The City of Nephi – The Fortress of Sacsayhuamán – Part I

Sacsahuaman (also known as Sacsayhuamán, Saqsaywaman) is a walled complex near and above the old city of Cusco, at an altitude of 12,000 feet (by comparison, Brian Head, near Cedar Breaks in southern Utah, at 9,800-feet, is the highest city in Utah, while Kings Peak, at 13,528 in northeastern Duchesne County in the central Uinta Mountains of Utah, is the highest peak in the State).
     The archaeological park of Sacsahuaman is located north of the city of Cuzco and covers an area of 3,094 hectares (7,645.5 acres, or 12 square miles), and contains more than 200 archaeological sites. Leading to Sacsahuaman today, there are two paved roads, one starts in the old and traditional neighborhood of San Cristobal and is just under a mile long, and the other road begins at Avenida Collasuyo and is a little over 2 miles long.

Ancient Peruvian city complex buildings

The city is such a remarkable layout of ancient structures of unprecedented engineering and construction ability, that when the conquistadors arrived, they looked at these extraordinary edifices and at the level of ability of the Inca around them, and despite the fact that these people had carved out an Empire covering 690,000 square miles in a little less than 100 years, the Spanish could not believe these “Peruvians” could have built such greatness. Workmanship, to these Europeans was so far beyond what they saw among the Inca caused these religious conquerors to attribute much, if not all, of what they saw to the work of demons or maligned spirits of the Devil.
    As a result, they tried to tear down and destroy what they considered to be Satan’s handiwork from the outset, and today much of the glory and beauty that was once Sacsahuaman is gone, its abundant gold sheeting stripped and melted down, its jeweled statues removed and destroyed, its magnificent structures demolished. Only the larger, unmovable boulders and hewn rock remains in place, enough of which, that gives us some idea to its past, along with the writings of the Spanish chroniclers who preserved in word and description, that once famed and remarkable area that today is merely a shadow that gives a hint of its former glory.
    Still, from what is left, we can draw a fairly good picture of the enormous achievements of the ancient builders of these cities, which in many cases, have been erroneously attributed to the Inca, whose building capabilities were far from the skilled artisans that originally built the marvelous constructions that we can only today catch a glimpse. As the conquerors correctly surmised, the Inca were simply not capable of building what we see today across the Peruvian landscape.

Three-tiered outer zigzag walls covering the north end of Sacsahuaman

In fact, not even the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, who was born around 1530, and raised in the shadow of these walls, writing much about what existed when he was a boy growing up there, had a clue as to how Sacsahuaman was built. He wrote:
    "...this fortress surpasses the constructions known as the seven wonders of the world. For in the case of a long broad wall like that of Babylon, or the colossus of Rhodes, or the pyramids of Egypt, or the other monuments, one can see clearly how they were executed...how, by summoning an immense body of workers and accumulating more and more material day by day and year by year, they overcame all difficulties by employing human effort over a long period. But it is indeed beyond the power of imagination to understand how these Indians, unacquainted with devices, engines, and implements, could have cut, dressed, raised, and lowered great rocks, more like lumps of hills than building stones, and set them so exactly in their places. For this reason, and because the Indians were so familiar with demons, the work is attributed to enchantment."
    Obviously, even in the 16^th century, Sacsahuaman was so ancient, no one had any memory of who built it or when, making the enormous achievement far older than modern scholars would lead us to believe as they fall over themselves today trying to make the Inca into some super race, which they were not—though they excelled at war, diplomacy, conquest and government.
    Not even in the early to mid 1500s did any Inca have any idea who built Sacsahuaman or when it was built—the same is true with Tiahuanaco, Puma Punku, Ollantaytambo and numerous other sites with such monumental stonework in the region. In fact, seeing the impossibility of the Inca at their highest civilized point when the Spanish entered Peru, and understanding there was no way the Indians could have built anything they saw, led to numerous questions by the conquerors as to who built the many structures they encountered and when were they built. To these questions, every Inca questioned replied that they did not know, stating merely that it was built by the ancients long before the Inca came.
    The official royal story line, of course, was that the Inca had built everything, a part of the diplomacy they developed over the century of their conquest—for the purpose of making their enemies believe they stood no chance against such a superior Empire with such tremendous power and ability, that fighting would only prove disastrous and that their salvation depended solely upon surrender and joining the might of the powerful Inca—which so many cultures did. It was a tact that served the Empire well, for many a tribe capitulated without raising a single sword in their defense.
    But Garcilaso, born of an Inca Princess, and a Captain of the Spanish conquerors, grew up in the royal courts of the Inca, talked with the old chiefs and the educated of the royal household all his growing years, and had no idea himself who had built Sacsahuaman, a fortress so dominant it was the focal point of the entire Empire, “the naval of the world,” and the seat of all power, even later under Spanish rule.

Top: Person showing a comparison height of the lower wall; Bottom: The engineering fete of cut and dressed stone that fits perfectly though each stone has multiple angled cuts to fit

The outer defensive perimeter consists of three outer lines of gargantuan walls, 1500 feet long and 54 feet wide, that flank the hill site of the temple and fortress citadel on three levels. The largest stone blocks, some of which are over 28-feet high, are regularly estimated to weigh over 120 tons, but other measurements claim they are between 300 and 440 tons. So precise was the masonry that one block on the outer walls, for example, has faces cut to fit perfectly with 12 other blocks. All the hewn blocks were fitted together so precisely that a thickness gauge could not be inserted between them.
    Beyond the walls is a 500,000 gallon water reservoir, storage cistern, ramps, citadels and underground chambers. At the top and center of the complex, on a collado, an artificially leveled mountain top, was the fortress, and next to it the temple—in Inca times called the “Fortress of the Sun” and the “Temple of the Sun.” And next to the temple was a triangle of three towers, the tallest and main tower was said to be 66-feet high.
    Beneath the fortress were a myriad of rooms, chambers, corridors, and a labyrinth of passageways that are no longer open to the public for fear tourists would wander off and get lost in the maze of tunnels that stretch for miles.
    As magnificent as the stonework is presently at Sacsahuaman, archaeologists tell us that the walls rose ten feet higher than their remnants seen today. That additional ten feet was removed to supply the building materials for the cathedrals and casas of the conquistadors. In fact, there simply are no other walls like these. They are different from Stonehenge, different from the Pyramids of the Egyptians and the Maya, different from any of the other ancient monolithic stoneworks. The stones fit so perfectly that no blade of grass or steel can slide between them. There is no mortar. They often join in complex and irregular surfaces that would appear to have been a nightmare for the stonemason to crerate. There is usually neither adornment nor inscription.
(See the next post, The City of Nephi – The Fortress of Sacsayhuamán – Part II,” for an understanding of who actually built these walls and fortress and how they managed to do so, defying known engineering techniques of today)