White Indians are descendants of the Atlanteans. White Indians White Indians Tribe

It all started with Columbus.

“My messengers report,” the great traveler wrote on November 6, 1492, “that after a long march they found a village consisting of 1000 inhabitants. The locals greeted them with honors, settled them in the best houses, took care of their weapons, kissed their hands and feet, trying to make it clear in any way that they (the Spaniards. - Auto.) - white people who came from God. About 50 residents asked my messengers to take them with them to heaven to the star gods.”

This is the first mention of the worship of white gods among the inhabitants of the New World. Countless legends of the Indians of both Americas tell that once white bearded gods, blue-eyed and blond-haired, arrived on the shores of their continent on large strange ships. They brought the Indians the basics of knowledge, laws, and the beginnings of culture. The Aztecs and Toltecs of Mexico called their white god Quetzalcoatl, the Incas called Kon-Tiki Viracocha, and the Mayans called Kukulcan.

Columbus's letter clearly shows the reverence and respect that was shown to the first Europeans on American soil. The powerful Aztec civilization, with an excellent military organization and a population of millions, fell to a handful of Spaniards. In 1519, Cortez's detachment walked freely through the jungle to the Aztec capital. He was not interfered with. Pizarro's conquistadors, who conquered Peru, also used the misconceptions of the Incas, marveling at the strange behavior of the Indians - they offered almost no resistance to the white newcomers.

The Indians saw the Europeans as returning “white gods.” »

Scientists have been studying this problem for many years. Extensive data from the oral tradition of Indian tribes of Central and South America, archaeological evidence and materials from medieval Spanish chronicles have been collected. One after another, hypotheses are born. Many researchers either try to connect the “white gods” with the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean (Crito-Minoans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, etc.), or delve into the wilds they themselves invented (Atlantis, aliens from outer space and other nonsense) . But in recent decades, in search of the place of origin of the “white gods”, scientists are increasingly beginning to turn their gaze to the Pacific Ocean...

In Peru, on the deserted Pacific coast, archaeologists have discovered numerous ancient necropolises. The dry climate allowed scientists to study the remains found there in detail. According to initial assumptions, the ancient mummies should have given researchers a comprehensive answer to the question: what was the type of the ancient pre-Incan population of Peru? However, everything happened exactly the opposite: the mummies asked scientists new riddles. Having opened the burials, anthropologists discovered types of people there that had not previously been encountered in ancient America.

In 1925, archaeologists discovered two large necropolises containing hundreds of mummies on the Paracas Peninsula on the southern central Peruvian coast. Radiocarbon analysis determined the age of these burials - 2200 years. Near the graves, researchers found large quantities of fragments of hard trees, which were usually used in the construction of rafts. When the burials were opened, a striking difference between the mummies and the main physical type of the ancient Peruvian population was discovered.

According to the American anthropologist Stewart, “this was an isolated group of people, completely atypical for the population of Peru.” While Stewart was studying the remains of these people, Peruvian anthropologist M. Trotger was analyzing the hair of nine mummies. According to her, their color in general was red-brown, but in some cases the samples yielded very light, almost golden hair color. And the hair of two mummies was completely different from the rest - it curled! Trotger further established that the cut of hair is different for different mummies, and almost all forms are found in the burial...

Another indicator is hair thickness. It is smaller here than among other Indians, but not as small as among the average European population, for example the Dutch. Trotger herself, a supporter of the theory of monoracial settlement of America, tried to justify such an unexpected observation for herself by the fact that death supposedly changes the shape of hair. But another authority in this field, the English anthropologist Dawson, objected to her: “I believe that after death there are no significant changes in hair. Curly ones stay curly, straight ones stay straight. Yes, after death they become brittle, but there are no color changes.”

Finds on the Paracas Peninsula made scientists remember what the famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro wrote about the Incas: “The ruling class in the Peruvian kingdom was fair-skinned, with skin the color of ripe wheat. Most of the nobles were surprisingly similar to the Spaniards. In this country I met an Indian woman so light-skinned that I was amazed. The neighbors call these people children of the gods”...

There were about five hundred such “nobles” - members of the royal family - before the arrival of the Spaniards. Chroniclers report that the eight rulers of the Inca dynasty were white and bearded, and their wives were “white as an egg.” One of the chroniclers, Garcillazo de la Vega, who was of Incan origin, left a description of how once, when he was still a child, a dignitary took him to the royal tomb. He showed the boy one of the rooms of the palace in Cusco, where several mummies lay along the walls, and said that these were former Incan emperors, and he saved their bodies from decomposition. The boy stopped in front of one of the mummies. Her hair was white as snow. The dignitary explained to him that this was the mummy of the White Inca, the 8th ruler of the country of Tawantinsuyu. It is known that he died at a young age, and the whiteness of his hair cannot in any way be explained by gray hair...

Having compared data on the light-pigmented element in America and Polynesia with the legends of Easter Island, a number of researchers have suggested that white-skinned people went from America to Polynesia, but not vice versa. One of the proofs of this is the similar custom of mummification of the bodies of the dead in Polynesia and South America and its complete absence in Indonesia. Having spread on the shores of Peru, the method of mummifying the bodies of the nobility was transferred by migrants to the islands of Polynesia. Two mummies found in the Hawaiian Islands "demonstrated" in detail all the details of this custom in Peru.

So, the source of the spread of the “white gods” was Peru? A superficial acquaintance with the vast and diverse literature on the history of this country is enough to find many references to bearded and white-skinned Indian gods, and above all about Kon-Tiki Viracocha. Pizarro and his people reported that in the temple of Cuzco there was a huge statue of the god Viracocha, depicting a man in a long robe and sandals, “exactly the same as what the Spanish artists painted at home...”. A contemporary of the events wrote that when the Spaniards saw this statue, they thought that Saint Bartholomew had reached Peru and the Indians created a monument in memory of this event. The conquistadors were so amazed by the strange statue that they did not destroy it immediately, and the temple for a time avoided the fate of other religious buildings. But soon its fragments were taken away in different directions by poor peasants.

When the chronicler Betanzos, who took part in the Peruvian campaigns of the Spaniards, asked the Indians what Viracocha looked like, they answered that he was tall, in a white robe down to his toes, the hair on his head was gathered in a bun, he walked importantly and in his hands he held something resembling prayer book. Lake Titicaca was at the very center of Viracocha's activity. There, on the lake and in the neighboring city of Tiahuanaco, his residence was located.

While exploring the territory of Peru, the Spaniards came across huge megalithic structures from pre-Incan times, lying in ruins. “When I asked the local Indians who built these ancient monuments,” wrote the Spanish chronicler Cieza de Leon in 1553, “they answered that it was done by another people, bearded and white-skinned, like us Spaniards. These people arrived long before the Incas and settled here.” How strong and enduring this legend is is confirmed by the testimony of the Peruvian archaeologist Valcarcel, who, 400 years after Leon, heard from the Indians who lived near the ruins that “these structures were created by a foreign people, white like the Europeans.”

“They also said,” continues Leon, “that on Lake Titicaca on an island in past centuries there lived a white people like us, and one local leader named Kari with his people came to this island and waged war against this people and killed many ... “In a separate chapter of his chronicle dedicated to the ancient structures of Tiahuanaco, de Leon reports the following: “I asked the local residents whether these buildings were created during the time of the Incas. They laughed at my question and said that they knew for certain that all this was done long before the power of the Incas. They saw bearded men on the island of Titicaca. These were people of subtle minds who came from an unknown country, and there were few of them, and many were killed in wars...

Inca Garcillazo de la Vega questioned his royal uncle about the early history of Peru. He answered: “Nephew, I will answer your question with pleasure, and what I say you will keep in your heart forever, know that in ancient times this entire area, known to you, was covered with forest and thickets and people lived like wild animals - without religion and power, without cities and houses, without cultivating the land and without clothing, for they did not know how to make fabrics to sew a dress. They lived in twos or threes in caves or rock crevices, in the mountains underground. They ate turtles and roots, fruits and human flesh. They covered their bodies with leaves and animal skins. They lived like animals and treated women like animals, because each of them did not know how to live with one woman.” De Leon continues Garcillazo's story: “After this, a tall white man appeared and had great authority. They say that in many villages he taught people to live normally. Everywhere they called him the same - Tikki Viracocha. And in honor of him they created temples and erected statues in them...

Where did Viracocha come from? “Many believe that his name is Inga Viracocha, and it means “sea foam,” notes the chronicler Zarate. Another chronicler, Gomara, claims that, according to the stories of the old Indians, he led his people across the sea. Legends of the Chimu Indians tell that a white deity came from the north. Many legends agree that Viracocha and his associates sailed on reed boats on Lake Titicaca and built the megalithic city of Tiahuanaco. From here he sent his bearded “apostles” to all corners of Peru to teach people and tell them that he was their creator. But, in the end, dissatisfied with the behavior of the inhabitants, he decided to leave their lands.

Viracocha. Relief on the Gate of the Sun in Tiwanaku, Peru

Throughout the vast Inca empire, right up to the arrival of the Spaniards, the Indians unanimously named the path along which Viracocha and his associates left. They went down to the Pacific coast and went west along the sea along with the sun towards Polynesia.

In the north of the Incan state, in the mountains of Colombia, lived the Chibcha Indians, who had reached a high level of culture before the arrival of the Spaniards. His legends also contain information about the white teacher Bochik. Its description is the same as that of the Incas. He ruled over them for many years and was also called Sua, meaning “sun” in local dialects. He came to them from the east.

To the east of the Chibcha region, in Venezuela and neighboring areas, we again come across evidence of the presence of a mysterious wanderer. He was called here Tsuma, or Sume. He taught the local Indians how to farm. According to one legend, he ordered all the people to gather around a high rock, stood on it and told them laws and instructions. After living here for some time, he left this country.

North of Colombia and Venezuela, in the area of ​​today's Panama Canal, live the Kuna Indians. They preserved legends that a long time ago, after a severe flood, someone came to them and taught people crafts. Several of his companions were with him. It is curious that in the 1920s, the American researcher Richard Marsh, who communicated a lot with the Kuna Indians, heard stories from them about a mysterious tribe of “white Indians” who in former times lived next door to the Kuna. Marsh even found several Indians among the Kuna, apparently with white skin; Later, researchers explained this phenomenon as hereditary albinism.

