The highest city in our travels so far as I mentioned earlier but so far…touch wood…we are not feeling anything that could be described as “altitude sickness”.
Today we started our tour with the obligatory church trip, ok it wasn’t that bad but still if you have seen one you …you know the rest! Ok. This one was different because it was an Inca temple site converted to a Catholic church. The Inca workmanship was outstanding given the year this was built, around the 13th century. Our next stop was the Inca burial grounds in a cave. The Incas mummified the royalty , the Inca, (while the entire group is called Incas in fact the word Inca refers only to the “king”), and his entourage., the rest of the people were buried in a grave.
The temples we have been seeing throughout this trip were all to worship the sun, stars and the earth. The Inka (the native spelling ) believed in three worlds. The sky represented by the Condor, the earth represented by the Puma, and the underworld represented by the Snake. All are very important in their beliefs, mother earth was honored to gain favor for good crops etc so their practices could be characterized as being that of the first real environmentalists. The Inka also had figured out long before Europe that the earth was round. (The Europeans were stuck in mythology not only with their religions but the world as it was, hence the flat earth belief and of course at that time if you disbelieved that notion the church would punish you as history has shown. It could be argued that the church was a major contributor to ignorance at that time). But the Inka, believing in the sun, earth, and underworld, looked at their environment logically. So logically if the sun and the moon were round then it made sense that the world they lived on was round too! Pretty simple.
The temples were laid out in a fashion as to highlight the summer and winter solstice, the fall and spring equinox, so windows were fashioned so that the sun would shine on certain artifacts at that exact time. Therefore they knew exactly what time of the year they were entering or in at all times. Simple but very effective for their livelihood. Here is some of their workmanship but it is not in any particular order:
