There have
been may contracts in the last 5,000 years between the civilized
regions of the Old World and the semi-isolated continent of
the New World. It was described by the ancient Mediterranean
navigators and map-makers as an island, because it rode in the
middle of Oceanus, the Ocean Stream, the wastes of the Pacific
part of the Ocean on the one flank, the Atlantic part of Ocean
upon the other. Relatively few of these contacts however have
been significant.
Certainly,
contacts with China and south-east Asia may have left a real
mark upon America and also its contacts with Polynesians. The
white-skinned Indians of the Amazon basin, Pizarro described
them as corn-blonde, who were noted and recorded by the Spaniards,
have to be explained as well as the fair-haired blue-eyed northern
Europeans remembered in Peru. Also the mummies discovered in
Peru which had red hair and blonde hair. But this does not form
the central subject of my book.
For I am
chiefly concerned with the culturally meaningful contacts between
the Old World and the New which make the New World useless as
a field study for anyone looking for Amerindian societies which
developed in isolation from the main stream of world events.
The first
formative area in America was seemingly Bolivia and Peru; the
period was the Copper Age. In the fourth millennium certainly,
but probably as early as the fifth or sixth, prospectors sought
to meet the needs of the Fertile Crescent. The cause of the
contact between these two distant parts of the world was the
need for copper, silver and gold, and later, tin. High up in
the Sierra, among the peaks of the Andes rising to 25,000 feet,
a mining city comparable with Kimberley and Johannesburg in
modern Africa, was developed by varying groups of white men
some 5,000 years ago in South America. Behind Peru and Bolivia
were the creative energy of the Semitic sea-people, the Aryans
and the Sumerians, their astronomical, mathematical, and navigational
skills, their knowledge of irrigation farming, their proclivity
for terraced agriculture. From this local center of civilization
they traded with and traveled throughout the Americas. In this
center the peculiar form of Amerindian civilization was developed
that spread north to Central America, the Peruvians themselves,
as well as the Sumerians and Cretans, taking it to Mexico and
Yucatan. The evidence for this theme is circumstantial: the
jig-saw can be pieced together with only a hazy picture as a
guide; as much evidence as possible must therefore be displayed.
So to turn a plausible picture into a convincing one, further
data is desirable.
The Indian
word for Peru when the Spaniards arrived, meant literally ‘Land
of the Four Quarters’. One o fthe pre-eminent titles of
Naram-Sin , grandson of King Sargon, whose name is inscribed
in Peru, was ‘Ruler of the Four Quarters’.
The Peruvians
used the batik and itka methods of dycing cloth. These dycing
techniques and the colour significance were used in the Mediterranean
area of that period.
From The
God-Kings & The Titans by James Bailey