Even further north, in Mexico, the Aztec civilization was thriving at the time of the Spanish invasion. From Anahuca (modern Texas) to Yucatan, the Aztecs spoke of the white god Quetzalcoatl. According to legend, he was the fifth ruler of the Toltecs, came from the land of the rising sun (of course, the Aztecs did not mean Japan by this name) and wore a long cape. He ruled for a long time in Tollan, prohibiting human sacrifice and preaching peace. People no longer killed animals and ate plant foods. But it didn't last long. The devil forced Quetzalcoatl to indulge in vanity and wallow in sins. However, he soon became ashamed of his weaknesses and decided to leave the country. Before leaving, the god made all the tropical birds fly away and turned the trees into thorny bushes. He went south...

“Map Secunda” by E. Cortez contains an excerpt from Montezuma’s speech: “We know from the writings inherited from our ancestors that neither I nor anyone else inhabiting this country are its indigenous inhabitants. We come from other lands. We also know that we descend from the ruler whose subordinates we were; he came to this country, he again wanted to leave and take his people with him. But they had already married local women, built houses and did not want to go with him. And he left. Since then we have been waiting for him to return someday. He will return just from the direction you came from, Cortes... We know what price the Aztecs paid for their “come true” dream.

The neighbors of the Aztecs, the Mayans, said that their ancestors came to Yucatan in two waves. The first time - this was the largest migration - from overseas, from the east, under the leadership of the cultural hero Itzamna. Another, smaller group came from the west, led by the white and bearded Kukulkan. Kukulcan is remembered as the builder of the pyramids and the founder of the cities of Mayapan and Chichen Itza. He taught the Mayans to use weapons, and then left them and went west...

A traveler traveling west from Yucatan must pass through the Tzeltal region in the Tabasco jungle. The legends of the population of these places contain information about Wotan, who came here from the east in ancient times. He was sent by the gods to divide the earth, distribute it to human races and give each its own language. The country from which he came was called Valum. When Wotan arrived in Zeltal, the people were "in a deplorable state." He distributed them among villages, taught them agricultural skills, and invented hieroglyphic writing, examples of which remained on the walls of their temples. It is also said that he wrote his story there. The myth ends very strangely: “When the time of sad departure finally came, he did not go through the valley of death, like all mortals, but passed through a cave into the underworld.”

But in reality, the mysterious Wotan did not go underground, but on the Soke plateau and received the name Condoy there. The Soke Indians, about whose mythology almost nothing is known, were neighbors of the inhabitants of Tzeltal. According to their legend, the “father-god” came in a light golden robe and taught them how to live correctly. They also did not believe in his death, but believed that he retreated into a cave and, having closed the hole, went to other nations...

To the south of the Mayans lived the Quiché tribes, whose culture was close to the Mayans. From their sacred book, the Popol Vuh, we learn that their people were also familiar with the white wanderer who passed through the lands. The Quiche called him Gugumats...

As we can see, legends about white bearded gods are widespread throughout Central America - from Yucatan to the Peruvian coast. In addition to legends, in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador, there are numerous images of white people. The frescoes of one of the Chichen Itza temples even depict a battle between Indians and white people. Thus, a wide range of sources indicate the spread of a lightly pigmented population in the New World. But what kind of population is this? Where did it come from? And how could this Caucasian minority maintain its racial type, being surrounded by numerous Indian tribes?

The last question is easiest to answer. Here it is enough to remember the gypsies - the analogy is very appropriate. Strict adherence to endogamy—marriages within an ethnic group—contributed to the preservation of the anthropological type. The existence of endogamy among the “white gods” is evidenced by Indian legends and reports of medieval chroniclers.

Who were these white bearded gods? Not aliens - that's for sure. Their origin is clearly terrestrial. Were they ancient proto-Berbers - megalith builders of the Old World, "peoples of the sea", Cretan-Minoans, Greeks or Phoenicians? Or maybe aliens from the other side of the world - Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Polynesians? There are a lot of hypotheses on this subject, all of which have one common drawback: they are groundless. Let's better think about this simple question: how ancient are these legends? After all, most of them are known to us only in the retelling of Spanish authors of the 16th century. It is likely that such legends were invented by European missionaries after the Spanish conquest to facilitate the Christianization of the Indians.

The image of a cultural hero, implanting the beginnings of civilization among backward peoples, is widespread among the peoples of America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, and there is no reason to consider it a specifically American phenomenon. And regarding the “beardiness” of Indian cultural heroes, it is worth noting that a beard - natural or artificial - was a symbol of wisdom among the pre-Columbian Indians. As a cult attribute, the beard was repeatedly depicted in the drawings of the Olmecs (1st millennium BC) and Mayans (1st–15th centuries). It is quite natural that mythology endowed a cultural hero with a beard - who else would be wise if not him?

The question of whiteness remains - the most interesting, and perhaps the most difficult. Or maybe vice versa - the easiest. The fact is that there is a number of evidence that groups of white Indians lived and continue to live in America today!

When the 19th-century German traveler Heinrich Barth first discovered cave paintings of elephants and hippos in the parched Sahara and told about it in Europe, he was laughed at. When another German researcher, Karl Mauch, shared his impressions of the gigantic structures of Zimbabwe with his colleagues, he was surrounded by a wall of cold silence and mistrust. The Englishman Percy Fossett, who traveled around Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century, obviously faced the same thankless fate if he had not disappeared forever in the jungle, leaving only a book of travel notes, later called “The Unfinished Journey.”

“‘There are white Indians on Kari,’ the manager told me,” writes Fossett. “My brother once went on a longboat up the Tauman, and at the very upper reaches of the river he was told that white Indians lived nearby. He did not believe it and only laughed at the people who said this, but still went on a boat and found unmistakable traces of their presence... Then he and his people were attacked by tall, handsome, well-built savages, they had pure white skin, red hair and blue eyes. They fought like devils, and when my brother killed one of them, the rest took the body and ran away."

Few people believe Fossett's testimony. Perhaps this is explained by the mystery and seeming unreality of the events described in the book?

“Here I again heard stories about white Indians... “I knew a man who met such an Indian,” the British consul told me. “These Indians are completely wild, and it is believed that they only come out at night. That's why they're called "bats." "Where do they live?" – I asked. “Somewhere in the area of ​​the lost gold mines, either north or northwest of the Diamantina River. No one knows their exact location. Mato Grosso is a very poorly explored country; no one has yet penetrated the mountainous regions in the north... Perhaps in a hundred years flying cars will be able to do this, who knows..."

“Flying cars” were able to do this three decades later. They did not find any white Indians that Fawcett writes about in his book. But that doesn't mean they don't exist. In 1926, the American ethnographer Harris studied the Indians of San Blas and wrote that they had hair the color of flax and straw and the build of a white man. The French explorer Homais described an encounter with the Waika Indian tribe, whose hair was chestnut. “The so-called white race,” he wrote, “has, even with a superficial examination, a mass of representatives among the Amazonian Indians.” Let us note that the American jungle has the ability to isolate no less than the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and the isolation is centuries-old...

White Indians. 19th century drawing

One of the legends about white Indians is associated with the mystery of the Mandans, a tribe belonging to the group of North American Sioux tribes. The Mandans, native inhabitants of the upper Mississippi, once lived in the territory now divided between the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas - perhaps the most unusual of all the Indian tribes of North America. The lands inhabited by Maidans became the arena of activity of white settlers only after 1850. However, for 200 years the Mandans have attracted the attention of ethnographers due to the fact that they were very different from all other Indian tribes in appearance, customs and religious views. Moreover, their physical appearance showed signs that suggested mixing with some northern race, for one fifth or one sixth of these Indians had almost white skin and light blue eyes. Among the Mandans, there were often people with blond hair and a facial expression so unusual for Indians that some ethnographers even refused to consider these “more than half white people” to be Indians. The dwellings of the Mandans strongly resembled the ancient buildings of northern European peoples. We find the closest similarity to their architecture only in medieval Norway and Sweden. And one of the Mandan legends said that the father of the tribe was a white man who arrived in their country in a canoe. Even in those days when not a single European visited these places, the Mandans were already familiar with the basic tenets of Christianity: they talked about the Savior, the virgin birth, the agony of the cross, the miraculous feeding of 5 thousand people, the sin of the ancestress of the human race, the flood , the escaped ark and the dove sent from it, which brought a willow branch, etc.

Similar ideas 200 years ago amazed the first European explorer to penetrate these remote areas, the Frenchman La Vérendry. In 1738, this explorer, on behalf of the French Governor-General, undertook an overland journey from Canada to the Pacific Ocean. He wanted to take this opportunity to personally get acquainted with the strange “white Indians”, rumors about which had reached him. Having visited the Mandans, the Frenchman concluded that once upon a time a “large military expedition from well-known countries of the globe” was launched into the territory of this tribe, and the Mandans “came from the mixing of natives with civilized people.” But La Vérendry could not understand how Europeans could have reached these remote areas, located more than 1,500 km from the Atlantic Ocean and settled by whites only in the second half of the 19th century, in ancient times?

Many researchers associate the mystery of the Mandans with the voyages of the medieval Scandinavian Vikings. But the mystery of the “white Indians” as a whole cannot be solved with the help of the Vikings. The Polynesians, or, as they are called, “Vikings of the Pacific Ocean,” can come to the rescue here.

Modern scientists agree that the racial identity of the Polynesians is still unclear. Apparently, they owe their origin to two, and perhaps several races that mixed with each other. Among the Polynesians, people with pronounced dolichocephaly and light skin pigmentation, like southern Europeans, are often found to this day. Throughout Polynesia, the so-called Arab-Semitic type (Thur Heyerdahl's term) has been found - with a straight nose, thin lips and straight red hair. These features were noted by the first European travelers all the way from Easter Island to New Zealand, so it is impossible to talk about later mixing with Europeans in this case.

Anthropological evidence points to the Southeast Asian roots of the inhabitants of Polynesia, but the first European explorers of Polynesia noted in their writings that there were many people with fair skin and red hair on the Pacific Islands. At that time, the version about Caucasoid (Caucasian) elements in the Oceanian racial type was born. Recently, anthropologists have discovered that fair skin and red (or blond) hair are found not only among the indigenous people of Polynesia, but also among the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and New Guinea.

