Human Sacrifices
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Human
Sacrifices
Human Sacrifices: In common with all known Bronze Age civilisations the Incas practiced human sacrifice, especially at great festivals or royal funerals where retainers died to accompany the dead into the next life. The Moche of Northern Peru or Pre-Incans sacrificed teenagers en masse, as archaeologist Steve Bourget found when he uncovered the bones of forty two male adolescents in 1995. The study of the images seen in Moche art has enabled researchers to reconstruct the culture's most important ceremonial sequence, which began with ritual combat and culminated in the sacrifice of those defeated in battle. Dressed in fine clothes and adornments, armed warriors faced each other in ritual combat. In this hand-to-hand encounter the aim was to remove the opponent's headdress rather than kill him. The object of the combat was the provision of victims for sacrifice. The vanquished were stripped and bound, after which they were led in procession to the place of sacrifice. The captives are portrayed as strong and sexually potent. In the temple, the priests and priestesses would prepare the victims for sacrifice. The sacrificial methods employed varied, but at least one of the victims would be bled to death. His blood was offered to the principal deities in order to please and placate them. The Inca of Peru also made human sacrifices. As many as four thousand servants, court officials, favorites and concubines were killed upon the death of the Inca Huayna Capac in 1527. A number of mummies of sacrificed children have been recovered in the Inca regions of South America, an ancient practice known as capacocha. The Incas performed child sacrifices during or after important events, such as the death of the Sapa Inca (emperor) or during a famine.
The sacrificial altar on Machu Picchu
We have learned that some children where chosen shortly after birth and brought up in the knowledge of their forthcoming sacrifice. They often lived separately from their parents in luxury and knew it was a great honour to join with the very deities they worshipped to have a life eternal in the hereafter. These children have been discovered as bones, with all their offerings, often girls and boys in equal number in the same place, to appease volcanoes, earthquakes or as a gift to a mountain.
On the 28th of January 2010 - a thousand-year-old temple complex including a tomb with human sacrifice victims was found under the windswept dunes of northwestern Peru, archaeologists reported. The discovery of the complex, excavated near the city of Chiclayo between 2006 and late 2009, has injected a dose of reality into the legend of Naylamp, the god who supposedly founded the pre-Inca Lambayeque civilization in the eighth century A.D., following the collapse of the Moche civilization. That's because evidence at the Chotuna-Chornancap archaeological site indicates the temple complex may have belonged to people claiming to have descended from Naylamp - suggesting for the first time that these supposed descendants existed in the flesh. The sophisticated Lambayeque culture, also known as the Sicán, were best known as skilled irrigation engineers until being conquered in A.D. 1375 by the Chimú, a civilization also based along Peru's arid northern coast. Archaeologists have been "trying to decode the legend's mystery" for a century, said dig leader Carlos Wester La Torre, director of the Bruning National Archaeological Museum in Lambayeque. "The goal was to understand the possible relations between the oral legend and archaeological evidence." Within the newfound temple complex is a pyramid-shaped tomb, called Huaca Norte, which was filled with the skeletons of thirty three women. Two skeletons still had their original hair and some (top row) are mummified. All of them show cut marks, meaning they were likely tortured as part of human-sacrifice rituals. "Women are traditionally associated with fertility," La Torre said. "They are offered in religious ceremonies in return for more fertility (and other beneficial events) - like rain, for instance."
ALL IN ALL PART OF THEIR BELIEF SYSTEM |