Peru's earliest inhabitants can be traced to migrants reaching the North American continent from Asia. After crossing the Behring Strait and slowly pushing southward, some groups eventually settled along the coast and in the highlands and tropical forest regions of present-day Peru. The people of each of these areas witnessed the development of a variety of cultures over thousands of years.
Highly developed communities flourished long before the rise of the Inca empire and left tangible signs of their presence. Their chronology extends from the year 8000 B.C. to 1532 A.D., when Peru was conquered by Francisco Pizarro.
Remnants of Peru's early civilisations include the ruins of Chan Chan (from Mochica Jang-Jang = sun-sun), capital of the ancient Chimú Kingdom; the pottery and textiles of the Nazca culture, in whose territory lie the mysterious Nazca lines, which some believe may have served to direct incoming spacecraft, and which will perhaps one day be deciphered; the Paracas culture, whose textiles have retained their splendour intact after thousands of years; the Tiahuanaco culture, which flourished around Lake Titicaca over an area covering parts of modern Peru and Bolivia; and the highland Chavín, Chimú, Mochica, Labayeque and Moche cultures along Peru's northern coast, where the recent discovery of the "Lord of Sipán" funeral site has been described as the single most momentous archaeological find since Tutankhamun.
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The Incas
The various cultures which flourished in ancient Peru either disappeared or were vanquished by the Incas, whose appearance is recorded at around A.D. 1000. The Incas made remarkable advances in numerous branches of engineering, as attested by their buildings, roads, bridges, aqueducts and monumental sites such as the fortress of Sacsayhuamán and the citadel of Machu Picchu.
The Incas' hydraulic expertise included techniques for converting mist into water for irrigation, something which enabled them to farm extensively what today is Peru's arid coastline.
Their language, Quechua, is Peru's second official language alongside Spanish. Evidence from quipus, or knotted strings, suggests that the Incas also processed a writing system, though its Texicography still puzzles scholars.
For political and administrative purposes, territory was divided into wards containing 10, 100, 1000 and 10,000 residents, each supervised by appointees of the Inca ruler. We thus know that the Incas were acquainted with the decimal system as early as the 11th Century A.D.
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Founding the Empire
The Inca Empire established itself in an area comprising the basins of Lake Titicaca and the Urubamba River. The heart of Inca power and the seat of government were situated in the middle Urubamba valley, the so-called Sacred Valley or Valley of Cuzco.
Several oral traditions acquired by the Spaniards from the quipucamayos (imperial officials trained in reading quipu strings) contain accounts of the Empire's foundation. The best-known among these, provided by Garcilaso in his "Royal Commentaries," is recapitulated below:
As the Sun had taken pity on mankind for its savage state (They ate the herbs of the field and roots or fruit like wild animals, and also human flesh. They covered their bodies with leaves and the bark of trees, or with the skins of animals), he sent down a son and daughter to give people religion and the Sun cult, precepts and laws, and to teach them to live in houses and towns and to grow crops and breed animals to enjoy together with the fruits of the earth. The Sun placed this couple in Lake Titicaca, whence they should set out and seek a place to settle. He gave them a golden rod to thrust into the ground wherever they might stop, so that where the rod should sink and disappear, they must remain and build a new kingdom.
Trying as they did to sink the rod in different places, they came upon the hill called Huanacaure, south of the city that was to be. "It was here that the sceptre of gold buried itself in the ground with great ease, and it was never seen more." Then the Inca said to his wife and sister: "Our Father the Sun orders that we settle in this valley to fulfil his wishes. It is therefore right, O queen and sister, that each of us should gather these people together, to instruct them and to do the good which has been ordered by our Father the Sun." Thus the king went northwards, and the queen to the south. Seeing these two personages attired and adorned with the ornaments which the Sun given them, their ears bored and covered by great earflaps, and seeing "that, from their words and appearances, they seemed to be children of the Sun", the savages acknowledged the strangers and obeyed them as their kings. Having spread the word amongst themselves, men and women assembled in great numbers and set out to follow the kings wherever they might lead them. "In this manner [the king] began to settle this our imperial city, dividing it into two parts, called Hanan Cuzco, which, as you know, means Upper Cuzco, and Hurin Cuzco, which is Lower Cuzco. The people who followed the king wished to settle in Hanan Cuzco, and for that reason it received the name; and those who were gathered together by the queen settled in Hurin Cuzco, and it was therefore called the lower town. This division of the city was not made in order that those living in one half should have any pre-eminence or special privileges, for the Ynca desired that all should be equal like brothers - the sons of one father and one mother. He only wished to make this division into an upper and a lower town, that there might be a perpetual memory of the fact that the inhabitants of one were assembled by the king, and of the other by the queen." Manco Cápac instructed the men in the arts and trades pertaining to their sex. He taught them how to sow crops, how to distinguish useful from worthless plants, and how to make ploughs and channel water from streams; he even taught men how to fashion their own sandals. Mama Occllo for her part taught trained the women in such occupations as spinning and weaving cotton and wool, and making clothes for themselves, their husbands and children. In sum, "our princes taught their first vassals everything that is needful in life, the Ynca making himself king and master of the men, and the Ccoya being queen and mistress of the women". (First Book of the Royal Commentaries, Chaps XV-XVI)
There were fourteen Inca sovereigns, their rule covering a period of almost five hundred years. Here is the sequence in which each king's name has been handed down to posterity:
* 1. Manco Cápac
* 2. Sinchi Roca
* 3. Lloque Yupanqui
* 4. Mayta Cápac
* 5. Cápac Yupanqui
* 6. Inca Roca
* 7. Yahuar Huaca
* 8. Viracocha
* 9. Pachacútec
* 10. Inca Yupanqui
* 11. Túpac Inca Yupanqui
* 12. Huayna Cápac
* 13. Huáscar
* 14. Atahualpa
Under Pachacútec, the most eminent Inca king, the Empire attained its greatest territorial extension, stretching over parts of present-day Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina in addition to the whole of Peru. Pachacútec unified the empire by adopting a single language, Quechua, and building an impressive network of roads - the Inca Trail - providing rapid communications between the realm's main locations.