Residents of Easter Island, the closest piece of land to America, claim that some of their ancestors had white skin and red hair, while the rest were dark-skinned and black-haired. This was witnessed by the first Europeans who visited the island. When a Dutch ship first visited the island in 1722, European travelers were surprised to note the following from the islanders: “Among them there are dark brown people, like the Spaniards, and completely white people, and some have completely red skin, as if the sun was burning it...” Intrigued by these reports, Thor Heyerdahl went to Easter Island in the 1950s and, after research conducted here, stated that the island was first inhabited in the 4th-11th centuries by Caucasoids (Caucasoids), immigrants from Peru - from Tiahuanaco. Then, at the beginning of the middle period, new settlers from Peru arrived here, bringing with them the cult of the birdman and the cult of ancestors (hence the erection of giant statues of leaders on stone platforms). A little later, but in the same middle period, the Polynesians themselves appeared on Easter Island. Both groups coexisted with each other for a long time, until finally, in the late period, the Polynesians managed to destroy all the descendants of the South American Indians.

This hypothesis did not last long - it was swept away by a wave of criticism. Dozens of archaeological, ethnographic and other expeditions went to the islands of Oceania, many experimental voyages were undertaken on ships built according to Polynesian models, and with the help of mathematical modeling methods it was possible to understand various aspects of the process of settling Polynesia. The results of these studies completely refuted the main provisions of Heyerdahl's concept. Another concept seems much more reasonable today - that it was the Polynesians (and among them white-skinned and blond or red-haired elements) who were the first to land on the coast of South America. “Nowadays, no serious scientist will deny that long before Columbus, real connections existed between the inhabitants of Polynesia and South America, despite the unimaginable expanses of ocean separating them.”

The French scientist and traveler E. Bishop, who devoted many years of his life to studying the secrets of the Pacific Ocean, comprehensively substantiated the hypothesis that the Polynesians, exploring the ocean, reached the shores of America - remember, the Peruvian Indians said that their Viracocha came “from the sea ", and its very name means "sea foam". Considering the high seafaring skill of the Polynesians, most scientists today believe that they were the first to cross the Pacific Ocean and reach the shores of America. According to the famous Soviet Americanist Yu.V. Knorozov, “Polynesian expeditions should have, of course, reached the American coast, most likely based on the islands of the Marquesas archipelago. There are seasons in Polynesia when fairly strong westerly winds blow. In addition, the expedition should have preferred to go against the usually prevailing eastern trade winds, so that in case of depletion of food supplies it could quickly return back with a fair wind. The coasts of America, relatively densely populated, were hardly suitable for establishing colonies there. Perhaps contacts were limited only to exploration expeditions. Stocking up on food supplies on the American coast, the Polynesians took out local cultivated plants from there. The Peruvian sweet potato - kumara - came to Polynesia under the same name, which indicates direct contacts of the Polynesians with local residents... The most favorable route to the east for the Polynesians ran in close proximity to the equator, between the oncoming North and South Equatorial Currents, where the eastern counter-equatorial current arises current, albeit unreliable. However, returning to their islands, the Polynesians could sail south along the American coast to approximately the latitude of the city of Lima in order to take advantage of the favorable South Equatorial Current, which was well known to them.”

We can provide other interesting information about the contacts of the Polynesians with the inhabitants of South America - both folklore and archaeological. For example, in Peru, two fighting clubs of Polynesian origin – “patu” – were discovered in ancient burials. Obsidian spear tips were also found here. Stone adzes found in Polynesia, Chile and Argentina have striking similarities. Thus, there is little doubt that long before the discoveries of Columbus, brave Polynesian sailors repeatedly crossed the greatest ocean of the planet and landed on the South American coast. However, “one can only guess about the results of such “visits”,” notes V.I. Gulyaev, “although it is unlikely that they had any noticeable influence on the development of the culture of both the Indians and the inhabitants of Polynesia.”

But what then to do with the stories that the “white gods” brought numerous cultural achievements to the American continent? There is no doubt that the basis of these stories is most likely heavily mythologized. But the real, non-mythical basis of legends about white and bearded cultural heroes can be (this is nothing more than a version!) the fact of the amazing similarity of the Ainu Jomon culture with the finds in Valdivia (Ecuador), as we discussed above. It seems that no one will deny that the Ainu are “white and bearded.” Another thing is interesting: the ceramics of Valdivia, similar to the Ainu, represent a real “cultural center” in a country whose population at that time did not know ceramics!

The discoverers of Valdivian ceramics, the Ecuadorian archaeologist E. Estrada and his American colleagues B. Meggere and K. Evans and E. Estrada, will explain it this way: about 5 thousand years ago, a boat with Ainu fishermen could have been carried away by a typhoon from the coast of the island of Kyushu into the open sea. If this happened in October or November, then it was caught in the North Pacific currents, moving at a speed of 24-32 miles per day. The voyage lasted many months, but the crew of the boat, or part of it, withstood the hardships of the journey, and as a result, the Ainu were brought to the Ecuadorian coast, where they were friendly received by the Indians. Asian newcomers taught local residents the art of making Jomon-type ceramics. Soon the Valdivians themselves became excellent potters and even surpassed their teachers in many ways. According to the authors of the hypothesis, the origin of the ceramics of Ecuador and all of pre-Columbian America goes back to the pottery traditions of the Jomon culture.

“If the main provisions of the hypothesis of Estrada and his colleagues are true,” writes Soviet ethnographer S.A. Arutyunov, - then what is the fundamental scientific significance of their discovery? The episode itself with the appearance of the ancient inhabitants of Japan in South America played a relatively small role in its ethnic and cultural history, although it may have given the first impetus to the spread of ceramics on the coast of Ecuador.

Be that as it may, the very fact that the “white and bearded” Ainu who came from overseas - the carriers of the Jomon culture - taught the Indians to make ceramics and thereby gave impetus to new cultural traditions in the New World could well form the basis of the legends about "white gods".

White-skinned Indians are a reality, and this is not surprising if you know the real history of our earthly civilization. About 25 thousand years ago, the Ant Slavs, whom we call Atlanteans, began to move to America...

The Lost Expedition

When the German traveler of the last century, Heinrich Barth, first discovered rock paintings of moisture-loving animals in the Sahara and told about it in Europe, he was laughed at. After another German researcher, Karl Mauch, shared his impressions of the gigantic structures of Zimbabwe with his colleagues, he was surrounded by a wall of cold silence and mistrust. The Englishman Percy Fossett, who traveled around Brazil at the beginning of our century, would have faced the same ungrateful fate if he had not... disappeared forever in the jungle, leaving only a book of travel notes. The brave traveler’s younger contemporaries called it “The Unfinished Journey”...

Page 133 of Fossett's diary: “There are white Indians on Kari,” the manager told me. “My brother once went on a longboat up the Tauman, and at the very upper reaches of the river he was told that white Indians lived nearby. He did not believe it and only laughed at the people who said this, but still went on a boat and found unmistakable traces of their presence... Then he and his people were attacked by tall, handsome, well-built savages, they had pure white skin , red hair and blue eyes. They fought like devils, and when my brother killed one of them, the rest took the body and ran away."

Re-reading the comments to the diaries, one becomes bitterly convinced of how deeply mistrust of eyewitness accounts, in particular travelers, has penetrated into people’s consciousness over the past decades. However, this can be understood - too many forgeries and hoaxes have been born during this time, discrediting the true position of this or that issue. Fossett is not believed. Or rather, they believe, but very few. Perhaps this can be explained by the mystery and seeming unreality of the events described in the book?..

“Here I again heard stories about white Indians. “I knew a man who met such an Indian,” the British consul told me. - These Indians are completely wild, and it is believed that they only come out at night. That’s why they are called “bats.” “Where do they live? - I asked. - Somewhere in the area of ​​​​the lost gold mines, either north or northwest of the Diamantinu River. No one knows their exact location. Mato Grosso is a very poorly explored country; no one has yet penetrated the mountainous regions in the north... Perhaps in a hundred years flying cars will be able to do this, who knows?”

Flying cars were able to do this three decades later. In 1930, while flying over the Gran Sabana region, American pilot Jimmy Angel discovered huge unknown holes in the ground and a giant waterfall. And this in an age when, as it is believed, all corners of the Earth have already been discovered and explored...

Von Däniken's "Guess"

It all started with Columbus. “My messengers report,” he wrote on November 6, 1492, “that after a long march they found a village with 1000 inhabitants. The locals greeted them with honors, settled them in the most beautiful houses, took care of their weapons, kissed their hands and feet, trying to make them understand in any way that they (the Spaniards) were white people who came from God. About 50 residents asked my messengers to take them with them to heaven to the star gods.”

This is the first mention of the worship of white gods among the American Indians.

“They (the Spaniards) could do whatever they wanted and no one stopped them; they cut jade, smelted gold, and behind all this was Quetzalcoatl...” - one Spanish chronicler wrote after Columbus.

Countless legends of the Indians of both Americas tell that white bearded people once landed on the shores of their country. They brought the basics of knowledge, laws, and entire civilization to the Indians. They arrived on large strange ships with swan wings and a glowing hull. Approaching the shore, the ships landed people - blue-eyed and fair-haired - in robes of coarse black material and short gloves. They had snake-shaped ornaments on their foreheads. This legend has survived almost unchanged to this day. The Aztecs and Toltecs of Mexico called the white god Quetzalcoatl, the Incas - Kon-Tiki Viracocha, for the Chibcha he was Bochica, and for the Mayans - Kukulkan... Scientists have been studying this problem for many years. Extensive data from the oral traditions of Indian tribes of Central and South America, archaeological evidence and materials from medieval Spanish chronicles have been collected. Hypotheses are born and die...

A well-known Swiss writer Erich von Däniken also, naturally, he could not pass over such an attractive topic in silence and made it work for himself. “The white deities of the Indians are, of course, aliens from outer space,” Däniken said without a shadow of a doubt and cited several legends in support. Indeed, these legends (too long to be cited here) contain, like any product of folklore, elements of fantasy, and it was not difficult for such a venerable interpreter and “interpreter” of legends as Däniken to take them in the direction he needed. But let’s not engage in this dubious matter together with Deniken. We have a hard job ahead of us - leaf through the notes of Spanish chroniclers, listen to some legends and delve into the mountains of archaeological finds that confirm the legends and chronicles. Let's try to understand this problem from an earthly perspective.

