Pyramids were built in Peru back in the days when statehood was just emerging in the classical country of pyramids - Egypt. The new archaeological discovery of Peru began in 1994, when the Peruvian explorer Ruth Shadi began excavations in the Supe Valley and discovered the oldest city in America - Caral. No less striking are the subsequent excavations in the Kasma Valley in northern Peru. Sanctuaries built over four thousand years ago have been found here
In the valleys of the Sechin and Kasma rivers, almost four hundred kilometers north of the capital of Peru, Lima, the gold of the Incas has long been sought. But what archaeologists from Germany and Peru have found is perhaps more important for scientists than the collection of jewelry from the time of the Spanish Conquest. The oldest monumental building of the New World was discovered here. This raw brick building was built almost nine centuries earlier than Caral, "America's first city." According to the method of radiocarbon analysis, it is dated 3400 - 3200 BC. At that time, the power of the pharaohs had not yet emerged in the Nile Valley, and no one even dreamed of building the pyramids.
River valleys are one of the characteristic features of the landscape of Peru. It's pretty monotonous. On one side stretches a relatively narrow - from 80 to 180 kilometers - coastal strip, a strip of desert plains. On the other, the Sierra rises - a vast mountainous country, the Peruvian Andes. Numerous shallow, short rivers run down from the mountains. About fifty rivers flow into the Pacific Ocean within Peru. They cross the coastal strip from east to west. For thousands of years, people have settled in the valleys of these rivers. It was here that the most ancient cultures of Peru were born.
In one of these oases - in the Kasma Valley - about fifty monumental buildings have been discovered. No other part of Peru has so many temple complexes located close to each other. For casual tourists accustomed to the "wonders of architecture", these monuments, however, are not remarkable at all. Time has changed them almost beyond recognition. The ancient pyramids could not withstand the unhurried work of natural forces. Wind and water were stronger than the calculations of the builders.
However, under these low, nondescript hills, from the point of view of archaeologists, genuine treasures can be hidden. Of course, not every ruin is comparable in age to the Sechin-Baho temple, the oldest monument in America, but it is already known that all of them were built 3-4 thousand years ago, and some even earlier. Among the most important monuments of the Kasma river valley are the Serro Sechin temple (its stone walls adorn about four hundred rough and at the same time skillful reliefs) and the Sechin Alto sanctuary, which is almost two kilometers long.
Temple of the Four Courts
The Sechin-Baho temple complex (excavations began in 2000) was located at the northern end of the Kasma valley, where the fields cultivated by the peasants gradually turned into the desert. The total area of the sanctuary reaches 30 hectares. Here you can see buildings erected in different eras. A long blank wall separates them from the desert sands.
The main building of the temple stands out for its clear axial symmetry. It is built on a platform 20 meters high. Thanks to the use of geophysical methods, it was established that at this place there was once another, even more ancient building, erected in the second half of the 4th millennium BC.
The walls of the temple, made in the form of a pyramid, in our opinion, are unusually empty. There are no reliefs or other images here. The rooms are rectangular, but the corners are somewhat rounded. In some places, niches can be seen in the walls, covered with white plaster.
In front of the main building there is a 14-meter-high "extension" with its own separate entrance. Subsequently, the gap between the buildings was filled up.
The total dimensions of the complex are approximately 200 x 140 meters. As the German archaeologist Renata Patschke notes, "the people who built this sanctuary, undoubtedly, had a brilliant understanding of architecture." The temple complex was built mainly of large stones brought from the surrounding mountains and then hewn.
There are four courtyards adjacent to the sanctuary, located along its central axis. All of them, rising by ledges, lead to the platform. The first, widest courtyard is fenced from the side by walls of five meters height. Wall reliefs depict people with outstretched hands - either participants in a procession, or dancing. In their right hand they are holding a certain oblong object, and in their left - something round, from where the head of a snake appears.
