Dan Snow's History Hit - Machu Picchu: The Lost City

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Part 1/4. Dan takes the podcast to the Peruvian Andes as he follows in the footsteps of intrepid American explorer Hiram Bingham who revealed Machu Picchu to the world.At the turn of the 20th century, Bingham heard rumours of a fabled lost city in the clouds that revealed the power and brilliance of the Inca and their vast empire that once spanned a continent from the Amazon rainforest to the Pacific coast. With the help of expert guests, Dan tells the story of Hiram Bingham's discovery and reveals the mysteries hidden within the walls of Machu Picchu.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.The Rest of the Series:Episode 2: The Rise of the Inca EmpireEpisode 3: Inca Gods and Human SacrificesEpisode 4: The Fall of the Inca EmpireEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. I'm about six hours into a hike in the High Andes. I'm about 3,000 metres here.

So, air's getting a little bit thinner a bit of a shortage of breath as you can hear I'm looking out on an astonishing view towering mountains on either side of me down below me a valley and in the bottom of that valley a river white water raging along I can just hear the sound of that water crashing along the rocks from all the way up here. It's hot when that sun comes out but there's very heavy vegetation so you're often in the shade and the temperature can really plunge. The guide has told us to be very careful of snakes apparently there's a brown snake a black snake and a red snake and the guide said one of them is exceptionally poisonous I've've forgotten which one, so my policy has been so far to avoid all of them. I've spent my career visiting extraordinary historic sites, some of the most famous and impressive on the planet.

I've staggered in extreme heat through the Egyptian desert. I've wandered about on the ice in Antarctica, put my crampons on and walked across glaciers in the Alps and Alaska. But this is somewhere completely new to me, the Peruvian Andes. I'm following a trail taken by a remarkable man, Horan Bingham, in 1911. The American explorer who, it's said,

inspired the whip-toting adventurer Indiana Jones, who I'm sure ignited my passion for history and archaeology, as he did for many of the listeners of this podcast. In fact, very embarrassing, I'm wearing an Indiana Jones hat on this journey, my homage to him. But more importantly, in the real world, Bingham heard a rumour of a fabled lost city in the clouds that would reveal the power, the skill, the brilliance of the Inca who once ruled over a vast empire that spanned this continent from the Amazon basin to the Pacific coast. He made his way through this dense foliage, He talks about the snakes, he talks about scaling near vertical cliffs and I've seen plenty of those.

But eventually he saw something completely remarkable. He came across a warren of stone walls. He had found the traces of this once mighty empire in a place where the earth meets the sky. of this once mighty empire in a place where the earth meets the sky. It was, of course, Machu Picchu. Apparently I've got about two hours of this hike left and I cannot wait to see it for myself. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Over four episodes, I'm taking you to the Peruvian Andes. We're going to follow in the footsteps of explorer Hiram Bingham,

how he revealed this lost city to the world. The story shot across the wires. The National Geographic story, when it came out, was the entire issue, and it had these unbelievable centerfolds. We'll traverse the Urabamba Valley to trace the rise of the great Inca Empire, its rulers, and domination of mountain, desert, and jungle. I'm going to dive into the incredible world of Inca religion, of oracles, astronomy, elaborate

rituals, and of course, the practice of human sacrifice. Some of the cloth that had been covering the face kind of went to the side, and there I was looking in as a face of anchor how did the inca become one of the most powerful empires on earth and how did it fall so spectacularly this is my series machu picchu episode one the lost city Episode 1. The Lost City. Machu Picchu is one of the most famous, renowned sites of Inca civilisation and it's often revered, it often makes the list of one of the seven wonders of the modern world. It's half hidden by clouds in the so-called cloud forest. It's perched high in the Andes.

And the sheer feat of its construction, its ambition, its sophistication, has awed people ever since it was rediscovered. First, there's the mystery of what exactly it is. No one can really agree. Machu Picchu was built under the instruction of one of the greatest of the Inca emperors, Pachacuti, 600 years ago. It's very high up in an environment that's not

very difficult to reach, but difficult to survive in. The altitude makes it hard to grow crops. The weather here is extreme and changeable. It's very, very hot and sunny now, but there's grey clouds swirling around the mountain peaks. Some say Machu Picchu was a palace. Some believe that there's a lost tomb of Pachacuti lying hidden somewhere within its walls yet to be discovered. But more practically how did the Inca with no horses, no horsepower, no wheeled vehicles build these incredible stone structures perched virtually on the summit of a mountain. Machu Picchu provides the best glimpse we have into the ingenuity and the brilliance of the Inca Empire. That empire, at its peak, was the biggest empire in the history of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans.