Success of the conquistadors

Columbus's letter clearly shows the reverence and respect that was shown to the first Spaniards on American soil. The powerful Aztec civilization with an excellent military organization and a population of millions gave way to a few Spaniards. In 1519, Cortez's detachment walked freely through the jungle, rising to the Aztec capital. There was almost no hindrance...

Pizarro's troops also took advantage of the Incas' misconceptions as best they could. The Spaniards broke into the temple in Cusco, where there were gold and marble statues of white gods, smashed and trampled the decorations, amazed at the strange behavior of the Incas. There was no resistance to them, the Spaniards. The people of Peru came to their senses too late...

The details of the conquest are well described in many books, and there is no point in dwelling on them. But far from everywhere there are attempts to somehow explain the incomprehensible behavior of the Indians.

The Aztec priests calculated that the White God, who left them in the year of Que-Acatl, would return in the same “special” year, which repeated every 52 years. By a strange coincidence, Cortes landed on the American coast just as the cycles determined by the priests were changing. In terms of clothing, he also almost completely “matched” the legendary god. And it is clear that the Indians did not doubt at all the divine affiliation of the conquistadors. And when they began to doubt it, it was already too late.

Another interesting fact. The Aztec ruler Montezuma sent one of his dignitaries (history has preserved his name - Tendile or Teutlila) to Cortes with a gift - a headdress filled with gold. When the envoy poured out the decorations in front of the Spaniards and everyone crowded in to look, Tendile noticed among the conquistadors a man wearing a helmet trimmed with the finest gold plates. The helmet hit Tendile. When Cortes invited him to take the return gift to Montezuma, Tendile begged him to give only one thing - the helmet of that warrior: “I must show it to the ruler, because this helmet looks exactly the same as the one that the white god once put on.” Cortez gave him the helmet with the wish that it be returned filled with gold... To understand the Indians, we need to travel back in time and space - to Polynesia in the first centuries of our era.

Procession of bearded gods

Modern scientists agree that the racial identity of the Polynesians is still unclear. Despite the fact that they owe their origin to two, and perhaps several races that mixed with each other, among them there are still often people with pronounced dolicocephaly (long-headed) and light pigmentation, like southern Europeans. Now throughout Polynesia the so-called Arab-Semitic type (Heyerdahl's term) with a straight nose, thin lips and straight red hair has been discovered. These features were noted by the first European travelers all the way from Easter Island to New Zealand, so it is impossible to talk about any later mixing with Europeans in this case. This strange type of people, called "uru-keu" by the Polynesians, are believed to have descended from an ancient fair-skinned, white-haired "race of the gods" who originally inhabited the islands.

On Easter Island, the most distant piece of land from Polynesia and the closest piece of land to America, legends have been preserved that the ancestors of the islanders came from a desert country in the East and reached the island after sailing 60 days towards the setting sun. Today's islanders - a racially mixed population - claim that some of their ancestors had white skin and red hair, while the rest were dark-skinned and black-haired. This was witnessed by the first Europeans who visited the island. When a Dutch ship first visited Easter Island in 1722, a white man came on board, among other inhabitants, and the Dutch wrote the following about the rest of the islanders: “Among them there are dark brown people, like the Spaniards, and completely white people, and some the skin is generally red, as if the sun was burning it..."

From early reports collected in 1880 by Thompson, it became known that the country, located according to legend 60 days' journey to the east, was also called "the burial place." The climate there was so hot that people died and plants withered. To the west of Easter Island, throughout the vast stretch of Southeast Asia, there is nothing that could correspond to this description: the shores of all the islands are closed by a wall of tropical forest. But in the east, where the residents pointed out, lie the coastal deserts of Peru, and nowhere else in the Pacific Ocean is there an area that better matches the descriptions of the legend than the Peruvian coast, both in climate and in name.

There are numerous burial sites along the deserted shore of the Pacific Ocean. The dry climate allowed today's scientists to study in detail the bodies buried there. According to initial assumptions, the mummies located there should have given researchers a comprehensive answer to the question: what was the type of ancient pre-Incan population of Peru? However, the mummies did the opposite - they only asked riddles.

Having opened the burials, anthropologists discovered types of people there that had not previously been encountered in ancient America. In 1925, archaeologists discovered two large necropolises on the Paracas Peninsula on the south-central Peruvian coast. The burial site contained hundreds of mummies of ancient dignitaries. Radiocarbon analysis determined their age - 2200 years. Near the graves, researchers found large quantities of fragments of hard trees, which were usually used to build rafts. When the mummies were opened, a striking difference was revealed between them and the basic physical type of the ancient Peruvian population.

Here is what the American anthropologist Stewart wrote then: “This was a selected group of large people, absolutely not typical for the population of Peru.” While Stewart studied their bones, M. Trotter analyzed the hair of nine mummies. According to her, their color is generally reddish-brown, but in some cases the samples yielded very light, almost golden hair color. The hair of two mummies was generally different from the rest - it curled. Trotter further established that the shape of the hair cut is different for different mummies, and almost all shapes are found in the burial... Another indicator is the thickness of the hair. “It is smaller here than in other Indian populations, but not as small as in the average European population (for example, the Dutch).” Trotter herself, a supporter of the “homogeneous” population of America, tried to justify such an unexpected observation by saying that death changes the shape of hair. But this is what another authority in this field, the Englishman Dawson, objected to her: “I believe that after death, no significant changes occur to the hair. Curly ones stay curly, smooth ones stay smooth. After death they become brittle, but there is no color change.”

Francisco Pizarro wrote about the Incas: “The ruling class in the Peruvian kingdom was light-skinned, the color of ripe wheat. Most of the nobles were surprisingly similar to the Spaniards. In this country I met an Indian woman so light-skinned that I was amazed. The neighbors call these people - children of the gods...»

It can be assumed that these layers adhered to strict endogamy and spoke a special language. There were 500 such members of royal families before the arrival of the Spaniards. Chroniclers report that the eight rulers of the Inca dynasty were white and bearded, and their wives were “white as an egg.” One of the chroniclers, Garcillazo de la Vega, the son of an Inca queen, left an impressive description of how one day, when he was still a child, another dignitary took him to the royal tomb. Ondegardo (that was his name) showed the boy one of the rooms of the palace in Cusco, where several mummies lay along the wall. Ondegardo said that these were former Incan emperors and he saved their bodies from decomposition. By chance the boy stopped in front of one of the mummies. Her hair was white as snow. Ondegardo said that this is the mummy of the White Inca, the 8th ruler of the Sun. Since it is known that he died at a young age, the whiteness of his hair cannot in any way be explained by gray hair...

By comparing the data on the light-pigmented element in America and Polynesia with the Easter Island legends about their homeland in the East, it can be assumed that white-skinned people went from America to Polynesia (and not vice versa, as some researchers believe). One of the proofs of this is the similar custom of mummification of the bodies of the dead in Polynesia and South America and its complete absence in Indonesia. Having spread on the shores of Peru, the method of mummification of the nobility was transferred by migrants (white?) to the scattered and unsuitable islands of Polynesia. Two mummies recently found in a cave in the Hawaiian Islands "demonstrated" in detail all the details of this custom in ancient Peru...

So, did the white Indian deities live in Peru? A superficial acquaintance with the vast and diverse literature on the history of Peru is enough to find many references there to bearded and white-skinned Indian gods...

Pizarro, already mentioned by us, and his people, while robbing and destroying Incan temples, left detailed descriptions of their actions. In the temple of Cuzco, razed to the ground, there stood a huge statue depicting a man in a long robe and sandals, “exactly the same as what the Spanish artists painted at home”...

In the temple built in honor of Viracocha, there also stood the great god Kon-Tiki Viracocha - a man with a long beard and proud posture, wearing a long robe. A contemporary of the events wrote that when the Spaniards saw this statue, they thought that Saint Bartholomew had reached Peru and the Indians created a monument in memory of this event. The conquistadors were so amazed by the strange statue that they did not destroy it immediately, and the temple for a time avoided the fate of other similar structures. But soon its fragments were taken away in different directions by poor peasants.

While exploring the territory of Peru, the Spaniards came across huge metal structures pre-Inca times, also lying in ruins. “When I asked the local Indians who built these ancient monuments,” wrote the Spanish chronicler Cieza de Leon in 1553, “they answered that it was done by another people, bearded and white-skinned like us Spaniards. These people arrived long before the Incas and settled here."

How strong and enduring this tradition is is confirmed by the testimony of the Peruvian archaeologist Valcarcel, who, 400 years after de Leon, heard from the Indians who lived near the ruins that “these structures were created by a foreign people, white like the Europeans.” Lake Titicaca turned out to be at the very center of the “activity” of the white god Viracocha, for all evidence agrees on one thing - there, on the lake, and in the neighboring city of Tiahuanaco, there was the residence of the god. “They also said,” continues Leon, “that on the lake, on the island of Titicaca, in past centuries there lived a people, white like us, and one local leader named Kari with his people came to this island and waged war against this people and many killed..."

In a special chapter of his chronicle dedicated to the ancient structures of Tiahuanaco, Leon says the following: “I asked the local residents whether these buildings were created during the time of the Incas? They laughed at my question and said that they knew for certain that all this was done long before the power of the Incas. They saw bearded men on the island of Titicaca. These were people of subtle minds who came from an unknown country, and there were few of them, and many of them were killed in wars...”

When the Frenchman Bandelier began excavating these places 350 years later, the legends were still alive. He was told that in ancient times the island was inhabited by people similar to Europeans, they married local women, and their children became Incas...

“The information collected in different regions of Peru differs only in details... Monk Garcillaso asked his royal uncle about the early history of Peru. He answered: “Nephew, I will be happy to answer your question and what I say, you will forever keep in your heart. Know that in ancient times this entire region, known to you, was covered with forest and thickets, and people lived like wild animals - without religion and power, without cities and houses, without cultivating the land and without clothing, for they did not know how to make fabrics to sew a dress. They lived in twos or threes in caves or rock crevices, in grottoes underground. They ate turtles and roots, fruits and human flesh. They covered their bodies with leaves and animal skins. They lived like animals and treated women like animals, because each of them did not know how to live with one woman...” De Leon complements Garcillazo: “Immediately after this, a tall white man appeared and he had great authority. They say that in many villages he taught people to live normally. Everywhere they called him the same - Tikki Viracocha. And in honor of him they created temples and erected statues in them...”