The area of the first two courtyards is about 2000 square meters. The area adjacent to them is even more huge - 18 thousand square meters. Obviously, in ancient times, popular gatherings and religious ceremonies were held here. The second, as well as the fourth, courtyard had niches as high as a man's height. Figures of idols were installed in them or mummies were placed.
The third courtyard is located more than six meters above the second. At first, all courtyards were open to visitors. However, over time, the third courtyard was separated from the first two by a high wall. She closed everything that happened there from prying eyes. Only two narrow side stairs led up. Obviously, only a select few had the right to climb them. “Perhaps the religion itself, which the local residents adhered to, has changed, or the hierarchy in society has changed,” says the German researcher Peter Fuchs, who has been working in Peru for a quarter of a century.
Around 1600 BC, the Sechin-Baho temple was abandoned. All its rooms were empty. Not only images of gods were not found here, but also cult objects, and even everyday objects. An abandoned sanctuary is usually replete with various artifacts. Here, archaeologists got only individual pearls and fragments of clay figures.
Particularly curious are the fragments of vessels with a round bottom, without a neck, which are among the earliest pottery specimens found in this region. They are decorated with a stylized image of a fish. Hallucinogenic fish are known to be found off the northern coast of Peru. And this image makes one think about the ecstatic rituals, which obviously became widespread in Peru in the indicated era.
What drove the people out of the sanctuary? “They did not leave the temple in a hasty flight - they left here in an organized manner,” the archaeologist notes. In several rooms, the clay brought here is still preserved; perhaps, they were going to re-plaster the walls with it. However, the work never started. The stairs were walled up, all entrances to the premises were closed. The temple was empty. Why? Nobody knows.
On the outer wall of the platform, a kind of "canvas" made of clay, about 130 graffiti were finally scratched. This is the largest collection of such drawings from the ancient history of Peru. For the most part, these are awkward, student-like copies of reliefs that adorned the walls of the first courtyard.
Here you can find geometric ornaments (crosses, rectangles, rectangular steps), masks, heads, schematic images of men and animals. “I don’t want to say that there are only primitive scratched drawings,” emphasizes Peter Fuchs, “but, remembering, for example, the reliefs in the
Cerro Sechin temple, I would like to say that they knew how to do it much better.”
But some of the compositions are quite beautiful and complex. For example, archaeologists were struck by a chimerical creature that combined the features of a man, a caiman, and a predatory cat with eerie claws and fangs. Such figures can be called characteristic already for the subsequent era, which was called the "Chavin era". We are talking about a culture that developed in the northern part of Peru by the end of the 2nd millennium BC and existed until about the 4th century AD. Its main monument was the Chavin de Huantar temple complex. Perhaps such a drawing marked the triumph of a new religion, which was finally established several centuries later? The oldest part of the Chavin de Huantar temple was also decorated with the image of a human figure with fangs of a predatory cat and snakes instead of hair.
… After 1600 BC, the Sechin-Baho temple is used only for burials. As of July 2008, 118 burials of later eras have been discovered here.
Cerro Sechin: fish are looking for where the severed heads are
In the town of Cerro-Sechin, about a kilometer from Sechin-Baho, excavations have been going on for almost a quarter of a century. The walls of the local sanctuary keep the memory of a thousand years of the country's ancient history, especially since the degree of preservation of the monument cannot but please any archaeologist. The Cerro-Sechin temple was not destroyed by the warlike tribes, it was not plundered by the conquistadors, and the peasants from the surrounding poor villages were not dismantled for building materials. Around 1300 BC, the temple was covered with an avalanche and forever buried under it. Its former splendor has been rediscovered by people thanks to the work of Peruvian and German researchers.
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The building rests on a stepped platform built between 2400 and 2200 BC. The central part of the temple is decorated with images of creatures resembling predatory cats. Later, the sanctuary was expanded, and colored reliefs appeared on both sides of the entrance portal, depicting five-meter fish, which open a terrible mouth. They seem to be struggling to swallow the severed heads of the people above them.
