Sacsayhuaman

Sacsayhuaman

Sacsayhuaman (satisfied falcon) – (pronounced like sexy woman) – is an Incan sacred and strategic site above the city, serves as the head of the puma. On the peak of a hill overlooking the city of Cusco lies the ancient fortress of Sacsayhuaman . Once the domain of Inca warriors, nobles and engineers it now stands in ruins but many visitors explore its maze of intricately constructed walls, stairways and structures. After the conquest of Cusco in 1536 most of the inner structures of Sacsayhuaman were dismantled and used to construct Spanish Cusco.

The carved stone walls fit so perfectly that no blade of grass or steel can slide between them. There is no mortar. They often join in complex and irregular surfaces that would appear to be a nightmare for the stonemason. There is usually neither adornment nor inscription. It reminds me of the stones of the Great Pyramid. That too has no inscriptions. One has to wonder who created these great stone edifices with such precision in that timeline with such limited tools. Could they have been created by the same gods? aliens?

Most of these walls are found around Cuzco and the Urubamba River Valley in the Peruvian Andes. There are a few scattered examples elsewhere in the Andes, but almost nowhere else on Earth.

Sacsahuaman was supposedly completed around 1508. It took approximately a crew of 20,000 to 30,000 men working for 60 years to complete it.

Chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega was born around 1530, and raised in the shadow of these walls. He wrote – “This fortress surpasses the constructions known as the seven wonders of the world. For in the case of a long broad wall like that of Babylon, or the colossus of Rhodes, or the pyramids of Egypt, or the other monuments, one can see clearly how they were executed. They did it by summoning an immense body of workers and accumulating more and more material day by day and year by year. They overcame all difficulties by employing human effort over a long period. But it is indeed beyond the power of imagination to understand now these Indians, unacquainted with devices, engines, and implements, could have cut, dressed, raised, and lowered great rocks, more like lumps of hills than building stones, and set them so exactly in their places. For this reason, and because the Indians were so familiar with demons, the work is attributed to enchantment.”

Archaeologists tell us that the walls of Sacsahuaman rose ten feet higher than their remnants. That additional ten feet of stones supplied the building materials for the cathedrals and casas of the conquistadors. It is generally conceded that these stones were much smaller than those lithic monsters that remain. Perhaps the upper part of the walls, constructed of small, regularly-shaped stones was the only part of Sacsahuaman that was built by the Incas and finished in 1508.

This could explain why no one at the time of the conquest seemed to know how those mighty walls were built.