When the chronicler Betanzos, who took part in the first Peruvian campaigns of the Spaniards, asked the Indians what Viracocha looked like, they answered that he was tall, in a white robe down to his toes, his hair was secured on his head with a tonsure, he walked importantly and was holding something in his hands. something like a prayer book.

Where did Viracocha come from?

There is no single answer to this question. “Many believe that his name is Inga Viracocha, and this means “sea foam,” notes the chronicler Zarate. Gomara claims that, according to the stories of the old Indians, he led his people across the sea..."

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Chachapoya is a mysterious Indian civilization.

An archaeological exhibition of Andean peoples has opened in the city of Lima, the capital of Peru. The exhibition presents exhibits that belonged to the mysterious Chachapoya Indians, whom the Incas called “those who live beyond the clouds” because they lived in villages located on the slopes of the mountains.

Recently, a local resident in a cave, a former settlement built by the Chachapoya, discovered a mummy that had been there for more than six hundred years, with a face distorted in a grimace of horror, an open mouth and hands covering its head. Next to the Chachapoya mummy, the remains of a child were found, as well as all kinds of precious items, fabrics, ceramics and other valuables. The walls of the mysterious cave were decorated with drawings.

Archaeologists were puzzled by the grimace on the face of the Chachapoya woman. Some experts suggested that it could have appeared during the process of natural mummification. Others agree that the reason for the woman's horror is the changes that occurred directly during mummification. The name of the tribe to which the mummy discovered by the peasant once belonged is Chachapoya. These were tall people, blond and light-skinned, which is not typical not only for the Andean peoples, but also for the inhabitants of Mesoamerica in general.

The Chachapoya are one of the most developed tribes of the Amazon. From the 8th to the 15th centuries AD, their empire spanned the entire Andes until they were conquered by the more warlike Incas. It is unknown for what reason the conflict arose between the Indians and the Chachapoyas, only one thing is clear - the aggression came from both the Incas and the blond inhabitants of the settlements hidden in the clouds. The Chachapoyas were skilled farmers, cultivating their own fields located on mountain terraces. The climate of the Andean ridges forced the Chachapoyas to develop craft skills, in particular weaving. The mountain inhabitants were also distinguished by their religious aspirations; they worshiped and were wary of local ideologists and shamans.

The Chachapoya tribe - the story of the blond Indians.

Ancient civilizations are full of secrets and riddles. The history of Chachapoya is a closed book for researchers. Almost all written sources indicating the existence of the Chachapoyas were lost during the Spanish Conquest and the enslavement of the Incas in 1512. The first evidence pointing to the Chachapoya culture dates back to the 4th century AD, that is, 500 years before the appearance of the Incas and during the dawn of another equally great nation, the Mayan civilization. The Chachapoya tribe, unlike the Mayans, occupied lands almost completely covered with mountains, between the stormy Marañon and Huayaga rivers. Their territories are mountain plateaus with a total area of ​​30 thousand square kilometers.

The Chachapoya tribe built multiple settlements on inaccessible mountain peaks. Some towns and villages consisted of only a dozen houses, while others numbered about a thousand of various structures. All Chachapoya settlements, regardless of their size, were fortified with powerful defensive structures that served as protection from neighboring Indian tribes. Researchers still know something about the Chachapoya tribe. So it was possible to find out that the Chachapoyas people in their traditions and way of life go back to the more ancient Peruvian tribes. This is evidenced by the burials of mummies, traditional clothes and stone buildings of similar style. Today, the legacy left by the Chachapoya tribe is limited only to rare archaeological finds, including an ancient citadel called Kuelap.

The Chachapoya structure is located at an altitude of three thousand meters above sea level and consists of four hundred buildings for various purposes and defensive towers, most of which are of a decorative nature. At one time, the researcher from Norway, traveler Thor Heyerdahl, was interested in the Chachapoya Indians, the mysterious inhabitants of the Andes. He turned his attention to the fair-haired and light-skinned Chachapoya people, who by all appearances did not correspond to any of the known racial groups living in South America. Researchers were able to discover that the Chachapoya tribe built their boats based on models of ancient Egyptian boats. Heyerdahl set up a fascinating experiment: on a papyrus ship called “Ra” he managed to cross the Atlantic Ocean, reaching the coastal territories of South America, thereby proving that the Chachapoya tribe could have come to Mesoamerica from the Mediterranean. It is curious that the traveler’s first attempt, when he used shipbuilding techniques preserved in Africa, was not crowned with success. The second ship in the style of the Chachapoya, which nevertheless managed to sail across the Atlantic, was built according to the methods of the Andean peoples and materials obtained there.

The Chachapoya Indians are in search of clues.

The era of major geographical discoveries is already behind us, and today it seems that literally every corner of the planet has been explored. However, the planet still keeps its secrets. One of them, the Chachapoya Indians, is hidden deep in the Amazon jungle, in the north of modern Peru. World-famous traveler and Discovery Channel presenter Josh Bernstein visited these mysterious and inaccessible places to learn everything possible about the Chachapoya Indians, about the cloud people who disappeared many centuries ago. Oddly enough, the Incas are a people known throughout the world, but their neighbors, the Chachapoyas, are a poorly studied civilization, known, perhaps, only among researchers and archaeologists. This is partly due to the fact that the territory where the Chachapoya tribe lived was almost completely isolated from the outside world.

The state of the blond Chachapoya Indians was located in a triangle, two sides of which were the stormy Marañon and Utcubamba rivers, which were extremely difficult to cross even by boat, and the third side was mountain ranges and impenetrable jungles that hid Chachapoyas from outside aggression in the person of neighboring Indian tribes. Josh Bernstein, going to the Kuelap settlement, a stronghold of the Chachapoyas, like any reasonable person, decided to swim across the obstinate and unyielding waters of the Marañon and Utcubamba rivers.

Bernstein did not go on his journey for the sake of extreme sports or new sensations. The traveler is driven by the desire to unravel secrets and uncover mysteries. And if it were possible to reach the cradle in which the Chachapoya Indians developed by car, he would have taken advantage of this opportunity. But this was not to be, and the researcher had to overcome most of the path through the dense thickets of the Peruvian Amazon jungle.

Together with guides who had first-hand knowledge of Chachapoya, Josh fought the jungle, cutting his way with a machete, without which such areas are insurmountable. However, if at the time when the Chachapoya Indians dominated the mountainous lands, the local jungle was truly impassable, but today the forest is gradually receding in the face of man. On the way, the traveler encountered a few paths trampled by the Chachapoya, along which a horse or cart led by a mule could easily pass.

Having covered a small part of the path on horseback and a large part on foot, Bernstein finally reached the slope, having climbed to a height of almost three kilometers, he found himself in Kuelapa, near the ancient stone city of Chachapoya. The territory of the city is six hectares, on which five hundred buildings for various purposes are located. The largest of them are the fortress and the tower. The city of Chachapoya is surrounded by a massive wall twenty-five meters high, in which there are three small openings through which a person can pass. Despite the fact that the ruins of a fortress belonging to the Chachapoya tribes were discovered back in 1843, the opportunity to get to it and explore it only appeared in our time.

The Chachapoya tribe erected noticeable and bulky structures, however, the scientists who discovered the ruins of the ancient city found not the remains of the once majestic settlement built by the Chachapoya Indians, but buildings protruding one and a half meters from the ground. The fact is that the fortress, and the entire city, were covered with rock. In order to get to the very essence, it was necessary to free the fortress that the Chachapoyas built from stone captivity. Tons of rocks were removed from the ruins for decades, and only by the end of 2007 did archaeologists, led by Alfred Narvaez, the leader of a group involved in restoring the heritage of the Chachapoya tribe, see buildings, and not the roofs of houses covered with stones. Narvaez is one of those scientists who are confident that the Chachapoyas disappeared under the military oppression of the Incas.

The archaeologist witnessed firsthand the consequences of the aggression that the Chachapoya Indians directed at their blond neighbors. All the inhabitants of the fortress were killed, and the structure itself was burned. Experts came to this conclusion after studying the Chachapoya mummies preserved in Kuelapa. All of them were scorched by fire, and their poses expressed despair and horror. Josh Bernstein became one of those who joined the archaeologists led by Narves, studying the heritage of the Chachapoya Indians. However, in order to get to the excavation site, he still had to overcome the descent down the narrow, cold and dark Chachapoya well.

Bernstein is nothing new to such adventures; he has already made difficult descents, for example in the gold mines near Timbuktu. The picture of the massacre carried out by the Incas that revealed itself to the scientist was terrifying. The mummies were well preserved in the impenetrable jungle. Among the dead Chachapoya Indians, women, children and old people were found hiding their faces and frozen in absurd poses in which they were caught in a terrible death.

The Chachapoya Indians are the revealed truths of a vanished civilization.

Researchers literally live in South and Central America, despite this, the Peruvian Chachapoya culture remains a big mystery. Before the discoveries made in 2007 and subsequent years, the existence of the Chachapoya people was generally questioned, and references left by the Incas about the light-skinned and tall Chachapoya Indians were considered legends in the scientific community. Today, thanks to the works of Narves and his colleagues, it was possible to obtain, albeit meager, more or less reliable knowledge.

By 800 AD, the blond Chachapoya Indians had formed a fairly advanced civilization, and the triangle of their state was populated almost to capacity. Despite the isolation of the territories of the Chachapoya state, there are facts indicating their communication with other tribes living in the Andes. In addition, the finds prove that the Chachapoya Indians were enviable artisans, in particular skillfully handling metals and stone. The Chachapoya were good builders, engineers and architects, but in general their culture was based on agriculture.

The blond Chachapoya Indians were also quite good warriors. This, at least, is evidenced by the references left by the Incas. For four centuries the Incas could not conquer the inaccessible state of Chachapoya. War between neighbors continued from approximately 1000 to 1450 AD, until Kuelap fell. After which, the surviving representatives of the Chachapoya tribe were forcibly resettled from their native places to various parts of the once great empire of the Inca Indians, stretching from Chile to the borders of Ecuador. However, the confrontation between the former neighbors did not end there.

Blonde-haired and white-skinned aborigines, the Chachapoya Indians, took revenge on their sworn enemies when the Spaniards came to the lands of Mesoamerica, acting on the side of the invaders. However, even this did not stop them from disappearing. In the 200 years since the destruction of the Chachapoya empire, the population of this nation has decreased by almost 90 percent. Most died from diseases brought by Europeans, while others fell from spears, swords and arrows. The surviving white Chachapoya Indians failed to maintain their identity; gradually, step by step, they merged with other peoples who settled throughout America.