It ruled over perhaps 10 million people or more and incorporated parts of the modern countries of Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Colombia. It was a multi-ethnic empire connected by thousands of miles of sophisticated road networks. For a couple of generations it looked like it was a supernova, expanding at a meteoric rate and pulling in disparate people, lands and cultures under its control. It was built through diplomacy, bribery and a dose of military force. But a supernova can only expand so far before it collapses. military force. But a supernova can only expand so far before it collapses. And when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1531, hungry for treasure, the cracks were already showing. The empire was wounded from a terrible civil war. And it didn't take much for a few battle-hardened soldiers armed with modern weapons, armour and horses to bring the empire down.

Within just a few years, the Spanish had vanquished the Inca. There was one place the Spanish never found, protected by the cloud forest vegetation, the altitude, the difficult terrain. The Spanish never set eyes on Machu Picchu and its mysteries and treasures lay virtually undisturbed for 400 years. Europeans and North Americans had begun exploring this part of South America in earnest in the mid-19th century, spurred on by myths, curiosity and sometimes promises of untold wealth hidden in the jungle. Gentlemen explorers began to explore this region, looking for the remnants of the sophisticated civilizations that existed here long before the Europeans arrived. Explorers like Desiree Charnay and Alfred Maudsley

uncovered and publicized some of the most remarkable Maya and Aztec ruins in existence, discovering crucial evidence of the ways that these societies operated. These discoveries captured the imagination of Heinrich Bingham. He had an early fascination with Latin America. He studied the region at UC Berkeley and then at Harvard before setting off to find something himself. When he first visited Peru in 1908,

Bingham wrote of its snow-capped mountains, saying, Being here now myself, I can see why he became so enraptured, although it doesn't have quite the same romantic appeal of discovering lost cities. Certainly one of the most remarkable journeys I've ever been on. It's beautiful in terms of its landscape, its views, but you also stumble across Inca ruins all the way. It's the perfect day out if, like me, you love hiking and history. To tell the story of Highland Bingham, I'm asking Christopher Heaney.

He's the Professor of Latinam Bingham. I'm asking Christopher Heaney, the professor in Latin American studies at Penn State University. He's the author of Cradle of Gold, the story of Hiram Bingham and the search for Machu Picchu. Christopher, thanks so much for coming on. Listen, tell me about a very interesting and unusual early life and background. How does that affect him? Talk me through his sort of early biography. Hiram Bingham was born in 1875 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He was the son of missionaries to Micronesia. And his grandfather, Hiram Bingham I, was the man who converted King Kamehameha of the Hawaiian people. And so he had this very religious background, very stern, very austere, and very mission-driven, that also presumed that what Americans were supposed to do was to go out into the world and convert,

and I put this in quotes, the heathens, that's how they talked about it, to Christianity. Did he have a respect for what we might loosely call sort of indigenous societies, or was he pretty much imbued with this idea of civilizing advanced Christians of European descent kind of spreading across the world? I don't think he did at first. I think he was raised to believe that Christianity and American culture was the be-all, end-all. His grandfather really criticized Native Hawaiian dance and storytelling and hula and indigenous religion. And so it wasn't really until later on after his time at college, he went to Yale University where he developed a taste for the

finer things in life. He really wanted to be part of a secret society and he wanted to have the respect of these Gilded Age classmates. This is in the 1890s. And it wasn't until afterwards when he went on to visit Peru that he became interested in things that weren't European culture, which was a pretty important moment for him. Was exploring, I mean, was it in the zeitgeist? Was it in the water at the time? Was that what ambitious young men sought to do, to travel great swathes of the world and bring quote-unquote discoveries to the attention of western science absolutely and in some ways it was like a continuation of what his grandparents

and parents had done except that he had changed the values from religion to knowledge and nature and so his first trip was you know a little bit of a, a little bit in the vein of Stanley and Livingston. He traveled from Venezuela to Colombia over the Andes Mountains to retrace the footsteps of Simon Bolivar and his important victory over the Spanish during the Wars of Independence. And really, it was a bit of a stunt. It was something to show that it could be done, which nobody had disputed in the past. And so simply, he was showing that he himself could do it. He could get on a mule and go up over the Paramoa Pispa.