Around 1900 BC, the building was expanded again and fenced off by a wall of four hundred stone slabs up to 4 meters high. It immortalizes an eerie procession, which, appearing from the back of the temple, moves along it to the main portal. At this wall, one thinks least of all about the "amazing peacefulness of the inhabitants of the ancient city of Peru", as the participants in the excavations in Caral never tire of emphasizing. Here, in the Kasma Valley, the cruelty typical of Ancient America is shown to visitors to the temple. Twenty-four fearsome human figures make up the stone procession. All around them, the mutilated bodies of the victims are visible: severed heads, arms and legs, ripped and shredded torsos, streams of blood. What is it? Some episode of sacrifice, similar to the terrible rituals of the Aztecs, or the memory of a small victorious war, maybeplundering a nearby valley?
Over time, this temple also lost its former significance and was neatly fenced off up to the level where the slabs with reliefs ended. “It was still possible to enter the temple from the back - so it was only half closed,” comments Peter Fuchs. Obviously, this was done in order to hide from the visitors of the scene of a cruel, murderous revelry. “But they did not destroy the reliefs,” the researcher notes. "Maybe they were just afraid to do it, because what the hell is not joking, as they say."
The processional road leads back from the old gods
Sechin Alto is the youngest of the three main sanctuaries found in the Kasma Valley. Its construction began around 1800 BC. And it is the most enormous. This temple complex stretches for almost two kilometers (!). Its highest height reaches 60 meters. Not every pyramid compares to it. It is undoubtedly the most grandiose brick structure in the entire Andean region. It includes the pyramid itself and the road that led to it. During the days of festivities, processions were performed along this road. Various buildings towered along it, and two circular squares extended into the ground.
It seems, says Fuchs, that the inhabitants of the Kasma Valley, having built a new sanctuary for themselves - Sechin-Alto, finally abandoned the former shrine - Sechin-Baho - and immured it. Scientists have not yet undertaken to explain the reason for such hostility to the ancient temple. You can remember, however, that in the Old World, people more than once renounced the former gods and declared war on temples. Let us name at least the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, who commanded his subjects to worship not Amun, but the solar disk, declared a deity. Probably, the history of Peru also knew similar events.
Sechin-Alto has been excavated by American archaeologists Shelia and Thomas Pozorski for several years. Some of their finds, for example "The Hill of Columns", were declared by the couple as the residence of some "extremely important person, perhaps the abbot of the Sechin_Alto temple complex or the ruler of the entire Kasma valley."
Ruler. Exactly. Was the processional road, which stretches for a couple of kilometers, built by a simple village community? Why did the humble peasants need a monumental building that makes you remember the monuments of Egypt? Could it be that in a community where everyone is equal, the idea of a 60-meter-high pyramid that hangs over the plain like a shadow cast by a formidable god or his likeness - a king could have arisen? And the area, reaching 110 meters in diameter, is it a worthy curtain for the acting of a single shaman? No, everything here reminds of the excitement and rumble of the masses, of the firm will of the tsars, of the long - lifelong - path to the gods.
The emergence of such structures marks the transition from an agricultural community, where almost everyone was equal to each other, to a society in which a strict hierarchy was established. The greatness of the inexorable ruler (king, high priest) in it will correspond to the haughty power of architecture: huge squares, endless lanes of roads, monumental buildings, the unbearable weight of monoliths and a mountain of walls soaring upward.
American archaeologists are firmly convinced that the oldest monumental temples in the Kasma Valley were the focus of the first cities that appeared here. These cities formed a union - an archaic form of the state. The clashes between individual cities led to the decline and then the complete destruction of the culture of the Kasma Valley. We know something similar from the history of, for example, Mesopotamia. Ancient Greece and Central America (Mayan civilization) knew the era of wars between city_states.