Josh Bernstein, studying the Chachapoyas mummies discovered by researchers, discovered that some of the skulls had holes left by firearms. This has baffled archaeologists: battles took place in the Chachapoya territory long before Europeans came to America, and the Indians themselves did not discover the gunpowder necessary for firearms. It later turned out that the mysterious wounds were inflicted not by bullets, but by stones fired from a sling. The Chachapoya Indians were skilled shooters; a projectile fired by them could fly 300 meters without losing speed or destructive power. From a distance of 70 meters, the Incas could easily hit their enemies in the head, which is clearly proven by the mummies found in the Chachapoya fortress.

Josh was not satisfied with the hypothesis proposed to him by his colleagues. He decided to personally test the chacha belt sling in practice to make sure. The traveler used pumpkins, watermelons and skulls as targets; stones of various shapes and sizes served as projectiles. Tests at the test site confirmed the theory about the sling and the Chachapoya Indians, in addition, Josh Bernstein was able to understand for himself that the skills of the Incas or their neighbors, the Chachapoyas, were as close to the moon as he could walk to the moon. The first shots fired by the researcher did not reach their targets. The third salvo was more accurate, hitting the skull; True, the force of the shot was not enough to pierce the bone or cause any visible damage. The Chachapoya Indians would have laughed, as would their neighbors: the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas - all of them were experts in military affairs.
The Chachapoya culture is an unexpected discovery.

While Bernstein was operating at the test site, archaeologists were not idle and made another significant discovery on the land of the Chachapoya. They discovered the third highest waterfall in the world, hiding in a remote area near the Chachapoya fortress. A waterfall called Gokta, 771 meters high, is located in the heart of the former state, which was built by the Chachapoya culture.

To look at this miracle of nature in all its glory, the researchers had to overcome a difficult journey: the road passed through virgin jungle and difficult rocky areas, however, the result was worth it. The waterfall, like the entire empire that belonged to the Chachapoya tribe, was hidden from the eyes of the curious for a long time. It is for this reason that we learned about them only in the 21st century. In addition, local residents, seemingly aware of the presence of such a miracle of nature in their lands, simply keep their secrets to themselves. Returning to the theme of the ancient empire created by the Chachapoya culture, the long-debunked assumption that the white-skinned Chachapoya Indians were among the first tribes to settle in Mesoamerica has finally been finally confirmed thanks to finds discovered in the Paracas region, which in Peru.

What did the indigenous people of North and South America really look like? What basis did the legends about the White Gods have in Indian civilizations?

South America

An unknown Indian tribe was discovered by an expedition of the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) in the state of Pará in northern Brazil. The white-skinned, blue-eyed Indians of this tribe, living in dense tropical forest, are skilled fishermen and fearless hunters. To further study the way of life of the new tribe, the expedition members, led by Raimundo Alves, a specialist in the problems of Brazilian Indians, intend to conduct a detailed study of the life of this tribe.

In 1976, the famous traveler Thor Heyerdahl wrote: “The question of white and bearded people in pre-Columbian America has not yet been resolved, and it is on this that I am now concentrating my attention. To clarify this problem, I crossed the Atlantic on the papyrus boat “Ra-II”. I believe that here we are dealing with one of the early cultural impulses from the African-Asian region of the Mediterranean. I consider the mysterious “peoples of the sea” to be the most likely candidate for this role.

Certificate Percival Harrison Fawcett(1867 - 1925) - British topographer and traveler, lieutenant colonel. Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances along with his son in 1925 during an expedition to discover a lost city in the Brazilian countryside.

White Indians live on Kari,” the manager told me. “My brother once went on a longboat up the Tauman, and at the very upper reaches of the river he was told that white Indians lived nearby. He did not believe it and only laughed at the people who said this, but still went on a boat and found unmistakable traces of their presence. Then he and his men were attacked by tall, handsome, well-built savages, they had pure white skin, red hair and blue eyes. They fought like devils, and when my brother killed one of them, the rest took the body and ran away." Another fragment: “I knew a man who met such an Indian,” the British consul told me. - These Indians are completely wild, and it is believed that they only come out at night. That's why they are called "bats." “Where do they live? - I asked. - Somewhere in the area of ​​​​the lost gold mines, either north or northwest of the Diamantinu River. No one knows their exact location. Mato Grosso is a very poorly explored country; no one has yet penetrated the mountainous regions in the north. Perhaps in a hundred years flying cars will be able to do this, who knows?

My messengers report that after a long march they have found a village with a thousand inhabitants. The locals greeted them with honors, settled them in the most beautiful houses, took care of their weapons, kissed their hands and feet, trying to make them understand in any way that they (the Spaniards) were white people who came from God. About fifty residents asked my messengers to take them with them to heaven to the star gods.

This is the first mention of the worship of white gods among the American Indians. “They (the Spaniards) could do whatever they wanted and no one stopped them; they cut jade, smelted gold, and behind all this was Quetzalcoatl,” one Spanish chronicler wrote after Columbus.

In both Americas there are countless legends that have survived virtually unchanged to this day, which tell of the landing of white bearded people on the shores of the Indians in ancient times. They brought the Indians the basics of knowledge, laws, civilization... They arrived on large strange ships with swan wings and a luminous hull. Approaching the shore, the ships landed people - blue-eyed and fair-haired - in robes of coarse black material and short gloves. They had snake-shaped ornaments on their foreheads. The Aztecs and Toltecs called the white god Quetzalcoatl, the Incas - Kon-Tiki Viracocha, the Mayans - Kukulkai, the Chibcha Indians - Bochica.

Francisco Pizarro about the Incas: “The ruling class in the Peruvian kingdom was light-skinned, the color of ripe wheat. Most of the nobles were surprisingly similar to the Spaniards. In this country I met an Indian woman so light-skinned that I was amazed. Neighbors call these people “children of the gods.” By the time the Spaniards arrived, there were about five hundred such representatives of the elite of Peruvian society and they spoke a special language. Chroniclers also report that the eight rulers of the Incan dynasty were white and bearded, and their wives were “white as an egg.” One of the chroniclers, Garcillaso de la Vega, spoke of a burial in which he saw a mummy with hair as white as snow. But the man died young, so it wasn't gray hair. De la Vega was told that this was the mummy of the White Inca, the 8th ruler of the Sun.

In 1926, the American ethnographer Harris studied the Indians of San Blas and wrote that they had hair the color of flax and straw and the build of a white man.

The French explorer Homais described an encounter with the Waika Indian tribe, whose hair was chestnut. “The so-called white race,” he wrote, “has, even with a superficial examination, a mass of representatives among the Amazonian Indians.”

On Easter Island there are legends that the ancestors of the islanders came from a desert country in the East and reached the island after sailing sixty days towards the setting sun. Today's islanders claim that some of their ancestors had white skin and red hair, while others had dark skin and hair. This was also witnessed by the first Europeans who visited the island. When in 1722 Fr. Easter was first visited by a Dutch frigate, then a white man climbed on board, among other inhabitants, and the Dutch wrote the following about the rest of the islanders: “Among them there are dark brown, like the Spaniards, and completely white people, and some have even red skin, like as if the sun was burning her.”

Thompson's notes (1880) are also very curious in this regard, which speaks of a country located, according to legend, sixty days' journey east of Fr. Easter. It was also called the “country of burials”: ​​the climate there was so hot that people died and plants withered. From Fr. Easter to the west, along the entire vast stretch to Southeast Asia, there is nothing that could correspond to this description: the shores of all the islands are covered with tropical forest. But in the east lie the coastal deserts of Peru, and nowhere else in the Pacific Ocean is there an area that better matches the descriptions of the legend than the Peruvian coast - both in name and in climate. There, along the deserted Pacific coast, there are numerous burial sites. Because The climate is very dry, it has allowed modern scientists to study in detail the bodies buried there, which turned practically into mummies.

In theory, these mummies should have given researchers a comprehensive answer to the question: what was the type of ancient pre-Inca population of Peru? But the mummies only posed new mysteries: anthropologists identified the types of buried people as never before encountered in ancient America. In 1925, archaeologists discovered two more large necropolises on the Paracas Peninsula (south of the Peruvian coast). There were hundreds of mummies there. Radiocarbon analysis determined their age - 2200 years. Near the graves, large quantities of fragments of hardwood trees, which were usually used to build rafts, were found. These bodies also differed in structure from the basic physical type of the ancient Peruvian population. The American anthropologist Stewart then wrote about this: “This was a selected group of large people, absolutely not typical for the population of Peru.”

While Stewart was studying the bones, M. Trotter was analyzing the hair of nine mummies. Their color is mostly red-brown, but in some cases it is very light, almost golden. The hair of two mummies was generally different from the rest - it was curly. The shape of the hair cut is different for different mummies, and almost all shapes are found in the burial. As for the thickness, “it is smaller here than in other Indians, but not as small as in the average European population (for example, the Dutch),” Trotter wrote in her conclusion. As you know, human hair does not undergo changes after death. They may become brittle, but neither the color nor the structure changes.

A superficial acquaintance with the vast and varied literature on the history of Peru is enough to find many references to bearded and white-skinned Indian gods.

Images of these deities stood in Inca temples. In the temple of Cuzco, razed to the ground, there was a huge statue depicting a man in a long robe and sandals, “exactly the same as what the Spanish artists painted at home,” wrote the Spanish conquistador Pizarro. In the temple built in honor of Viracocha, there also stood the great god Kon-Tiki Viracocha - a man with a long beard and proud posture, wearing a long robe. The chronicler wrote that when the Spaniards saw this statue, they thought that Saint Bartholomew had reached Peru and the Indians created a monument in memory of this event. The conquistadors were so amazed by the strange statue that they did not destroy it immediately, and the temple for a time avoided the fate of other similar structures. But soon its fragments were taken away.

While exploring Peru, the Spaniards came across huge megalithic structures from pre-Inca times, which also lay in ruins. “When I asked the local Indians who built these ancient monuments,” wrote the chronicler Cieza de Leon in 1553, “they answered that it was done by another people, bearded and white-skinned, like us Spaniards. Those people arrived long before the Incas and settled here.” How strong and enduring this legend is is confirmed by the testimony of the modern Peruvian archaeologist Valcarcel, who heard from the Indians who lived near the ruins that “these structures were created by a foreign people, white like the Europeans.”

