The Fallacy of the Inca – Part II

Continuing from the previous post with the fallacy of the Inca regarding the development and building of ancient Peru.

The Inca used existing roads to move their armies quickly to any part of their empire

In less than a century the Incas rose from obscure origins to build one of the largest empires of the ancient world. At its zenith it extended northward from the Inca capital Cuzco along the spine of the Andes to embrace most of modern Peru and Ecuador, and southward into Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. The sheer scale of the empire, coupled with the challenges of the rugged landscape, made the Inca achievement truly remarkable. But after some fifty years of control, the empire erupted in a civil war between two brothers and the result was their conquest by the Spanish and the assassination of the Inca ruler Atawallpa, and the final years of the rebellious, neo-Inca state in the tropical forests of Vilcabamba finally coming to an end in 1571 (Craig Morris and Adriana von Hagen, the The Incas: Ancient Peoples and Places, Thames & Hudson, New York 2012).
    Centered in Peru but stretching from Ecuador to Chile, the Inka empire was the culmination of many indigenous civilizations. The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead using techniques contemporary with ancient Egypt's similar burials. The coastal Moche built large adobe pyramids, road networks and complex irrigation systems. The Nazca invented underground aqueducts and made vast drawings of animals and geometric shapes criss-crossing the desert. The Inka, when they arrived on the scene in Cuzco in the early 1400s absorbed a set of symbols from many earlier Andean cultures and incorporated them in ceramics, architecture, textiles, metalwork and dance (Craig Morris, et. al., The Inca Empire and its Andean Origins, Abbeville Press, American Museum of Natural History, 1993).
    There was never such a thing as the Inca “empire.” It was in fact a confederation of states, with Cuzco being the center. Unfortunately, most that has been written about the Inca comes from Spanish chronicles. The Inca themselves kept most of their knowledge from these ruthless conquerors, in an attempt to protect their cultural integrity. The conventional history is thus blurred.

The roads throughout Andean Peru, Ecuador and western Bolivia were mostly cobbled and have lasted thousands of years, many still in use today

The 25,000-mile long road system from Colombia in the north to the middle of Chile and Argentina in the south, and from the coastal lands to the Amazon, which was used by them for their speedy movement over the lands they conquered, was not built by them, though today the roads bear their name. The previous ancient Peruvians, long before the Inca, built those roads and many of the ancient structures now called Inca work by tourist guides. Certainly, the Inca did not build the ingenious rope bridges that interconnected many roads and trails. This original road system was an inheritance from much older cultures that enabled the Inca to swiftly conquer and control their vast empire.
    The Inca never made artistic depictions of their leaders, and thus we do not know what they looked like. Just prior to the arrival of the Spanish in Cuzco, the entire Inca royal family (who were the true Inca, not the general population) had been slaughtered in a civil war. Thus, even early Spanish portraits do not present a genuine depiction.
    On the one hand, the Inca knew the concept of the wheel, as seen in their spindle used for spinning wool. However, due to the hilly and mountainous nature of the Inca world, carts with wheels would have been useless. Thus, the Inca, as had their predecessors, used Llama instead to move things. On the other hand, the Inca did not possess the building skills, as seen by their shoddy patchwork of earlier works, and could not have built the magnificent works that still awe builders of our day.

Left: The khipu cords, with knots in various levels; Right: An embroidery work considered to contain binary language

The Inca had 2 forms of recording their language. One was the Khipu system of knotted cords used for accounting purposes, but recent revelations from Harvard PhD Gary Urton show that the Khipu was also a binary code, with the ability to convert words into numbers. A very advanced concept.
    They also had a glyph system where each symbol in the squares about represents a syllable, and adorned the royal Inca attire. Only the elite of the Inca could read these glyphs, and thus the general public had no clue what they meant. In the words of one of the high Inca “a little knowledge is dangerous.”
    “The ruins of Tiahuanuco have been regarded by all students of American antiquities as in many respects the most interesting and important, and at the same time most enigmatical, of any on the continent. They have excited the admiration and wonder alike of the earliest and latest travelers, most of whom, vanquished in their attempts to penetrate the mystery of their origin, have been content to assign them an antiquity beyond that of the other monuments of America, and to regard them as the solitary remains of a civilization that disappeared before that of the Inca began, and contemporaneous with that of Egypt and the East (Brien Foerster, A Brief History of the Incas, CreateSpace Publishers, 2010).
    Many of the stone buildings and walls were magnificent when first built and even today command an awesome sight. The mastery of these ancient builders far surpassed the limited building skill of the Inca.

 

As American archaeologist and newspaper editor Ephraim George Squier as said of these awe-inspiring structures in Peru in 1877: “Unique, yet perfect in type and harmonious in style, they appear to be the work of a people who were thorough masters of an architecture which had no infancy, passed through no period of growth, and of which we find no other examples. Tradition, which mumbles more or less intelligibly of the origin of many other American monuments, is dumb concerning these. The wondering Indians told the first Spaniards that ‘they existed before the sun shone in the heavens,’ that they were raised by giants, or that they were the remains of an impious people whom an angry Deity had converted into stone because they had refused hospitality to his viceregent and messenger“ (E. George Squier, Land of the Inca, Harper & Brothers, New York 1877).
    The Inca were the last of the priest kings and queens of Tiwanaku (or Tiahuanaco), which is presently 13 miles from the shore of Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, and thousands of years ago rested on the shoreline of what would have been a vastly large sea. This is well documented by many researchers, including Graham Hancock in his book “Fingerprints of the Gods.” Tiwanaku itself is one of the most mysteries places of human habitation on the planet, as it contains, even to the present day, the remains of structures which defy conventional archaeological timelines. 
    What is commonly suggested by most academia as originating about 300 B.C. Modern science has been unable to explain how such a clearly highly evolved culture as that of Tiwanaku, and the even more technologically advanced one at nearby Puma punku were able, at a barren and bone chilling 13,000 plus foot elevation, to sculpt and hew precision stone works, some of immense size and astonishing precision, with the tools of presumed primitive man? The stone used at Puma punku, for example, is diorite, so hard that the only material known which is harder is diamond. And yet, a so-called primitive culture was able to achieve seemingly perfectly flat planes, ninety degree angles, and exacting holes and channels in this material.
    No matter what age of these structures turns out to be correct, the people themselves are also an enigma. It is known that due to an extensive El Nino event in the area, about the year 900 to 950 A.D., which lasted 40 years, and as a result of attacks of nearby Aymara speaking tribal people, the priest kings of Tiwanaku had to flee that place.
    The Inca are known to have been an incredibly organized group, quite small in size, that entered Cuzco and the Sacred Valley of Peru and quickly became the dominant civilization. Whatg should be understood about these Inca is that they spent their entire 100-year history expanding their kingdom, arching to and conquering far away lands. It was a small group at first which quickly grew larger, but the conquered often rebelled or were in a state of  rebellion, which took all of the Inca resources and personnel to keep them in check.
    They simply would not have had the time or manpower to build magnificent roads, great cities, and far away fortresses. These were all built by a much earlier people, and were utilized by the Inca, as they had been occupied by other cultures before them.