12. The Inca - Cities in the Cloud

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Discovery of Machu Picchu

0:30In the year 1911, the young explorer Hiram Bingham was exploring the mountainous cloud forests of Peru.

1:04He was chasing a rumor that had been circulating for many years, a rumor that an entire lost city might lie somewhere high in the Peruvian Andes, in a valley known as Urubamba.

1:22Bingham was skeptical, but upon hearing a tip from a local guide, he decided to climb to the top of the precarious mountain trail and investigate. He later wrote about how his journey unfolded. So lofty are the peaks on either side that although the trail was frequently shadowed by dense tropical jungle, many of the mountains were capped with snow. There seemed to be little in the way of ruins,

1:52and I began to think that my time had been wasted. However, the view was magnificent. On all sides of us rose the magnificent peaks of the Urubamba Canyon, while 2,000 feet below us, the rushing waters of the noisy river. Bingham climbed a little higher, hacking through the dense forest and fighting off the effects of altitude sickness that would often creep up on travelers in the high passes of the Andes.

2:26And soon, he stumbled across something that must have made his heart skip a beat. Presently, we found ourselves in the midst of a tropical forest, beneath the shade of whose trees we could make out a maze of ancient walls, the ruins of buildings made of blocks of granite, some of which were beautifully fitted together in the most refined style of Inca architecture.

2:55Bingham was impressed, but the more he explored, the more he realized that this was no mere scattering of ruins.

3:05A few roads farther along, we came to a little open space on which there were two splendid temples or palaces. The superior character of the stonework, the presence of these splendid edifices, and of what appeared to be an unusually large number of finely constructed stone dwellings, led me to believe that this might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America. His trek turned into a frenetic scramble, as crumbling ruins gave way to yet more and more ruins,

3:38and it became clear that a large settlement did indeed lie here under the dense scrub and undergrowth. For an hour and twenty minutes, we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance, we went on all fours, sometimes holding on by our fingernails. Here and there, a primitive ladder made from the roughly notched trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have been an impassable cliff.

4:10The heat was excessive. The ruins that Bingham had discovered were the remains of a royal estate of the kings of a people known as the Inca. It had lain completely abandoned for nearly four centuries on top of the craggy peaks of the Urubamba Valley.

4:32Today, it is one of the most recognizable and distinctive ruined places in the world, and it is known as Machu Picchu. It had once been an outpost of an empire that stretched right across the continent of South America and formed its most extensive and sophisticated civilization, an empire that had tamed one of the most hostile environments on Earth. As Bingham explored the overgrown ruins

5:03over the following weeks and months, clearing away the vegetation that rolled over these ancient walls, he must have asked himself, how had the people of this region built such a mighty fortress in the clouds? How had this great city gone undiscovered for so many centuries, and with no signs of war or destruction on its stone, what in all the world had happened to the Inca people of the Cloud Forest?

Podcast Introduction

5:59My name's Paul Cooper, and you're listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Each episode, I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of history. I want to ask, what did they have in common? What led to their fall? And what did it feel like to be a person alive at the time

6:32who witnessed the end of their world?

Inca Empire Overview

6:36In this episode, I want to look at the story of the Inca Empire. I want to explore how this unique culture grew up in one of the most extreme mountain landscapes that our planet can provide. I want to explain how they built the largest empire to ever arise in the Western Hemisphere. And I want to tell the story of how their society finally came to an end in the most dramatic and cataclysmic way imaginable.

Andes Mountain Geography

7:07The Andes Mountains are the largest continental mountain range in the world.

7:22They stretch more than 7,000 kilometers across the South American landmass, from north to south, a distance that stretches about a sixth of the way around the circumference of the earth. They form part of the eastern edge of what's called the Pacific Ring of Fire, a nearly continuous chain of volcanic belts, lava-filled oceanic trenches, and towering mountains that stretches right around the coast of the Pacific Ocean.

7:55This is one of the most seismically active areas in the world, with around 90% of the world's earthquakes and about 75% of its volcanoes occurring along this enormous ring.

8:10Since their formation around 10 to 6 million years ago, these soaring peaks have had a dramatic effect on the circulation of the earth's atmosphere, and they have given rise to some of the world's most extreme landscapes. To the east, they act as a wall to the continent's rain clouds, pooling and gathering them, and resulting in the vast jungle rainforest of the Amazon, home to over 400 billion trees.