Lake Titicaca turned out to be at the very center of the “activity” of the white god Viracocha, for all evidence agrees on one thing - there, on the lake, and in the neighboring city of Tiahuanaco, was the residence of the god. “They also said,” writes de Leon, “that on the island of Titicaca in past centuries there lived a people, white like us, and one local leader named Kari with his people came to this island and waged war against this people and killed many.” . The white people left their buildings on the lake. “I asked the local residents,” de Leon further writes, “if these buildings were created during the time of the Incas. They laughed at my question and said that they knew for certain that all this was done long before the power of the Incas. They saw bearded men on the island of Titicaca. These were people of subtle minds who came from an unknown country, and there were few of them, and many of them were killed in the war.”

The Frenchman Bandelier was also inspired by these legends at the end of the 19th century. and began excavations on Lake Titicaca. He was told that in ancient times people similar to Europeans came to the island, they married local women, and their children became Incas. The tribes before them lived the life of savages, but “a white man came and he had great authority. In many villages he taught people to live normally. Everywhere they called him the same - Tikki Viracocha. And in his honor they created temples and erected statues in them.” When the chronicler Betanzos, who took part in the first Peruvian campaigns of the Spaniards, asked the Indians what Viracocha looked like, they answered that he was tall, in a white robe down to his toes, his hair was secured on his head with something like a tonsure (?), he walked important and in his hands he was holding something similar to a prayer book (?). Where did Viracocha come from? There is no single answer to this question. “Many believe that his name is Inga Viracocha, and this means “sea foam”,” notes the chronicler Zarate. According to the stories of the old Indians, he led his people across the sea.

Legends of the Chimu Indians tell that a white deity came from the north, from the sea, and then rose to Lake Titicaca. The “humanization” of Viracocha is most clearly manifested in those legends where various purely earthly qualities are attributed to him: they call him smart, cunning, kind, but at the same time they call him the Son of the Sun. The Indians claim that he sailed on reed boats to the shores of Lake Titicaca and created the megalithic city of Tiahuanaco. From here he sent bearded ambassadors to all ends of Peru to teach people and tell them that he was their creator. But, in the end, dissatisfied with the behavior of the inhabitants, he left their lands - he went down with his associates to the Pacific coast and went by sea to the west along with the sun. As we see, they went towards Polynesia, but came from the north.

In the mountains of Colombia lived another mysterious people - the Chibcha, who had reached a high level of culture before the arrival of the Spaniards. His legends also contain information about the white teacher Bochica with the same description as that of the Incas. He ruled it for many years and was also called Sua, that is, “sun”. He came to them from the east.

In Venezuela and neighboring areas there are also legends about the presence of a mysterious wanderer there who taught the locals how to farm. He was called there Tsuma (or Sume). According to legend, he ordered all the people to gather around a high rock, stood on it and told them laws and instructions. After living with people, he left them.

The Kuna Indians live in the area of ​​today's Panama Canal. Their legends also include someone who, after a great flood, came and taught them crafts. In Mexico, at the time of the Spanish invasion, the high civilization of the Aztecs was blooming. From Anahuac (Texas) to Yucotan, the Aztecs spoke of the white god Quetzalcoatl. According to legend, he was the fifth ruler of the Toltecs, came from the Land of the Rising Sun (of course, the Aztecs did not mean Japan) and wore a long cape. He ruled for a long time in Tollan, prohibiting human sacrifice, preaching peace and vegetarianism. But this did not last long: the devil forced Quetzalcoatl to indulge in vanity and wallow in sins. However, he soon became ashamed of his weaknesses, and he left the country in a southerly direction.

In Cortés’s Carta Segunda there is an excerpt from Montezuma’s speech: “We know from the writings handed down to us from our ancestors that neither I nor anyone else who inhabits this country are its original inhabitants. We come from other lands. We also know that we descend from the ruler, whose subordinates we were. He came to this country, he again wanted to leave and take his people with him. But they had already married local women, built houses and did not want to go with him. And he left. Since then we have been waiting for him to return someday. Just from the direction you came from, Cortez.” It is known what price the Aztecs paid for their “come true” dream...

As scientists have proven, the neighbors of the Aztecs - the Mayans - also did not always live in today's places, but migrated from other areas. The Mayans themselves say that their ancestors came twice. The first time was the largest migration - from overseas, from the east, from where 12 thread-paths were laid, and Itzamna led them. Another, smaller group came from the west, and among them was Kukulcan. They all had flowing robes, sandals, long beards and bare heads. Kukulkan is remembered as the builder of the pyramids and the founder of the cities of Mayapac and Chichen Itza. He taught the Mayans how to use weapons. And again, as in Peru, he leaves the country and goes towards the setting sun.

The Indians who lived in the Tabasco jungle have similar legends. They keep information about Wotan, who came from the Yucatan regions. In ancient times, Wotan came from the East. He was sent by the gods to divide the earth, distribute it to human races and give each its own language. The country from which he came was called Valum Votan. The myth ends very strangely: “When the time of sad departure finally came, he did not go through the valley of death, like all mortals, but passed through a cave into the underworld.”

Yes, there is evidence that the medieval Spaniards did not destroy all the statues; the Indians managed to hide some. When archaeologist Bennett was excavating in Tiahuanaco in 1932, he came across a red stone figurine depicting the god Kon-Tiki Viracocha in a long robe with a beard. His robe was decorated with horned snakes and two pumas - symbols of the supreme deity in Mexico and Peru. This figurine was identical to the one found on the shores of Lake Titicaca, precisely on the peninsula closest to the island of the same name. Other similar sculptures were found around the lake. On the Peruvian coast, Viracocha was immortalized in ceramics and drawings. The authors of these drawings are the early Chimu and Mochica. Similar finds are found in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. (Note that bearded images were noted by A. Humboldt, looking at the drawings of ancient manuscripts stored in the Imperial Library of Vienna in 1810.) Colored fragments of the frescoes of the Chichen Itza temples have also reached us, telling about the naval battle of black and white people. These drawings have not yet been solved.

What did the indigenous people of North and South America really look like? What basis did the legends about the White Gods have in Indian civilizations?

South America

An unknown Indian tribe was discovered by an expedition of the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) in the state of Pará in northern Brazil. The white-skinned, blue-eyed Indians of this tribe, living in a dense tropical forest, are skilled fishermen and fearless hunters. To further study the way of life of the new tribe, the expedition members, led by Raimundo Alves, a specialist in the problems of Brazilian Indians, intend to conduct a detailed study of the life of this tribe.

In 1976, the famous traveler Thor Heyerdahl wrote: “The question of white and bearded people in pre-Columbian America has not yet been resolved, and it is on this that I am now concentrating my attention. To clarify this problem, I crossed the Atlantic on the papyrus boat “Ra-II”. I believe that here we are dealing with one of the early cultural impulses from the African-Asian region of the Mediterranean. I consider the mysterious “peoples of the sea” to be the most likely candidate for this role.

Certificate Percival Harrison Fawcett(1867 - 1925) - British topographer and traveler, lieutenant colonel. Fawcett disappeared under unknown circumstances along with his son in 1925 during an expedition to discover a lost city in the Brazilian countryside.

White Indians live on Kari,” the manager told me. “My brother once went on a longboat up the Tauman, and at the very upper reaches of the river he was told that white Indians lived nearby. He did not believe it and only laughed at the people who said this, but still went on a boat and found unmistakable traces of their presence. Then he and his men were attacked by tall, handsome, well-built savages, they had pure white skin, red hair and blue eyes. They fought like devils, and when my brother killed one of them, the rest took the body and ran away." Another fragment: “I knew a man who met such an Indian,” the British consul told me. “These Indians are completely wild, and it is believed that they only come out at night.” That's why they are called "bats." “Where do they live? - I asked. - Somewhere in the area of ​​​​the lost gold mines, either north or northwest of the Diamantinu River. No one knows their exact location. Mato Grosso is a very poorly explored country; no one has yet penetrated the mountainous regions in the north. Perhaps in a hundred years flying cars will be able to do this, who knows?

My messengers report that after a long march they have found a village with a thousand inhabitants. The locals greeted them with honors, settled them in the most beautiful houses, took care of their weapons, kissed their hands and feet, trying to make them understand in any way that they (the Spaniards) were white people who came from God. About fifty residents asked my messengers to take them with them to heaven to the star gods.

This is the first mention of the worship of white gods among the American Indians. “They (the Spaniards) could do whatever they wanted and no one stopped them; they cut jade, smelted gold, and behind all this was Quetzalcoatl,” one Spanish chronicler wrote after Columbus.

In both Americas there are countless legends that have survived virtually unchanged to this day, which tell of the landing of white bearded people on the shores of the Indians in ancient times. They brought the Indians the basics of knowledge, laws, civilization... They arrived on large strange ships with swan wings and a luminous hull. Approaching the shore, the ships landed people - blue-eyed and fair-haired - in robes of coarse black material and short gloves. They had snake-shaped ornaments on their foreheads. The Aztecs and Toltecs called the white god Quetzalcoatl, the Incas - Kon-Tiki Viracocha, the Mayans - Kukulkai, the Chibcha Indians - Bochica.

Francisco Pizarro about the Incas: “The ruling class in the Peruvian kingdom was light-skinned, the color of ripe wheat. Most of the nobles were surprisingly similar to the Spaniards. In this country I met an Indian woman so light-skinned that I was amazed. Neighbors call these people “children of the gods.” By the time the Spaniards arrived, there were about five hundred such representatives of the elite of Peruvian society and they spoke a special language. Chroniclers also report that eight rulers of the Inca dynasty were white and bearded, and their wives were “white as an egg.” One of the chroniclers, Garcillaso de la Vega, spoke of a burial in which he saw a mummy with hair as white as snow. But the man died young, so it wasn't gray hair. De la Vega was told that this was the mummy of the White Inca, the 8th ruler of the Sun.

In 1926, the American ethnographer Harris studied the Indians of San Blas and wrote that they had hair the color of flax and straw and the build of a white man.

The French explorer Homais described an encounter with the Waika Indian tribe, whose hair was chestnut. “The so-called white race,” he wrote, “has, even with a superficial examination, a mass of representatives among the Amazonian Indians.”

