their reason. It is also recorded that he passed on his teachings to them
1 South American Mythology, p. 87.
2 Ibid., p. 44.
3 Antonio de la Calancha, Cronica Moralizada del Orden de San Augustin en el Peru,
1638, in South American Mythology, p. 87.
4 Good summaries of the Plutarch account are given in M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian
Legends and Stories, Rubicon Press, London, 1990, pp. 24-9; and in E. A. Wallis Budge,
From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 178-83.
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by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments.
While he was gone, however, he was plotted against by seventy-two
members of his court, led by his brother-in-law Set. On his return the
conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood
and gold was offered as a prize to any guest who could fit into it exactly.
Osiris did not know that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his
body measurements. As a result, when the assembled guests tried one by
one to get into it they failed. Osiris lay down comfortably inside. Before
he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward, nailed the lid
tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there
would be no air. The coffer was then thrown into the Nile. It had been
intended that it should sink, but it floated rapidly away, drifting for a
considerable distance until it reached the sea coast.
At this point the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, intervened. Using all the
great magic for which she was renowned, she found the coffer and
concealed it in a secret place. However, her evil brother Set, out hunting
in the marshes, discovered the coffer, opened it and, in a mad fury, cut
the royal corpse into fourteen pieces which he scattered throughout the
land.
Once more Isis set off to save her husband. She made a small boat of
papyrus reeds, coated with pitch, and embarked on the Nile in search of
the remains. When she had found them she worked powerful spells to
reunite the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old
form. Thereafter, in an intact and perfect state, Osiris went through a
process of stellar rebirth to become god of the dead and king of the
underworld—from which place, legend had it, he occasionally returned to
earth in the guise of a mortal man.5
Although there are huge differences between the traditions it is bizarre
that Osiris in Egypt and Thunupa-Viracocha in South America should have
had all of the following points in common:
• both were great civilizers;
• both were conspired against;
• both were struck down;
• both were sealed inside a container or vessel of some kind;
• both were then cast into water;
• both drifted away on a river;
• both eventually reached the sea.
Are such parallels to be dismissed as coincidences? or could there be
some underlying connection?
5 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 180.
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Reed boats of Suriqui
The air was Alpine cold and I was sitting on the front of a motor launch
doing about twenty knots across the icy waters of Lake Titicaca. The sky
above was clear blue, reflecting aquamarine and turquoise tints inshore,
and the vast body of the lake, glinting in copper and silver tones, seemed
to stretch away for ever ...
The passages in the legends that spoke of vessels made of reeds
needed to be followed up because I knew that ‘boats of totora rush’ were
a traditional form of transport on this lake. However, the ancient skills
required to build craft of this type had atrophied in recent years and we
were now headed towards Suriqui, the one place where they were still
properly made.
On Suriqui Island, in a small village close to the lakeshore, I found two
elderly Indians making a boat from bundled totora rushes. The elegant
craft, which appeared to be nearly complete, was approximately fifteen
feet long. It was wide amidships, but narrow at either end with a high
curving prow and stern.
I sat down for a while to watch. The more senior of the two builders,
who wore a brown felt hat over a curious peaked woollen cap, repeatedly
braced his bare left foot against the side of the vessel to give additional
leverage as he pulled and tightened the cords that held the bundles of
reeds in place. From time to time I noticed that he rubbed a length of
cord against his own perspiring brow—thus moistening it to increase its
adhesion.
The boat, surrounded by chickens and occasionally investigated by a
shy, browsing alpaca, stood amid a litter of discarded rushes in the
backyard of a ramshackle farmhouse. It was one of several I was able to
study over the next few hours and, though the setting was unmistakably
Andean, I found myself repeatedly overtaken by a sense of déjà vu from
another place and another time. The reason was that the totora vessels of
Suriqui were virtually identical, both in the method of construction and in
finished appearance, to the beautiful craft fashioned from papyrus reeds
in which the Pharaohs had sailed the Nile thousands of years previously.
