City of the King

On a narrow ledge of the high Andes, 75 miles northwest of the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, a handful of Peruvians and Americans met last week to dedicate a bronze plaque to U.S. Archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the mysterious lost city he discovered 50 years ago. Some experts believe that parts of the city, which Bingham named Machu Picchu (Old Peak), are 60 centuries old, which would make it 1,000 years older than ancient Babylon. More recently, if its ruins are interpreted correctly, it was at once an impregnable fortress and a majestic royal capital of an exiled civilization.

Built on a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu is surrounded by a granite wall, can be entered only by one main gate. Inside is a maze of a thousand ruined houses, temples, palaces, and staircases, all hewn from white granite and dominated by a great granite sundial. In Quechua, language of the sun-worshipping Incas and their present-day descendants, the dial was known as Intihuatana-hitching post of the sun.

Romantic History. Hiram Bingham, Yale scholar and later U.S. Senator from Connecticut, set out on muleback in 1911 in search of the lost Indian city, which he was convinced was more than legend. For years there was talk of ruins located far above the Urubamba Canyon near Cuzco, but they were known only to a few local Indians until Bingham came upon "a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-faced terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high." Bingham died five years ago, after spending much of his free time exploring and writing about Machu Picchu. and watching it become a growing tourist attraction. Hundreds of others have studied, scraped and photographed the lost city. There are still great gaps in their knowledge, and little agreement on the significance of what they know. Fittingly enough, the best known--and most romantic--history of Machu Picchu was compiled by Discoverer Bingham himself.

According to Bingham, Machu Picchu was in reality the Tampu-Tocco ("Window Tavern") of pre-Inca legend, a mountain fortress maintained by the kings of the Amautas, who ruled the highlands of the Andes for 62 generations. The last king, Pachacuti VI, was mortally wounded in a battle with barbarian tribes of the Amazon jungles, probably in the 8th century A.D., and his body was carried by his loyal warriors to Tampu-Tocco. With the death of Pachacuti, the widespread kingdom of the Amautas broke into pieces.

First Inca. For four centuries, they grew farther and farther apart, and finally lost contact with each other. Then, from Tampu-Tocco, which had flourished as the capital of the Quechua tribe, came a new King named Manco Capac. Around A.D. 1200, according to Quechua legend, he and his many brothers "set out toward the hill over which the sun rose" reached the ancient Amauta capital of Cuzco, settled there and began to rebuild the empire of his ancestors.

Manco Capac called himself Inca (King) and was the first ruler of the greatest nation the continent had ever known. According to the 17th century Inca chronicler, Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, when Manco Capac had consolidated his power, "he ordered works to be executed at the place of his birth, consisting of a masonry wall with three windows." The only such wall yet found is in Machu Picchu.

The Inca empire lasted three centuries, at its peak stretched from Quito along thousands of miles of paved roads south to the Andes of present-day Chile and Argentina. Then, from out of the north in 1533, came the Spaniards. They killed the ruling Inca, Atahualpa, put in his place Manco II, an able young prince whom they thought they could trust to supervise the empire. Manco rebelled, led several attacks on the Spaniards, finally fled to a hidden mountain fortress that had come to be known as Vilcapampa, but which Bingham insisted was the traditional refuge of the Quechua kings--Machu Picchu.

End of the Line. With Manco went all the trappings of Inca royalty: the Virgins of the Sun, high priests, the harem of Chosen Women, even the royal embalmers. Each had their place in Machu Picchu, and each left their mark: the sundial, the palaces, the preponderance of fine-boned women in the burial caves. Manco died in 1545, and his throne quickly passed from one son to another and finally to a third, Tupac Amaru, whom the Spaniards tracked down in the Amazon jungles and killed in 1572. His death ended the rule of what may have been an unbroken line of Indian kings that started in the mists of prehistory, lasted through 62 generations of Amautas, four centuries of Quechua and nearly four more of Inca. To each civilization, Machu Picchu was the last, impregnable retreat. There is no record that any invader ever reached it--or even found it. Until Hiram Bingham came along, it lived only in the fading legends of a vanquished nation.

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