THE EMPIRE OF THE SUN
By L. TAYLOR HANSEN
What was the mysterious "Empire of the Sun"? Was it the country of the ancient Incas ruled by the "Tiger"?
And the footsteps of The Southerners echoed throughout the new land..." says America's most ancient book, The Chilam Balam. It is a phrase which haunts one's mind as one continues to run the various northern threads of a deeply inwoven pattern back to what is apparently a southern source. One becomes increasingly reminded of the world of Caesar's day when all roads led to Rome.
At last one begins to notice this southern continent where the antiquity of countless ages awaits the study of skilled minds. It is a vast untouched field in which the merest scratches have been made, and before which those who know it the best stand appalled at their own ignorance. Dr. John W. Sargent, for example, holding degrees of doctor of science from Oxford and P.H.D. from Lima, and former leader of a scientific expedition to Peru for the British Museum says: "After twenty-eight years spent in probing the past of Peru and Latin America in general, I feel that I know less today about it than I imagined I did when I began."
Yet Dr. Sargent's other ideas are more intriguing. A long list of facts has convinced him that man was living in South America some two hundred thousand years ago, while he is inclined to join Poznansky, the Bolivian savant, in the idea that the pre-Incan civilization in the high Andes dates back some eighteen thousand years. As for the Incas themselves, he would go beyond the chronology of Montesinos and give that brilliant empire the duration of three thousand years.
Most other scientists will not follow him in this. For example, he gives Manco Capac as the name of the first Inca and then Sinchi Rocca as the name of the second dynasty a hundred generations later. Linguists are no longer willing to concede that these were Incas, as they do not have Quichua names. They are therefore to be relegated to the great legendary powers who preceded the rise of the historical Incan Empire which Pizarro conquered and wrecked. Of these pre-Incan empires there apparently were several, yet at the dawn stood the titan of them all. In many ways this empire seemed to be more impregnable than the Imperial City of Caesar. Then Something-Happened. What the nature of that Something may have been, is hard to tell now because the Great Colossus of The South existed so many milleniums ago....
It is not the Incan Empire which holds the attentions of the archaeologists in South America, though due to the childish inability of the conquering Spaniards to understand and appreciate the institutions or the history of a foreign people, little enough is known of that civilization. We have two authorities. One is the mission-bred Inca boy who spent most of his life in Spain, and who wrote the history of The Incan Empire from what tales he could remember from the childhood stories once told him by his mother.
The other authority is the scholar, Montesinos, a Spaniard, who, imbued with a desire to learn what could be learned of the vanished empire before it was too late (the conquest had taken place before his birth), tramped the entire continent over, seeking out the old readers of the quippus,[1] who had been the historians, and the sons and grandsons of the historians. From records long vanished, and from others destined to vanish since he made up his history, the young Spaniard reconstructed the rise of The Incan Empire.
It is one of the most fantastic facts possible, that the history followed today is that composed by the Inca boy, who, as a poor scholar who learns a historical sequence too young and without great enthusiasm might be expected to do, probably forgot most of the list of rulers; while the list of the scholar Montesinos, who went to the historians for his data, is the one which is questioned. However, it is only fair to point out that the list of Montesinos does contain these legendary names which are now thought to belong not to the Incas but to their legendary ancestors, the supposed First Great Empire of The Sun.
In order to understand how such a confusion could come about, we must remember that the Incas claim to have been driven out of their ancient stronghold in the Andes of the Tiahuanaco where "The Sun First Arose", and to have taken refuge toward the Southwest. A period of chaos and anarchy followed, in which they left their homeland and went north, wandering for many generations in the forests of the northland. Then,
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- ↑ A quippu is a series of colored and knotted strings, each knot of which stands for a word or sentence. Relics of these, degenerated, because no longer recognized as such, are to be found wound into the braided hair of many tribes. Since even the Karibs of Columbus' day were quippu-reckoners, it appears to have, been an eastern culture-trait, though vestiges of it, probably carried thence by trade, are to be found in Tahiti and China of the third millenium B.C. The center of the culture trait of quippu-reckoning is apparently South America.
Recently, the quippus recording populations and tribute of the Incan Empire have been found. From them we have learned that the Incan Empire at the time of the conquest ruled about three hundred million souls, or three times the population of the present United States. Today, Peru has a population of five million.
