The Secret City of Machu Picchu

 There isn't anything quite as chilling as a city bereft of its inhabitants. A silent array of towers, walls and houses, without voices or the hubbub of everyday life. A place solely constructed to shelter people, that now has no purpose. Abandoned cities can be found around the world. Sometimes they were killed by war, while others starved in famine. In the case of the most ancient cities, the mystery of their deaths may never be solved.
The Secret City on the Mountain Top In 1911 Professor Hiram Bingham, of Yale University, mounted an expedition to Peru to examine Inca ruins (The Inca Empire ruled Peru from 1200 A.D. to 1532). Questioning the local inhabitants, he heard about a city on a mountain top. Hiring a guide, Bingham set off in a cold drizzle through a forest and up a long slope. In the steepest sections logs with notches cut in them served as ladders. Any fall would have been fatal.

After a two hour climb, Bingham finally was led to a fantastic sight: perched between two peaks was a city. Bingham was able to find the ruins of many houses, a staircase, fountains, and a temple with an altar for the Sun God.

The city is now known as Machu Picchu. At first Bingham supposed this had been built as a hideout from the Spanish that invaded Inca territories in 1532. Archaeological investigations, though, have established the city was built before the Spanish arrived. The first signs of human habitation date back to 1300 A.D. The city was fortified and probably used for religious ceremonies. The Spanish invaders never found this sacred place and the Incas secret was safe on top of the mountain.
The Mayans Move Out

Few peoples in history are as mysterious as the ancient Mayans of Central America. Though socially isolated in the jungles early in their history, they developed knowledge never obtained by other comparable civilizations. For instance, their number system could express sums in the millions and they developed a calender accurate for 400 million years. They could predict the rising and the setting of the sun, the transits of Venus and eclipse of the sun and moon down to the second. They measured the length of the year to 365.2420 days, only a small fraction off from the actual value of 365.2422. They had a highly sophisticated set of numerical notations and understood the concept of the quantity of zero a thousand years before anyone else did.

Despite this, the Mayans never seemed to move beyond the stone age. They never employed the wheel for any practical purpose, nor developed a phonetic alphabet. Despite amazing feats of architecture, including a suspension bridge 600 feet in length, they never figured out how to build a "true" arch.

This paradox, the Mayan's genius in the theoretical, with little practical application, has led some to suggest their knowledge came as the result of visits from ancient alien astronauts. Others think that the Mayans may have had an unprecedented genius in their history who single-handedly moved their science forward in a great leap.

The Mayans also built wonderful cities with large pyramids, terraces and temples made of stone. From 300 to 800 A.D. these city-states thrived and many vast complexes of public buildings were erected. These dozen or so metropolises became bustling centers of commerce and culture. None had walls or fortifications. The Mayans, isolated from the outside world, lived with themselves in perfect peace.

Then suddenly the Mayans abandoned their cities and migrated to the edge of their empire traveling north to the Yucatan. Their great cities, left to the forest, soon crumbled and vanished only to be discovered by the Spanish hundreds of years later. Why did the Mayans abandon their great metropolises? Did it just become too hard to farm in the jungle? Did centuries of burning and planting exhaust the soil? Or did the common people rebel against a harsh ruling class sending them to live at the outskirts of civilization only to discover the lower classes were incapable of maintaining the cities alone? Why move north when that brought them into contact with other nations which led to war? We may never know. Mayan books that may have contained this secret were burned by the Spanish who feared them as "works of the Devil."


Copyright Lee Krystek 1997. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.unmuseum.org/lostcity.htm