of population was dependent upon an intensive cultivation of the narrow river-valleys rather than upon the conquest of new territories. Thus, the whole environment of life in Peru, montane and littoral, is framed by the fact of more or less constricted and protected valley centres, immensely productive in response to toil, but yielding no idyllic fruits to unlaborious ease. If the peoples who inhabited these valleys were not agriculturists when they entered them, they were compelled to become such in order that they might live and increase; and while the stupendous thrift of the aborigines, as evidenced by their stone-terraced gardens, their elaborate aqueducts, and their wonderful roads, still excites the astonishment of beholders, it is none the less intelligible as the inevitable consequence of prolonged human habitation. It is certain that the Peruvian peoples were the most accomplished of all Americans in the working of the soil; and it is possible that they were the originators of agriculture in America, for it was from Peru, apparently, that the growing of maize spread throughout wide regions of South America, Peru that developed the potato as a food-crop, and in Peru that the cultivation of cotton and various fruits and vegetables added greatest variety to the native farming. Peru, likewise, was the only American centre in which there was a domestic animal more important than the dog; and the antiquity of the taming of the llama and alpaca—useful not only for food and wool, but also as beasts of burden—is shownby the fact that these animals show marked differentiation from the wild guanaco from which they are derived. The development of domestic species of this animal and, even more, the development of maize from its ancestral grasses (if indeed this were Peruvian)[125]imply many centuries of settled and industrious life, a consideration which adds strongly to the archaeological and legendary indications of a civilization that must be reckoned in millennia.
PLATE XXX.
PLATE XXX.
Machu Picchu, in the valley of the Urubamba, north of Cuzco. These ruins of an ancient Inca city were discovered by Hiram Bingham, of the Yale University and National Geographical Society expedition, in 1911, and are by him identified with the "Tampu-Tocco" of Inca tradition (see pages216-18, and PlateXXXVIII). From photograph, courtesy of Hiram Bingham, Director of the Yale Peruvian Expedition.
The conditions which thus fostered local and intensive cultural evolutions were scarcely less favourable—once the local valleys had reached a certain complexity—to the formation of extensive empires. As Cieza de León remarks, conquest was easy where refuge was difficult; and the Inca conquerors themselves found that the most effective weapon they could employ against the coastal cities was mastery of their aqueducts. The town which lost control of its water, drawn from the hills, could only surrender; and thus, the segregated valleys fell an easy prey to a powerful and aggressive people, gifted with engineering skill, such as the Inca race; while the empire won was not difficult to hold. At the time of the Spanish conquest that empire was truly immense. Tahuantinsuyu ("the Four Quarters") was the native name, and "the Quartered City" (Cuzco), its capital, was regarded as the Navel of the World. The four quarters, or provinces, were oriented from Cuzco: the southerly was Collasuyu, stretching from the neighbourhood of Lake Titicaca southward; the eastern province was Antisuyu, extending down the slopes of the Andes into the regions of savagery; to the west lay Cuntisuyu, reaching to the coast and to the lands of the Yunca peoples; while to the north was Chinchasuyu, following the Andean valleys. Shortly before the Conquest the Inca dominion had been imposed upon the realm of the Scyris of Quito, so that the northern boundary lay beyond the equator; while the extreme southerly border had recently been extended over the Calchaqui tribes and down the coast to the edges of Araucania in theneighbourhood of latitude 35º south. The imperial territories were naturally narrowed to the Andean region, for the tropical forests to the east offered no allurements to the mountain-loving race which, indeed, could endure only temporarily the heat of the western coast, so that Inca campaigners in this direction resorted to frequent reliefs lest their men be debilitated. On the other hand, the immense expanse north and south, notwithstanding the perfection of the roads and fortresses built by astute rulers to facilitate communication, caused a natural tension of the parts and a tendency to break at the appearance of even the least weakness at the centre. Such appears to have been the fatal defect underlying the conflict of Huascar, at Cuzco, with Atahualpa, whose initial strength lay in his possession of Quito, and whose career was brought to an untimely end by the advent of Pizarro. Despite the fact that Inca power had been clearly crescent within the generation, it is by no means certain that the political conditions which the Spaniards used to advantage might not, if left to themselves, have disrupted the great empire.