8:43Although the Andes Mountains sit right beside the Pacific Coast and are nearly 3,000 kilometers from the Atlantic, still more than 90% of the water that falls in these mountains will drain into the Atlantic Ocean. These rainwaters follow the enormous watercourse of the Amazon River and bring a superabundance of life to this vast plain. But the land on the Pacific side of the mountains

9:15couldn't be more different. In fact, the desert that has formed on the western side of the mountains is the driest place on earth, and it is known as the Atacama.

9:32The Atacama Desert may be the oldest desert on earth and has experienced its extreme climate for at least the last three million years. It's so dry because the winds that blow up the coast of Chile and Peru are cold winds from the Antarctic, parched of any moisture by the sub-zero conditions of the pole. The Atacama is so arid that even though it contains several mountains higher than 6,000 meters,

10:04many are still completely free of glaciers. Some weather stations set up in the desert in modern times have never detected any rain. This extreme aridity, as well as its broken rocky landscape, means this desert is frequently used as a filming location for science fiction films set on the planet Mars. In fact, in 2003, a team of scientists

10:35even went out into the driest parts of the Atacama Desert and repeated the same tests that the Mars Viking rovers had used to try to find life on the surface of the red planet. The tests returned negative, detecting no signs of life. But across this desert, about 40 rivers do flow down from the mountains. These desert rivers form rich oases,

11:07and for at least the last 10,000 years, humans have made their home here. This was one of the last stops on humanity's journey of more than 30,000 kilometers from the deserts of Ethiopia. Many common plants were domesticated and farmed in these valleys, which receive virtually no rainfall. Foods like avocados, peanuts, beans, squash, peppers, sweet potatoes,

11:38and a variety of fruits, including pineapples and guavas. And it's in these fertile river valleys that the very earliest civilizations of this region began. In Inca conceptions, the universe was created by a god named Viracocha. He also created mankind and crafted humans out of stone, as one surviving Inca hymn recounts.

12:10O creator, root of all, Viracocha, end of all, lord in shining garments, who infuses life and sets all things in order, saying, let there be man, let there be women, molder, maker, to all things you have given life, watch over them,

12:41keep them living prosperously, fortunately, in safety and peace. In fact, the Inca were only the latest in a long string of human civilizations that rose and fell in the region of the Andes. The coastal basin of the Atacama Desert is thought to be one of the few so-called cradles of civilization

13:11in the world, along with others like Mexico, the Indus Valley, the basin of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China, and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in Mesopotamia, all places where city-dwelling human societies have independently risen up. Some memory of these early days is recalled in the Inca's version of their own history, known as the Chronicle of the Incas.

13:44In ancient times, they say, the land and the provinces of Peru were dark and neither light nor daylight existed. In this time, there lived certain people who had a lord who ruled over them and to whom they were subject. The name of these people and that of their ruler have been forgotten.

14:04Today, we do know the names of some of these peoples, and some of the best known of these early precursors are the Moche and the Nazca.

14:19During a period roughly equivalent to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, that is, between around 400 BC and 500 AD, the Moche and the Nazca achieved a high degree of organization and sophistication and expanded their territories across the deserts of the Atacama. They became experts at directing water in the dry landscape, building long canals and rivulets of stone,

14:51and soon began to expand their settlements into the foothills and the mountain valleys of the Andes. The Nazca are most famous for the hundreds of remarkable patterns and images that they drew in the landscape of the coastal deserts. This is a rough terrain broken by stones and rubble, and so, to ease travel and trade between their settlements, the Nazca cleared long roads in the desert.

15:23But soon, these desert lines seem to have taken on a more decorative and perhaps mystical significance. The Nazca constructed these lines with simple tools and careful planning, clearing away the rocks and rubble of the desert and revealing the lighter-colored sand beneath. Some of these vast patterns are nearly 400 meters long, or the length of four football pitches. Hundreds are

15:54simple geometric designs, while more than 70 are depictions of animals, including hummingbirds, spiders, fish, condors, monkeys, lizards, and humans, as well as an assortment of trees and flowers. These vast shapes in the sand were invisible from ground level, but they could be seen from the sharply rising foothills and mountains that rose out of the desert.

16:25We don't know the full significance of these lines, whether religious or to mark the positions of the stars at certain times of the year, or simply as ostentatious expressions of wealth and power. But if you've ever drawn a picture into the sand of a beach and then climbed up onto the cliff to see it from above, you'll understand this impulse, although on a scale hundreds of times larger.