It was during this Inca's reign that Prince Inca Túpac Yupanqui organised a maritime expedition that eventually reached Polynesia. Accounts of that voyage were collected by the chronicler Sarmiento de Gamboa and were vindicated, centuries later, by Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 Kontiki expedition, which sailed from Peru to Polynesia in a similar raft following the same course as those used by the ancients Peruvians.
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Under Spanish Rule
Conquest
In 1532, the Inca or Tahuantisuyo Empire, as it was then called, fell before the Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro. The state, in fact, had already been weakened by a civil war which had broken out in 1529 as two rival brothers, Huáscar and Atahualpa, contended for power.
Pizarro captured Atahualpa in November 1532, and had him executed in July, 1533, after accusing him of ordering the murder of his own brother Huáscar. Comparatively feeble resistance by several Inca generals was swiftly crushed and Spanish rule established over the former empire of the Incas - a dominion that soon became the most powerful viceroyalty Spain was ever to posses overseas.
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eThe Republic
The winds of liberty that led to the independence of the United States and the fall of the French monarchy in the late 18th Century did not spare the Spanish viceroyalties in the New World. In 1821, Peru resolved to become a republic. Drafted by Manuel Pérez de Tudela (later to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs), the Declaration of Independence was read out in an open section of Lima's town council on July 15, 1821. Independence was proclaimed by General José de San Martín on the 28th of that month, but was definitively achieved by victory at Ayacucho on December 9, 1824 in the final battle for the emancipation of the Americas.
Officers and soldiers in the army of the liberator Antonio José de Sucre included patriots - (among them the Panamanian colonel Tomás Herrera) from all corners of Latin America. Most Peruvians fought in the Peruvian Legion, a battalion whose most distinguished officers were Ramón Castilla, Miguel San Román and Narciso Tudela; all displayed heroic conduct on the battlefield.
Throughout the republican era, Peru has sought to be one of the leading nations in Latin America in the domain of science and technology. Accordingly, South America got its first railroad when the line from Lima to Callao was opened in 1851. Begun in 1869 under the supervision of Enrique Meiggs, the rail line that winds its way across the Andes - and through Ticlio (Anticona) at 4,818 mt. above sea level - to Huancayo is a stunning feat of engineering. In Lima, the Exposition Palace was built on plans designed by A. Gustave Eiffel in 1872.
Pedro Paulet Mostajo, a Peruvian aviation visionary, developed a "torpedo plane" which NASA director Wemher von Braun later acknowledged as a forerunner of the modern space rocket. Another flight pioneer, Jorge Chávez in 1910 was the first to cross the Alps in a rudimentary monoplane. In Lima in 1911, Juan Bielovucich performed the first successful take off in Peru.
In the field of political thought, José Carlos Mariátegui and Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre had considerable influence in Peru and the rest of Latin America through much of the 20th Century.
More recently on the international scene, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar served two successive terms as United Nations Secretary-General.
A significant number of Peruvians have gained international stature in literature and art. Painters include Francisco "Pancho" Fierro, Ignacio Merino, Franciso Laso, Teófilo Castillo, Juan Lepiani, Luis Montero, Jorge Vinatea Reinoso, Daniel Hernández, Carloández, Carlos Bacaflor, Mario Urteaga, Teodoro Núñez Ureta, Palao Berastamy and Fernando de Szyslo. Literature is adorned by Ricardo Palma, Abraham Vadelomar, César Vallejo, José Santos Chocano, Ciro Alegría, Manuel Scorza, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alfredo Bryce Echenique.
Since achieving independence, Peru has promoted solidarity across the continent. Its government convened the Amphictyonic Congress that was held in Panama City in 1826. In 1851, on the initiative of President Rámon Castilla, Lima hosted the first Pan-American Conference. Similar events followed and eventually led to the Pan-American Union, the precursor of today's Organisation of American States (O.A.S.).
In 1969 Peru and other South American states set up the Andean Pact, a regional trade alliance officially located in Lima. Today the group comprises Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
As elsewhere in Latin America, Peru has been a land where many people have sought refuge. Shortly before the turn of the century and after the First and Second World Wars, tides of migrants from Europe and Asia reached Peru, where their acceptance helped alleviate the harshness of economic conditions in the countries they had left behind.
