The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological, and Calendrical SystemsNuttall, Zelia
Religion
The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations: A Comparative Research Based on a Study of the Ancient Mexican Religious, Sociological, and Calendrical Systems
Documentary evidence certainly justifies the inference that the
civilization of Peru itself was due to just such a deliberately executed
plan of colonization, which gradually extended southwards and ultimately
took root and flourished in the most favorably situated locality.
Leonce Angrand, who cites Acosta, Montesinos, Garcia, Boturini, Valera,
Garcilaso de la Vega, Gomara, Balboa, Paz Soldan, d’Orbigny, Zarate, Cieza
de Leon, Torquemada, Herrera, Velasco, Rivero and Tschudi, Gibbon,
Stevenson, Castelnau, Desjardins, Villavicencio, Roman and others, unites
their testimony in the following sentence: “It is therefore solely towards
the North, in the elevated mountainous region, that researches should be
directed [in order to ascertain the origin of the Peruvian civilization].
As soon as this is done innumerable proofs appear of the residence, in
extremely ancient times, of people who can scarcely belong to other races
than those who founded Cuzco and Tiahuanaco. It is therefore, from the
North that these hardy pioneers of humanity came, from distant
civilizations, and it is certainly by going northwards that one must look
for traces of one or the other current of civilization. The inexhaustible
force of expansion of the Inca Empire extended to the North as well as in
other directions.”
Angrand also mentions a line “of prehistoric ruins which extend northwards
from Peru and display the essentially characteristic outlines of the
Mexican Teocallis or temples.”(24)
Garcilaso de la Vega, citing Padre Blas Valera, goes so far as to state
that the race, which introduced human sacrifices and ritualistic
cannibalism into Peru, “had come from the region of Mexico, peopled the
regions of Panama and the Isthmus of Darien and all those great mountains
which extend between Peru and the new kingdom of Granada” (the present
Nicaragua).(25)
According to Padre Anello Oliva, whose manuscript notes on Peru are
preserved in the British Museum Library, the immediate ancestors of the
Incas were colonists who came from unknown parts either by land or by sea,
and settled at Caracas (Atlantic coast), whence they gradually spread
southwards. As his authority for this statement, he cites original
manuscripts which had been placed in his hands by a Spanish missionary of
high standing. Among these was a relation by a Quipucamayoc or “accountant
by means of quippus,” named Catari, who had been a chronicler of the
Incas. His forefathers had occupied the same post and had handed down the
above record as having been related to them by their predecessors.
This account does not disagree with that of Salcamayhua who states that
“all the nations of the empire had come from beyond Potosi, in four or
five armies, arrayed for war and settled in the districts as they
advanced.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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