On Easter Island there are legends that the ancestors of the islanders came from a desert country in the East and reached the island after sailing sixty days towards the setting sun. Today's islanders claim that some of their ancestors had white skin and red hair, while others had dark skin and hair. This was also witnessed by the first Europeans who visited the island. When in 1722 Fr. Easter was first visited by a Dutch frigate, then a white man climbed on board, among other inhabitants, and the Dutch wrote the following about the rest of the islanders: “Among them there are dark brown, like the Spaniards, and completely white people, and some have even red skin, like as if the sun was burning her.”

Thompson's notes (1880) are also very curious in this regard, which speaks of a country located, according to legend, sixty days' journey east of Fr. Easter. It was also called the “country of burials”: ​​the climate there was so hot that people died and plants withered. From Fr. Easter to the west, along the entire vast stretch to Southeast Asia, there is nothing that could correspond to this description: the shores of all the islands are covered with tropical forest. But in the east lie the coastal deserts of Peru, and nowhere else in the Pacific Ocean is there an area that better matches the descriptions of the legend than the Peruvian coast - both in name and in climate. There, along the deserted Pacific coast, there are numerous burial sites. Because The climate is very dry, it has allowed modern scientists to study in detail the bodies buried there, which turned practically into mummies.

In theory, these mummies should have given researchers a comprehensive answer to the question: what was the type of ancient pre-Inca population of Peru? But the mummies only posed new mysteries: anthropologists identified the types of buried people as never before encountered in ancient America. In 1925, archaeologists discovered two more large necropolises - on the Paracas Peninsula (south of the Peruvian coast). There were hundreds of mummies there. Radiocarbon analysis determined their age - 2200 years. Near the graves, large quantities of fragments of hardwood trees, which were usually used to build rafts, were found. These bodies also differed in structure from the basic physical type of the ancient Peruvian population. The American anthropologist Stewart then wrote about this: “This was a selected group of large people, absolutely not typical for the population of Peru.”

While Stewart was studying the bones, M. Trotter was analyzing the hair of nine mummies. Their color is mostly red-brown, but in some cases it is very light, almost golden. The hair of two mummies was generally different from the rest - it was curly. The shape of the hair cut is different for different mummies, and almost all shapes are found in the burial. As for the thickness, “it is smaller than that of other Indians, but not as small as that of the average European population (for example, the Dutch),” Trotter wrote in her conclusion. As you know, human hair does not undergo changes after death. They may become brittle, but neither the color nor the structure changes.

A superficial acquaintance with the vast and varied literature on the history of Peru is enough to find many references to bearded and white-skinned Indian gods.

Images of these deities stood in Inca temples. In the temple of Cuzco, razed to the ground, there was a huge statue depicting a man in a long robe and sandals, “exactly the same as what the Spanish artists painted at home,” wrote the Spanish conquistador Pizarro. In the temple built in honor of Viracocha, there also stood the great god Kon-Tiki Viracocha - a man with a long beard and proud posture, wearing a long robe. The chronicler wrote that when the Spaniards saw this statue, they thought that Saint Bartholomew had reached Peru and the Indians created a monument in memory of this event. The conquistadors were so amazed by the strange statue that they did not destroy it immediately, and the temple for a time avoided the fate of other similar structures. But soon its fragments were taken away.

While exploring Peru, the Spaniards came across huge megalithic structures from pre-Inca times, which also lay in ruins. “When I asked the local Indians who built these ancient monuments,” wrote the chronicler Cieza de Leon in 1553, “they answered that it was done by another people, bearded and white-skinned, like us Spaniards. Those people arrived long before the Incas and settled here.” How strong and enduring this legend is is confirmed by the testimony of the modern Peruvian archaeologist Valcarcel, who heard from the Indians who lived near the ruins that “these structures were created by a foreign people, white like the Europeans.”

Lake Titicaca turned out to be at the very center of the “activity” of the white god Viracocha, for all evidence agrees on one thing - there, on the lake, and in the neighboring city of Tiahuanaco, was the residence of the god. “They also said,” writes de Leon, “that on the island of Titicaca in past centuries there lived a people, white like us, and one local leader named Kari with his people came to this island and waged war against this people and killed many.” . The white people left their buildings on the lake. “I asked the locals,” de Leon further writes, “if these buildings were created during the time of the Incas. They laughed at my question and said that they knew for certain that all this was done long before the power of the Incas. They saw bearded men on the island of Titicaca. These were people of subtle minds who came from an unknown country, and there were few of them, and many of them were killed in the war.”

The Frenchman Bandelier was also inspired by these legends at the end of the 19th century. and began excavations on Lake Titicaca. He was told that in ancient times people similar to Europeans came to the island, they married local women, and their children became Incas. The tribes before them lived the life of savages, but “a white man came and he had great authority. In many villages he taught people to live normally. Everywhere they called him the same - Tikki Viracocha. And in his honor they created temples and erected statues in them.” When the chronicler Betanzos, who took part in the first Peruvian campaigns of the Spaniards, asked the Indians what Viracocha looked like, they answered that he was tall, in a white robe down to his toes, his hair was secured on his head with something like a tonsure (?), he walked important and in his hands he was holding something similar to a prayer book (?). Where did Viracocha come from? There is no single answer to this question. “Many believe that his name is Inga Viracocha, and this means “sea foam”,” notes the chronicler Zarate. According to the stories of the old Indians, he led his people across the sea.

Legends of the Chimu Indians tell that a white deity came from the north, from the sea, and then rose to Lake Titicaca. The “humanization” of Viracocha is most clearly manifested in those legends where various purely earthly qualities are attributed to him: they call him smart, cunning, kind, but at the same time they call him the Son of the Sun. The Indians claim that he sailed on reed boats to the shores of Lake Titicaca and created the megalithic city of Tiahuanaco. From here he sent bearded ambassadors to all corners of Peru to teach people and tell them that he was their creator. But, in the end, dissatisfied with the behavior of the inhabitants, he left their lands - he went down with his associates to the Pacific coast and went by sea to the west along with the sun. As we see, they went towards Polynesia, but came from the north.

In the mountains of Colombia lived another mysterious people - the Chibcha, who had reached a high level of culture before the arrival of the Spaniards. His legends also contain information about the white teacher Bochica with the same description as that of the Incas. He ruled it for many years and was also called Sua, that is, “sun”. He came to them from the east.

In Venezuela and neighboring areas there are also legends about the presence of a mysterious wanderer there who taught the locals how to farm. He was called there Tsuma (or Sume). According to legend, he ordered all the people to gather around a high rock, stood on it and told them laws and instructions. After living with people, he left them.

The Kuna Indians live in the area of ​​today's Panama Canal. Their legends also include someone who, after a great flood, came and taught them crafts. In Mexico, at the time of the Spanish invasion, the high civilization of the Aztecs was blooming. From Anahuac (Texas) to Yucotan, the Aztecs spoke of the white god Quetzalcoatl. According to legend, he was the fifth ruler of the Toltecs, came from the Land of the Rising Sun (of course, the Aztecs did not mean Japan) and wore a long cape. He ruled for a long time in Tollan, prohibiting human sacrifice, preaching peace and vegetarianism. But this did not last long: the devil forced Quetzalcoatl to indulge in vanity and wallow in sins. However, he soon became ashamed of his weaknesses, and he left the country in a southerly direction.

In Cortés’s Carta Segunda there is an excerpt from Montezuma’s speech: “We know from the writings handed down to us from our ancestors that neither I nor anyone else who inhabits this country are its original inhabitants. We come from other lands. We also know that we descend from the ruler, whose subordinates we were. He came to this country, he again wanted to leave and take his people with him. But they had already married local women, built houses and did not want to go with him. And he left. Since then we have been waiting for him to return someday. Just from the direction you came from, Cortez.” It is known what price the Aztecs paid for their “come true” dream...

As scientists have proven, the neighbors of the Aztecs - the Mayans - also did not always live in today's places, but migrated from other areas. The Mayans themselves say that their ancestors came twice. The first time was the largest migration - from overseas, from the east, from where 12 thread-paths were laid, and Itzamna led them. Another, smaller group came from the west, and among them was Kukulcan. They all had flowing robes, sandals, long beards and bare heads. Kukulkan is remembered as the builder of the pyramids and the founder of the cities of Mayapac and Chichen Itza. He taught the Mayans how to use weapons. And again, as in Peru, he leaves the country and goes towards the setting sun.

The Indians who lived in the Tabasco jungle have similar legends. They keep information about Wotan, who came from the Yucatan regions. In ancient times, Wotan came from the East. He was sent by the gods to divide the earth, distribute it to human races and give each its own language. The country from which he came was called Valum Votan. The myth ends very strangely: “When the time of sad departure finally came, he did not go through the valley of death, like all mortals, but passed through a cave into the underworld.”

Yes, there is evidence that the medieval Spaniards did not destroy all the statues; the Indians managed to hide some. When archaeologist Bennett was excavating in Tiahuanaco in 1932, he came across a red stone figurine depicting the god Kon-Tiki Viracocha in a long robe with a beard. His robe was decorated with horned snakes and two pumas - symbols of the supreme deity in Mexico and Peru. This figurine was identical to the one found on the shores of Lake Titicaca, precisely on the peninsula closest to the island of the same name. Other similar sculptures were found around the lake. On the Peruvian coast, Viracocha was immortalized in ceramics and drawings. The authors of these drawings are the early Chimu and Mochica. Similar finds are found in Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. (Note that bearded images were noted by A. Humboldt, looking at the drawings of ancient manuscripts stored in the Imperial Library of Vienna in 1810.) Colored fragments of the frescoes of the Chichen Itza temples have also reached us, telling about the naval battle of black and white people. These drawings have not yet been solved.

North America

Recently, geneticists found that among the “Indians” of America there are representatives of the DNA haplogroup R1a. They, without any hesitation, were called the descendants of European Jews, Ashkenazi Levites, the remnants of the ten lost tribes of Israel... However, for some reason, the lost tribes - “Indians” still live in reservations, essentially in modern-type concentration camps, and defenders of Jewish rights this is not at all disturbing, nor was their destruction in earlier history.

There is every reason to believe that representatives of this haplogroup are the remnants of the indigenous population of the American continent.

It is traditionally believed that North American “Indians” are naked, red-skinned, beardless, and beardless savages. However, if you look at these photographs of North American "Indians" of the 19th century, the generally accepted picture changes somewhat