THE COLONIES IN PERU

There have been may contracts in the last 5,000 years between the civilized regions of the Old World and the semi-isolated continent of the New World. It was described by the ancient Mediterranean navigators and map-makers as an island, because it rode in the middle of Oceanus, the Ocean Stream, the wastes of the Pacific part of the Ocean on the one flank, the Atlantic part of Ocean upon the other. Relatively few of these contacts however have been significant.

Certainly, contacts with China and south-east Asia may have left a real mark upon America and also its contacts with Polynesians. The white-skinned Indians of the Amazon basin, Pizarro described them as corn-blonde, who were noted and recorded by the Spaniards, have to be explained as well as the fair-haired blue-eyed northern Europeans remembered in Peru. Also the mummies discovered in Peru which had red hair and blonde hair. But this does not form the central subject of my book.

For I am chiefly concerned with the culturally meaningful contacts between the Old World and the New which make the New World useless as a field study for anyone looking for Amerindian societies which developed in isolation from the main stream of world events.

The first formative area in America was seemingly Bolivia and Peru; the period was the Copper Age. In the fourth millennium certainly, but probably as early as the fifth or sixth, prospectors sought to meet the needs of the Fertile Crescent. The cause of the contact between these two distant parts of the world was the need for copper, silver and gold, and later, tin. High up in the Sierra, among the peaks of the Andes rising to 25,000 feet, a mining city comparable with Kimberley and Johannesburg in modern Africa, was developed by varying groups of white men some 5,000 years ago in South America. Behind Peru and Bolivia were the creative energy of the Semitic sea-people, the Aryans and the Sumerians, their astronomical, mathematical, and navigational skills, their knowledge of irrigation farming, their proclivity for terraced agriculture. From this local center of civilization they traded with and traveled throughout the Americas. In this center the peculiar form of Amerindian civilization was developed that spread north to Central America, the Peruvians themselves, as well as the Sumerians and Cretans, taking it to Mexico and Yucatan. The evidence for this theme is circumstantial: the jig-saw can be pieced together with only a hazy picture as a guide; as much evidence as possible must therefore be displayed. So to turn a plausible picture into a convincing one, further data is desirable.

The Indian word for Peru when the Spaniards arrived, meant literally ‘Land of the Four Quarters’. One o fthe pre-eminent titles of Naram-Sin , grandson of King Sargon, whose name is inscribed in Peru, was ‘Ruler of the Four Quarters’.

The Peruvians used the batik and itka methods of dycing cloth. These dycing techniques and the colour significance were used in the Mediterranean area of that period.

From The God-Kings & The Titans by James Bailey

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