There is reason to think that such a rupture had occurred at least once before in the history of Andean civilization. The list of more than a hundred Peruvian kings given by the Licentiate Fernando Montesinos (writing about 1650)[126]was formerly viewed with much distrust, chiefly for the reason that the kings of the pre-Inca dynasties recorded by Montesinos are almost without exception unnamed by earlier and prime authorities on Peruvian history (including Garcilasso de la Vega and Cieza de León). Recent discoveries, however, both scholarly and archaeological, have brought a new plausibility to Montesinos's lists, and it appears probable that he derived them from the lost works of Blas Valera, one of the earliest men in the field, known to have had exceptional opportunities for a study of native lore; while at the same time the archaeological investigations of Max Uhle and the brilliant achievements of the expeditions headed by Hiram Binghamhave given a new definiteness to knowledge of pre-Inca conditions.[127]
It has long been known that Inca civilization was only the last in a series of Peruvian culture periods. Back of it, in the highlands, lay the Megalithic Age, so called from the great size of the stone blocks in its cyclopean masonry, the earliest centre of this culture being supposed to have been about Lake Titicaca, and especially Tiahuanaco, at the south of the lake—a site remarkable not only for the most extraordinary of all ancient American monuments, the monolithic gate and the surrounding precincts, but also for the importance ascribed to it in legend as a place of origin of nations. Other highland centres, however, hark back to the same period, and Cuzco itself, in old cyclopean walls, shows evidence of an age of Megalithic greatness upon which the later Inca civilization had supervened. Again, in the coastal region from Ica to Truxillo—the realms of the Yunca, according to the older chroniclers—there were several successive culture periods; and though it is possible that traditions such as that of Naymlap (seeChapter VI, Section V) indicate a foreign origin for the Yunca peoples, in any case their differing environment would account for much. The peoples of the littoral could have no herds of llamas, since the animal was unable to live in that region; and hence they looked mainly to cotton for their fabrics, while the sea gave them fair compensation in the matter of food. In the lesser arts, especially in that of the potter, they surpassed the highlanders and, indeed, all other Americans; but their building material was adobe, and they have left no magnificent monuments, as have the stone-workers of the hills. Nevertheless at some remote, pre-Inca period the ideas of the coast and those of the highlands met and interchanged: the art of Tiahuanaco is reflected in motive at Truxillo, while the vases of Nasca repeat the bizarre decoration of the monolith of Chavin de Huantar. The hoary sanctity of the great temple of Pachacamac was such that its Incaconqueror adopted the god into his own pantheon; and it was just here, at the Yunca shrine of Pachacamac, that Uhle found evidence of a series of culture periods leading to a considerable antiquity. The indigenous coastal art had already passed its climax of expressive skill when the influence of Tiahuanaco appeared; but this influence lasted long enough to leave an enduring impress on the interregnum-like period which followed, awaiting, as it were, the return of the hills' influence, which came with the advent of the Inca. Such, in brief, is the restoration, and it seems to fit remarkably with Bingham's discoveries and with Montesinos's lists.