From Gebekli Baho to Sechin Tepe
Was that how it was here? American archeology is characterized by the search for the most ancient state formations. In the Kasma Valley, Pozorski argue, their own "castes" have already developed: the aristocracy, the priesthood and the officials who depended on them. Another explorer of this valley, Peter Fuchs, only polemically declares: "I don't see an official anywhere." In his opinion, such a noticeable and sharp stratification of society has not yet occurred here. Here, only “specialization” is still perceptible - shamans, artisans, leaders stand out, that is, people who possessed certain talents and valor, which they used for the benefit of the rest of their tribesmen.
Shamans are especially important - future priests who kept the memory of the past, the traditions of the tribe. They knew everything the young men could only guess about and what the elders no longer believed. From their heartfelt words the gods awakened, from their howls and cries, even demons were dumbfounded. “It so happened that they gathered the whole tribe around them. But that required the right set,”continues Fuchs. The tribesmen could converge, for example, in a round square or a fenced yard. Later, another courtyard was fenced nearby - for the elite. During such gatherings, real performances were staged - perhaps, as at the meetings of modern sects. Music sounded, chants rang out, people started dancing.
… Be that as it may, one thing is clear. Textbooks on the history of Peru and - wider! - all of South America will have to be rewritten. We are rediscovering whole millennia of the formation of the culture of the peoples who inhabited the Andes. We are trying to understand again when the Indians of South America began to move to a sedentary lifestyle. When did the cultural revolution take place, and how did the state and the hierarchical society gradually emerge on the lands inhabited by the tribes of hunters, fishermen and gatherers? How was it formed from scattered clans? How was the horizontal (tribal) structure of society replaced by the vertical hierarchy inherent in the state?
There is still a lot of incomprehensibility in this “squaring the circle”. It is too difficult for one community - a small alliance of relatives and associates - to transform into another, into a multitude of inconspicuous, identical atoms, each of which has its own unshakable place. A slave is destined to remain a slave, a peasant - a peasant, and even the wisest hunter will never become a king, even if he knows better than any nobleman to hunt down an animal in the forest and fish in the river.
Archaeological discoveries of the last decade have cast doubt on the usual model of the formation of human civilization. Until recently, it was believed that the emergence of monumental architecture was preceded by the transition of people to a sedentary lifestyle, the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, the invention of ceramics. The first architects of Ancient Peru were not plowmen, but fishermen, not sowers, but gatherers of herbs, fruits and roots, not artisans, but hunters. They did not know the art of writing, did not know how to make ceramic dishes - they "only" built temples. Their experience, however, makes us recall another achievement of the builders of the Stone Age, a sanctuary discovered far from Peru - on the land of Turkey, in Gebekli Tepe (see "З-С", 9/06).
We know little about the inhabitants of Peru of that distant era. Even about the exact purpose of the buildings erected by them, we can sometimes only guess. With some degree of certainty, we are ready to say that in these squares and courtyards, in the pyramids and other buildings, some kind of community festivals and certain rituals were performed.
… Until recently, in the early 1990s, the Chavin culture was considered the oldest civilization in Peru, which formed in the north of the country around 1200-1100 BC. “The origin” of the “Chavin culture” itself is still unclear,”stated the Archaeological Dictionary by W. Bray and D. Trump, published in Russian in 1990 (the first original edition in English was in 1970).
But archaeological excavations carried out in the - separate - river valleys of Peru in the last 15 years allow us to leave the "horizon of the Chavin culture" and step back into the past for two thousand years, in order … to see there the distinctive cultures that developed back in the late Stone Age. It was a time not only for hunting and gathering, but also for monumental construction.
Not only in the Kasma Valley, but also in other river valleys of Peru - oases in this desert country - archaeologists are discovering the ruins of ancient buildings.
