dramas had been handed down. Dr. Justiniani told me that the Ollantay play was put into writing by Dr. Don Antonio Valdez, the cura of Sicuani, from the mouths of Indians. He divided it into scenes, with a few stage directions, and it was acted before the unfortunate Tupac Amaru, a friend of Valdez, who headed an insurrection against the Spaniards in 1782. It would appear that Valdez was not the first to reduce the play to writing, for there is or was a version of 1735, and others dating from the previous century.[1]
The father of Dr. Justiniani was a friend of Dr. Valdez, and he made a copy of that learned Quichua scholar's manuscript. This is the one which I copied. Dr. Valdez died in 1816, and in 1853 the original Valdez manuscript was possessed by his nephew and heir, Don Narciso Cuentas of Tinta. I ascertained the existence of another copy in the possession of Dr. Rosas, the cura of Chinchero, and there was another in the monastery of San Domingo at Cuzco, which was nearly illegible from damp. But the literature on the subject of the drama of Ollantay is extensive.
The period of the drama is during the reigns of the Inca Pachacuti and his son Tupac Yupanqui. The hero is a warrior named Apu Ollantay,[2] who was Viceroy of the province of Anti-suyu. Though