In my travels in Egypt I had examined the images of many such vessels
painted on the walls of ancient tombs. It sent a tingle down my spine to
see them now so colourfully brought to life on an obscure island on Lake
Titicaca—even though my research had partially prepared me for this
coincidence. I knew that no satisfactory explanation had ever been given
for how such close and richly detailed similarities of boat design could
occur in two such widely separated places. Nevertheless, in the words of
one authority in ancient navigation who had addressed himself to this
conundrum:
Here was the same compact shape, peaked and raised at both ends with rope
lashings running from the deck right round the bottom of the boat all in one piece
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... Each straw was placed with maximum precision to achieve perfect symmetry
and streamlined elegance, while the bundles were so tightly lashed that they
looked like ... gilded logs bent into a clog-shaped peak fore and aft.6
The reed boats of the ancient Nile, and the reed boats of Lake Titicaca
(the original design of which, local Indians insisted, had been given to
them by ‘the Viracocha people’7), had other points in common. Both, for
example, were equipped with sails mounted on peculiar two-legged
straddled masts.8 Both had also been used for the long-distance transport
of exceptionally heavy building materials: obelisks and gargantuan blocks
of stone bound for the temples at Giza and Luxor and Abydos on the one
hand and for the mysterious edifices of Tiahuanaco on the other.
In those far-off days, before Lake Titicaca became more than one
hundred feet shallower, Tiahuanaco had stood at the water’s edge
overlooking a vista of awesome and s
acred beauty. Now the great port,
capital city of Viracocha himself, lay lost amid eroded hills and empty
windswept plains.
Road to Tiahuanaco ...
After returning from Suriqui to the mainland we drove our hired jeep
across those plains, raising a cloud of dust. Our route took us through
the towns of Puccarani and Laha, populated by stolid Aymara Indians who
walked slowly in the narrow cobbled streets and sat placidly in the little
sunlit plazas.
Were these people the descendants of the builders of Tiahuanaco, as
the scholars insisted? Or were the legends right? Had the ancient city
been the work of foreigners with godlike powers who had settled here,
long ages ago?
6 Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, Book Club Associates, London, 1972, pp. 43, 295.
7 Ibid., p. 43.
8 Ibid., p. 295.
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Chapter 10
The City at the Gate of the Sun
The early Spanish travellers who visited the ruined Bolivian city of
Tiahuanaco at around the time of the conquest were impressed by the
sheer size of its buildings and by the atmosphere of mystery that clung
to them. ‘I asked the natives whether these edifices were built in the time
of the Inca,’ wrote the chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon, ‘They laughed at
the question, affirming that they were made long before the Inca reign
and ... that they had heard from their forebears that everything to be
seen there appeared suddenly in the course of a single night ...’1
Meanwhile another Spanish visitor of the same period recorded a
tradition which said that the stones had been lifted miraculously off the
ground, ‘They were carried through the air to the sound of a trumpet.’2
Not long after the conquest a detailed description of the city was
written by the historian Garcilaso de la Vega. No looting for treasure or
for building materials had yet taken place and, though ravaged by the
tooth of time, the site was still magnificent enough to take his breath
away:
We must now say something about the large and almost incredible buildings of
Tiahuanaco. There is an artificial hill, of great height, built on stone foundations
so that the earth will not slide. There are gigantic figures carved in stone ... these
are much worn which shows their great antiquity. There are walls, the stones of
which are so enormous it is difficult to imagine what human force could have put
them in place. And there are the remains of strange buildings, the most
remarkable being stone portals, hewn out of solid rock; these stand on bases
anything up to 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and 6 feet thick, base and portal being
all of one piece ... How, and with the use of what tools or implements, massive
works of such size could be achieved are questions which we are unable to answer
... Nor can it be imagined how such enormous stones could have been brought
here ...3
1 Pedro Cieza de Leon, Chronicle of Peru, Hakluyt Society, London, 1864 and 1883, Part
I, Chapter 87.
2 Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas, p. 64. See also Feats and Wisdom of the
Ancients, Time-Life Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1990, p. 55.
3 Royal Commentaries of the Incas, Book Three, Chapter one. See, for example, version
published by Orion Press, New York, 1961 (translated by Maria Jolas from the critical
annotated French edition of Alain Gheerbrant), pp. 49-50.
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Tiahuanaco.
That was in the sixteenth century. More than 400 years later, at the end
of the twentieth century, I shared Garcilaso’s puzzlement. Scattered
around Tiahuanaco, in defiance of the looters who had robbed the site of
so much in recent years, were monoliths so big and cumbersome yet so
well cut that they almost seemed to be the work of super-beings.
Sunken temple
Like a disciple at the feet of his master, I sat on the floor of the sunken
temple and looked up at the enigmatic face which all the scholars of
Tiahuanaco believed was intended to represent Viracocha. Untold
centuries ago, unknown hands had carved this likeness into a tall pillar of
red rock. Though now much eroded, it was the likeness of a man at peace
with himself. It was the likeness of a man of power ...