16:55These kinds of vast public works were possible because of the increasing social centralization of these empires. But for reasons we don't entirely understand, both of these early societies soon passed out of history and into dust.

Early Andean Civilizations

17:18While the civilization of the Andes may have begun on the fringes of the desert, it's in the mountains that it reached its most astonishing heights. A short distance inland from the coast, the towering wall of these mountains rises sharply.

17:38This is a landscape that is exceptionally hard to live in. It's made up of high, craggy peaks of sandstone, limestone, and granite, and less than two percent of its total area is at all suitable for growing food. The elevation changes dramatically over short distances, with the highest peaks towering up to 6,700 meters, or 22,000 feet,

18:08roughly two-thirds the cruising altitude of an airliner. The steep, rocky slopes of the Andes hold very little fertile soil, and even at the bottom of its valleys, it's rare to find any fertile earth.

18:26The mountains above 4,800 meters are capped with snow and ice all year round, while the snows creep much lower in the winter months. For the people who lived here, altitude was one of the primary ways they measured their landscape. The people of the Andes divided the mountains into distinct zones by height. There was the Quechua zone between about 2,000 and 3,000 meters

18:58above sea level, which contained warm valleys free of frost, many of them suitable for growing maize and other lowland crops. Above that was the Sunni zone at about 3,000 to 4,000 meters. On these steep slopes, potatoes were the primary crop. Higher still was the zone known as Puna. Agriculture was impossible here, but there are vast frosty grasslands

19:28where herds of alpaca and llama could be grazed in great numbers, crucial for their wool and meat. Also raised for meat were guinea pigs, which were cheap to raise and maintain, happily ate grains too coarse or bitter for humans and reproduced extremely rapidly.

19:52Life for these early people was hard. Infant mortality was so high in the Andes that Inca children were not given a name until their third birthday and until then were simply referred to with the fitting name Wah-Wah. This rugged landscape was no place for individualism. There were no horses or oxen in the Americas that could help its people carry heavy loads or pull plows,

20:24so fields had to be turned by human hands. A group of farmers worked much faster than one on his own, and the dry, cold valleys needed irrigation canals dug through stone and rock, enormous labors that required large work gangs, and so to survive in this tough environment, people needed to pull together. This reciprocal economy formed the basis

20:54of the highly controlled and centralized empires that would follow and would form the hallmark of Andean society right through its history. These early valley settlements were joined by a precarious strand of pathways and roads that traced narrow lines through the mountains. The steep, narrow river gorges were home to quick-flowing

21:25rivers and could only be crossed at certain points where it was possible to build a bridge. This meant that there was often only one road between one town and another, a fragile web that slowly turned the landscape of the mountains into a traversable network.

21:48Along these roads, the people of the Andes would trek with caravans of llamas. These camelid animals are incredibly strong for their size and are capable of carrying loads of up to 40 kilograms across some of the world's toughest terrain.

22:08As a pack animal, they are also essentially self-sufficient. Since they were able to eat any of the coarse grasses growing along the mountain roads, travelers didn't need to bring along any food for their animals, saving precious space for cargo. Along this complex and sophisticated trade route, coca leaves, tobacco, and bright feathers passed west

22:38out of the jungle, while maize, seashells, and dried fish passed east from the coast. This system saw seashells decorating the clothes of people who lived a thousand miles from the sea, and bright tropical feathers decorating the hair of people who had never laid eyes on the jungle.

23:03One of the first great cities of this region was called Tiwanaku, and it grew up in what is now western Bolivia, near the vast shores of the body of water known as Lake Titicaca. America.

23:22This is the largest lake in South America, and one of the highest in the world, today straddling the borders of Bolivia and Peru.

23:35This lake is so vast that it's often impossible to see the other side, and so, in the craggy landscape of the Andes, it forms a completely unique place where the narrow valleys and jagged peaks suddenly give way to blue, open skies, the placid surface of the lake reflecting it like a mirror, and a horizon vanishing into the distance. For the whole history of the people of the Andes,

24:05this lake would hold a special place in their imagination and would form the center point of their mythology.

24:14The city of Tiwanaku held vast pyramid structures and impressive carved gateways cut from solid blocks of stone weighing up to 66 tons. It was home to as many as 20,000 people and formed one of the first capitals of the Andes. In the Inca creation story, we can see the cultural debt they owed to Tiwanaku.

