The lost city of the Incas

I'm going to break up the tale of Macchu Picchu into a few different posts to make it more palatable.  It was quite the trip.  I'm going to skip over the chronological run down and start with the history of Macchu Picchu that we learned from our tour guide.  

As we were walking up to Macchu Picchu and dying and wondering why the hell they would build on top of the mountain....our guide explains that Incas built it on top as protection.  Anyone wanting to invade would have to climb the mountains from the Rio Urubamba.  Because of that, the Spaniards never invaded Macchu Picchu, they didn't even know it was there.

The Inca empire was pretty much the whole west coast of South America, with Cusco in the center as the capital.  All roads lead to Cusco.  When the Spaniards invaded and the last Inca king staged a revolution, the people of Macchu Picchu slowly abandoned it to make way toward Cusco to fight in the revolution.  Unfortunately, the last Inca king was captured and publicly murdered, effecting killing off the Incas.  Inca was a monarchy, so when the last Inca king was killed, there were no more kings, therefore no more Incas.

In 1911, a guy named Bingham from Hawaii decided to try to find the lost city of the Incas.  He knew that all civilizations are built near water, so he followed the Rio Urubamba, eventually meeting a local man who didn't know about the lost city, but knew about Macchu Picchu.  He took Bingham to the top, where there were 4 families living there!  But it was extremely overgrown by 150 years of being mostly uninhabited.  He got money from Yale University of excavate and research.  They spent a few years cleaning and sending artifacts back to Yale to be researched and cataloged.  Around the 1950's Macchu Picchu became a tourist attraction.

Unfortunately, the tarnish on the story is that Yale never gave back the artifacts that Bingham sent up.  Last year, the Peruvian government took Yale to court  over the stolen artifacts.  Yale gave back about 25% of the artifacts.  Peruvians are still hoping they'll get the other 75% back.

View of Macchu Picchu from Hyanapicchu the mountain overlooking the city. Macchu Picchu means big mountain in Quechua.  Photo care of my roommate Ben, the photographer.

View of Hyanapicchu, meaning little mountain from Macchu Picchu.  That was the second mountain we climbed to the top of.  But more about that in the next post where I whinge about how hard it was.  Photo also care of Ben.