He had a high forehead, and large, round eyes. His nose was straight,
narrow at the bridge but flaring towards the nostrils. His lips were full.
His distinguishing feature, however, was his stylish and imposing beard,
which had the effect of making his face broader at the jaws than at the
temples. Looking more closely, I could see that the sculptor had
portrayed a man whose skin was shaved all around his lips with the result
that his moustache began high on his cheeks, roughly parallel with the
end of his nose. From there it curved extravagantly down beside the
corners of his mouth, forming an exaggerated goatee at the chin, and
then followed his jawline back to his ears.
Above and below the ears, on the side of the head, were carved odd
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representations of animals. Or perhaps it would be better to describe
these carvings as representations of odd animals, because they looked
There were other points of interest. For example, the stone figure of
Viracocha had been sculpted with the hands and arms folded, one below
the other, over the front of a long, flowing robe. On each side of this robe
appeared the sinuous form of a snake coiling upwards from ground to
shoulder level. And as I looked at this beautiful design (the original of
which had perhaps been embroidered on rich cloth) the picture that came
into my mind was of Viracocha as a wizard or a sorcerer, a bearded,
Merlin-like figure dressed in weird and wonderful clothes, calling down
fire from heaven.
The ‘temple’ in which the Viracocha pillar stood was open to the sky
and consisted of a large, rectangular pit, like a swimming pool, dug out
six feet below ground level. Its floor, about 40 feet long by 30 feet wide,
was composed of hard, flat gravel. Its strong vertical walls were formed
from precisely dressed ashlar blocks of varying sizes laid closely against
one another without mortar in the joints and interspersed with taller,
rough-hewn stelae. A set of steps was let into the southern wall and it
was down these I had come when I had entered the structure.
I walked several times around the figure of Viracocha, resting my
fingers on the sun-warmed stone pillar, trying to guess its purpose. It was
perhaps seven feet tall and it faced south, with its back to the old
shoreline of Lake Titicaca (originally less than six hundred feet away).4
Ranged out behind this central obelisk, furthermore, there were two
others, of smaller stature, possibly intended to represent Viracocha’s
legendary companions. All three figures, being severely, functionally
vertical, cast clean-edged shadows as I gazed at them, for the sun was
past its zenith.
I sat down on the ground again and looked slowly all around the
temple. Viracocha dominated it, like the conductor of an orchestra, and
yet its most striking feature undoubtedly lay elsewhere: lining the walls,
at various points and heights, were dozens and dozens of human heads
sculpted in stone. These were complete heads, protruding three
dimensionally out of the walls. There were several different (and
contradictory) scholarly opinions as to their function.
Pyramid
From the floor of the sunken temple, looking west, I could see an
immense wall into which was set an impressive geometrical gateway
made of large stone slabs. Silhouetted in this gateway by the afternoon
sun was the figure of a giant. The wall, I knew, enclosed a parade-ground
4 Bolivia, p. 156 (map).
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sized area called the Kalasasaya (a word in the local Aymara language
meaning simply ‘Place of the Upright Standing Stones’5). And the giant
was one of the huge time-worn pieces of sculpture referred to by
Garcilaso de la Vega.
I was eager to take a look at it, but for the moment my attention was
diverted southwards towards an artificial hill, 50 feet high, which lay
almost directly ahead of me as I climbed the steps out of the sunken
temple. The hill, which had also been mentioned by Garcilaso, was known
as the Akapana Pyramid. Like the pyramids at Giza in Egypt, it was
oriented with surprising precision towards the cardinal points. Unlike
those pyramids its ground-plan was somewhat irregular. Nonetheless, it
measured roughly 690 feet on each side which meant that it was a
hulking piece of architecture and the dominant edifice of Tiahuanaco.
I walked towards it now, and spent some time strolling around it and
clambering over it. Originally it had been a clean-sided step-pyramid of
earth faced with large andesite blocks. In the centuries since the
conquest, however, it had been used as a quarry by builders from as far
away as La Paz, with the result that only about ten per cent of its superb
facing blocks now remained.
What clues, what evidence, had those nameless thieves carried off with
them? As I climbed up the broken sides and around the deep grassy
troughs in the top of the Akapana, I realized that the true function of the