Of the one hundred and two kings in these lists, the last ten form the Inca dynasty (a group with respect to which Montesinos is in essential agreement with other chroniclers), whose beginning is placed 1100-1200a. d.; back of these are the twenty-eight lords of Tampu-Tocco; and still earlier the sixty-four rulers of the ancient empire, forty-six of them forming theamauta(or priest-king) dynasty which followed after the primal line of eighteen Sons of the Gods. Were this scheme of regal succession followed outin extensothe beginnings of the Megalithic Empire of the highlands should fall near the beginning of the first millennium before Christ, and that of the Tampu Tocco dynasty in the early years of our Era. Archaeological and other considerations lead, however, to estimates somewhat more conservative, placing the culmination of the early empire in the first centuries of the Christian era, and the sojourn at Tampu Tocco from about 600-1100a. d.[128]
The Inca dynasty, established at Cuzco toward 1200a. d., was the creator of the great empire which the Spaniards found, and its record is the traditional history of Peru, recounted by Garcilasso and Cieza. According to the legend, the Inca tribes had come to Cuzco from a place called Tampu-Tocco, a city of refuge in an inaccessible valley, where for centuries their ancestors had lived in seclusion, the cause of the retirement being as follows: in past generations, it was said, the Amautadynasty held sway over a great highland realm, extending from Tucuman in the south to Huanuco in the north, the empire having been formed perhaps by the earlier royal house, which was calledPirua, after the name of its first King. In the reign of the forty-sixth Amauta, there came an invasion of hordes from the south and east, preceded by comets, earthquakes, and dire divinations. The King Titu Yupanqui, borne on a golden litter, led his soldiers out to battle; he was slain by an arrow, and his discouraged followers retreated with his body. Cuzco fell, and after war came pestilence, leaving city and country uninhabitable, while the remnants of the Amauta people fled away to Tampu-Tocco, where they established themselves, leaving at Cuzco only a few priests who refused to abandon the shrine of the Sun. It was said that the art of writing was lost in thisdébâcle, and that the later art of reckoning byquipus, or knotted and coloured cords, was invented at Tampu-Tocco. Here, in a city free from pests and unmoved by earthquakes, the Kings of Tampu-Tocco reigned in peace, going occasionally to Cuzco to worship at the ancient shrine, over which, with its neighborhood, some shadowy authority was preserved. Finally a woman, Siyu-Yacu, of noble birth and high ambition, caused the report to be spread that her son, Rocca, had been carried off to be instructed by the Sun himself, and a few days later the youth, appearing in a garment glittering with gold, told the people that corruption of the ancient religion had caused their fall, but that their lost glories should be restored to them under his leadership. Thus Rocca became the first of the Incas, Cuzco was restored as capital, and the new empire started on a career which was to exceed the old in grandeur.
With the removal to Cuzco, Tampu-Tocco became no more than a monumental shrine where priests and vestals preserved the rites of the old religion and watched over the caves made sacred by the bones of former monarchs. The native writer Salcamayhua, who, like Garcilasso, makes Manco Capac thefounder of the Incas (Montesinos regards Manco Capac I as the first native-born king of the Pirua dynasty), tells how "at the place of his birth he ordered works to be executed, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows, which were emblems of the house of his fathers, whence he descended"; and the name Tampu-Tocco actually means "Tavern of the Windows," windows being an unusual feature of Peruvian architecture. As the event proves, the commemorative wall is still standing.
In 1911, Hiram Bingham, the leader of the expedition sent out by Yale University and the National Geographical Society, discovered in the wild valley of the Urubamba, north of Cuzco, the ruins of a mountain-seated city, one of the most wonderful, and (in its natural context) beautiful ruins in the world. Machu Picchu the place is called, and its discoverer identifies it with the Tampu-Tocco of Inca tradition. One of its most striking features is a wall with three great windows; it contains cave-made graves and temples; bones of the more recent dead indicate that those who last dwelt in it were priestesses and priests; and it gives evidence of long occupation. The more ancient stonework is the more beautiful in execution, seeming to hark back to the masterpieces of Megalithic civilization; the later portion is in Inca style. Especially interesting is the discovery of record stones, associated with the older period, indicating that an earlier method of chronology had been replaced in later times, for it is to the reign of the thirteenth King of Tampu-Tocco that the invention ofquipusis ascribed. Ideally placed as a city of refuge in a remote cañon, so that its very existence was unknown to the Spanish conquerors; seated on a granite hill unmoved by earthquakes; with its elaborate structures and complicated terraces indicating generations of residence, Machu Picchu represents the connecting link between the old and the new empires in Peru and gives a suddenly vivid plausibility to the traditions recorded by Montesinos.