Kim MacQuarrie’s Peru & South America Blog
June 7, 2008
Armed With a Pen, and Ready to Save the Incas’ Mother Tongue
NYT
CALLAO, Peru
“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago.”
Simple enough, right? But not for Demetrio Túpac Yupanqui.
Instead, he regales visitors to his home here in this gritty port city on Lima’s edge with his Quechua version of the opening words of “Don Quixote”:
“Huh k’iti, la Mancha llahta suyupin, mana yuyarina markapin, yaqa kay watakuna kama, huh axllasqa wiraqucha.”
(Above: A 16th century drawing of Francisco Pizarro meeting the Inca emperor Atahualpa, in Cajamarca, Peru in 1532)
Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, theologian, professor, adviser to presidents and, now, at the sunset of his long life, a groundbreaking translator of Cervantes, greets the perplexed reactions to these words with a wide smile.
“When people communicate in Quechua, they glow,” said Mr. Túpac Yupanqui, who at 85 still appears before his pupils each day in a tailored dark suit. “It is a language that persists five centuries after the conquistadors arrived. We cannot let it die…”
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Machu Picchu
German may have found, looted Inca city
June 5, 2008
Newscientist.com
LIMA, Peru — The jungle-shrouded Inca citadel of Machu Picchu may have been rediscovered – and looted – decades before the Yale scholar credited with the find first got there, a researcher said Thursday.
Most academics say Yale University’s Hiram Bingham III rediscovered the site in Peru’s verdant southeastern Andes during a 1911 expedition.
But Paolo Greer, a retired Alaska oil pipeline foreman, says otherwise. Thirty years of digging through files in the United States and Peru led him to maps and documents showing that a German businessman named Augusto R. Berns got there first…
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The Inca Ruins of Saqsaywaman
Cusco (3-4 Days)
Visiting the Inca Ruins of Saqsaywaman
When the Inca emperor Manco Inca rose up against Francisco Pizarro and his men in 1536, the emperor at first escaped from the city, then returned with several hundred thousand Inca warriors who trapped the 190 Spaniards within two small buildings on Cusco’s main square. Francisco Pizarro was in Lima at the time leaving three of his brothers—Hernando, Juan, and Gonzalo—in charge of the city. Thoroughly unnerved by the massive size and scale of the rebellion, the three brothers decided that the Spaniards’ only chance was to break out of the city and to somehow capture the massive Inca ceremonial center of Saqsaywaman, now being used as a fortress, that loomed above. Saqsaywaman, it turned out, was the key to capturing the Inca’s capital.
Quoting from Chapter 9 of The Last Days of the Incas:
“Conferring with Manco’s cousin Pasac, who had sided with the Spaniards, Juan and Hernando [Pizarro] decided that the only way to attempt storming the fortress of Saqsaywaman was to first somehow break through the legions of warriors to the north of the city, gaining the road that led to Jauja, and then, if successful, to wheel about and ride east around the hills until they reached the grassy plain fronting the fortress. Once there, the Spaniards would have to somehow launch a frontal assault against the Incas’ colossal walls. To many of those who listened to the plan, the mission seemed suicidal. Still, unless they were somehow able to seize the initiative, all realized that they were doomed to remain in the city and to gradually be worn down by attrition. With the grace of God, thought some, the desperate plan just might work…
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