About five thousand years ago, a hierarchical society began to form in various regions of Peru. Their population no longer lives only by fishing, but also is engaged in the cultivation of cultivated plants - maize, peanuts, cassava, pumpkin. Artificial irrigation systems are being created that make it possible to use vast areas of desert lands for plantations. The life of society is becoming noticeably more complicated, which implies both the division of labor and the emergence of a rigid centralized system of social management, and this, in turn, allows some of the workers to be diverted for the construction of large structures, such as pyramids.
Joint participation in cult ceremonies conducted under the leadership of shamans or priests, as well as work on the construction of pyramids in Peru and on the other side of the world, in Egypt, allowed people to feel like a single community. The main difference between the cultures of Ancient Egypt and Peru was that the inhabitants of the Nile Valley invented hieroglyphic writing, which had a huge impact on the development of society. The symbols inscribed on the papyrus were filled with the spirit of the era and kept many meanings. They could capture the religious beliefs and exploits of warriors, the dull murmur of the poor and the complaints of lovers, the norms of behavior and the hopes of prophecy.
The communities of Ancient Peru turned out to be a society of stillborn words. All that was said disappeared forever, forgotten from generation to generation. There were only pyramids, canals, graffiti, residential buildings, knots on laces … How much could the latter retain? Archaeologists don't dare say.
Writing united the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. Many thousands of people over the centuries worshiped common gods, lived according to the same laws, while the inhabitants of the river valleys of Peru remained deeply divided. Each oasis was a separate world, which was fatally separated from other similar worlds, hidden behind a mountain spur, beyond the desert. Individual communities lived in isolation from each other, did not exchange their inventions and cultural achievements. This impeded the development of the ancient Peruvian civilization. From the scattered fragments, a single whole did not stick together …
When the caiman shows the way
The ruins of Peru hold many more secrets. So, only in March 2007, archaeologists proved that the well-known monumental fortress, erected about 2300 years ago, is in fact a solar calendar according to which the ancient inhabitants of Peru counted the passage of time. The
oldest city in America was discovered only fifteen years ago.
So do we know well enough the early history of Peruvian civilization? Are our judgments about her really so solid? During excavations in the Kasma Valley, graffiti were found on which the image of a creature endowed with human and caiman features is found. Similar images became widespread several centuries later, during the era of the Chavin culture. Surprising, however, is something else. In the rivers west of the Andes, that is, on the coast of Peru, caimans have never been found and are not found.
However, a few years ago, in the rainforests of Ecuador, east of the Andes, French archaeologists discovered extraordinarily carefully polished and decorated stone vessels, as well as sanctuaries and burial sites that also resembled the corresponding monuments of the Chavin culture. But the main thing: they are dated to the middle of the XXV century BC, that is, they were a thousand years older than this culture.
Perhaps the first inhabitants of the river oases of Peru came here not from the northern coast, but from the east - from the tropical forests that lay on the other side of the Andes, passing the seemingly irresistible mountain ranges? Come from the country where almost five thousand years ago they worshiped a deity in the form of a caiman? Are the traces of the oldest civilization in South America lurking in the dense tropical forests south of the Isthmus of Panama?
Perhaps, in the coming years, revolutionary discoveries will occur in the archeology of the New World. Moreover, in most Latin American countries, interest is growing in the distant past of their cultures and the origins of their Indian identity.
The oldest frescoes in America
In autumn 2007, in northwestern Peru, 650 kilometers from Lima, near Mount Ventarron, during the excavation of a sanctuary of 2500 square meters, erected about four thousand years ago, fragments of colored frescoes were discovered. On one of them you can see a deer caught in a hunter's net. These are the oldest frescoes found so far in America. Several walls are covered with them. According to the head of the excavation, Walter Alva, the painting is of "high artistic quality."
The bones of Amazonian parrots and monkeys were also seen on the territory of the temple complex. This find testifies to the fact that even in those distant times, the inhabitants of the northern coast of Peru were trading with the tribes inhabiting the
Amazon basin. The mountain system of the Andes, stretching as an impregnable wall, was not an obstacle for them.