24:45They believed it was the place where light was first brought to the world, when before there had been only darkness.

24:56During this time of total night, they say that a lord emerged from a lake in this land of Peru. They say he brought with him a certain number of people and went to the place near the lake where today there is a town called Tiwanaku. There, they say that he suddenly made the sun and day and ordered the sun to follow the course that it follows. Then, they say, he made the stars and the moon.

25:22From the Inca perspective, the light of civilization had been created at Tiwanaku. By the time that the Inca ruled the Andes, this ancient city was already a series of ruins. When the Inca first stumbled upon it, they would have found the ancient city abandoned, a chaotic mess of broken blocks of masonry, the high grassy plains littered with the fragments of monumental statues,

25:53shattered fragments of stone heads staring out of the walls. To the Inca, the meaning of this place was clear. This must have been the workshop where the creator god Viracocha had worked to create the world. And these stone statues were his first failed attempts at creating human life.

26:19He made some people from stone as a model of those that he would produce later, together with a chieftain to govern and rule over them, and many women, some pregnant and others delivered. When he made all these of stone, he set them aside and then made another province, forming them of stones. In the Sumerian legends, the people of Mesopotamia recounted how the god Enlil created man out of clay,

26:49an idea that lived on in the Hebrew Bible. Clay was the element of ancient Mesopotamia. It was the substance that built their houses, their pots, and tools, the substance that allowed them to develop writing. But in the Andes, the element that the people knew best was stone. In the Andes, stone was everywhere. It towered over you on either side in the valleys. It lay waiting for

27:20you if you dug too deeply into the thin soil. It was what you had to cut through to build canals, to build your houses and temples. It even came tumbling and crashing down the mountainsides when earthquakes rocked the ground beneath your feet. So, perhaps it's no coincidence that the Inca believed themselves to have been crafted from stone.

27:48It's in this city of Tiwanaku that the art of stone carving reached its earliest heights. Today, a great monument known as the Gate of the Sun still stands in ruins, covered with 48 intricately carved figures, perhaps representing something like the signs of the zodiac. The city of Tiwanaku was grand, with its elites living inside a fortified artificial island,

28:18guarded by four high stone walls surrounded by a moat. But after a time, Tiwanaku also faded into obscurity. Still, its influence on the region was enormous, and all the civilizations that followed would retain something of its unique cultural imprint. One of these civilizations was the Wari.

28:45The Wari were experts at water control, and they marshaled enormous work gangs to build vast reservoirs and aqueducts that cut through the dry coastal plains and transformed the landscape of the low Andes.

29:04The Wari tamed the desert, building aqueducts up to 40 kilometers long to divert the sparse waters towards their cities. But they were never ornate or showy builders, like the people of Tiwanaku. Their buildings were rough constructions, pulled together out of uncarved field stones, and locked together with mud for mortar. But they still liked to build big.

29:34The walls of their cities were sometimes two to three meters thick and up to 12 meters high. The Inca built on the foundations laid by the Wari, sometimes quite literally. At certain sites, you can see the walls of the Wari built from small stones, but with Inca additions, extending and upgrading them in their distinctive signature style of massive megalithic stones.

30:05For reasons we don't quite understand, the Wari soon embarked on a rapid series of expansions that saw their power spread across the Andes. Some have guessed that they might have adopted a new expansionist religion that drove them to conquer their neighbors. Others have speculated that climate shifts may have reduced the habitability of their traditional desert territory, meaning that expansion may have been a matter of

30:36survival. Either way, they were incredibly successful. Between the mid-sixth to mid-seventh century, while Europe continued to reel from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the Wari expanded across the hostile mountains of the Andes and brought people after people under their banner. Wherever the Wari went, they built terraces.

31:07Each terrace was a remarkable feat of engineering and displayed an intimate knowledge of the soil and the plants that grew in it. The walls of these terraces were sloped backwards, angled to hold in the earth and resist earthquake damage. They were floored with broken stones for drainage, which were then covered by gravel and sand. Finally, the Wari would gather rich topsoil,

31:38digging it up from the lower elevations and the river valleys and carrying it up the mountain paths, laying it out to form the top layer of the terrace. This was constantly fertilized and turned over to aerate the soil. The stone walls of the terraces absorb the heat of the sun during the day and then slowly release it into the earth throughout the