But it really, he got the bug from that. And it diverted him from a life as a historian, which is what he was trained to be. He was a historian at Yale University, towards something a little bit more out there. Theodore Roosevelt was one of his heroes. And so he really believed in the strenuous life and the proving of one's mettle as a white American male outside of one's comfort zone. And he also had the benefit of access to money. He married Alfreda Mitchell, who was the daughter of an heir to the Tiffany fortune. And with that money and the connections that he had from Yale, he was able to drum up interest from his friends and colleagues in supporting him doing these adventures into South America. Stanley and Livingston and some other explorers. He has the kind of academic chops, right? I mean, he's doing a PhD, he's in Latin American history. He is a little bit more scholarly than some other sort of adventure seekers, thrill seekers of this period. That's right. When he finally got a job,

he was hired at Yale University to be a lecturer in Latin American history, which was sort of a new field at the moment. History for, as it was taught in the United States in the academy back then, was pretty much that of Europe and that of the United States. Other places didn't so much have history as sort of culture or folklore in the eyes of white Americans. And so for him to become Latin American history really did make him different. And it opened him up to the experience that changed his life. On a chance trip to Peru in 1909, he was brought to a site named Choquequirao, which can be translated as the cradle of gold. And there, his Peruvian hosts told him that he

was standing in the last city of the Incas. So back then, he would have immediately felt like there was fertile ground to make discoveries and make his name. Yeah. He realized that there were places in Peru that hadn't been excavated, that there were places in Peru that had a lot of local stories about them, and that there was a real advantage in connecting them to texts, to the chronicles, to older histories, some of which were just being rediscovered. And in some ways, this was not new. There were plenty of Peruvians doing this work before him. He really benefited from some Peruvian archivists and librarians who had gone into

the collections to look at these last accounts of the Incas under Spanish rule. And what he did have was this sort of two-sided nature that there was the interest in the archives and the sources, but also this really wandering spirit that had him on the ground. He was probably happiest in this time of his life when he was on a mule riding into the mountains. And that combination is what led to his success. What did he want to find? He wanted to have his name in lights. He wanted to have his name in lights. He wanted to have his name in the newspaper, in the New York Times, and in the mouths of his fellow classmates.

And his letters and journal entries are a little bit either affecting, they're a little bit cringy in some ways. They're a little bit cringy in some ways, in that you see how much he is drawing from meeting a fellow classmate on the street and telling him what he's doing now as an explorer and seeing the fellow classmate get excited. But there's a part of him that really was motivated by the possibility of learning something new about Inca history. Well, he did deliver. What are some of the early successes? Yeah. When he came back from Chocicurau, that cradle of gold, he looked at the chronicles and realized that the actual place that Manco Inca, the final Inca emperor who rebelled, had built was a place, one place named Vitcos. And then moving on, another place further still into the jungle named Vilcabamba. And this is where Manco Inca and his sons lived in quasi-independence for about 36 years until 1572. And so, it was to get to these last Inca sites, which weren't

the heights of Inca rule, but really, for us historians, really meaningful, as in the place where Inca peoples tried to hold on and tried to survive and to resist, and they kept on with their original rituals and original religion. And so, it was to try and attain those places that Bingham started exploring. But he was pushed there in part by Peruvians who wrote these pamphlets about where some of these places were, as well as a Peruvian archaeologist named Julio Teo, who sent Bingham this information and actually wanted to travel with him. But Bingham declined. He thanked him for the information. But when Teo asked to be included on the expedition,

Bingham said, no thanks. This was, I think, an example of him trying to hold on to the glory and make sure that nobody else was there to share it. But really, he struck gold in the sense that he was headed off towards the Vilcabamba region, where this kingdom where Manco Inca was. And along the way, he was talking to everybody he could, getting information on other sites in the area. And he ran into a couple people, a miner in Cusco, who told him to look for some fine ruins above a place named Huadquinha on the Urabamba River. And then in the town of Urabamba, a sub-prefect, a government official said, you know, there are some incredible ruins at a place named Huayna Picchu and also some pretty good ruins at a place named Machu Picchu above Huayna Picchu. And you should check that out as well, which was the leap that

changed his life. It was pretty loose in some ways, I guess, right? You're gathering up kind of gossip and hearsay, I suppose, in Cusco, but he decided to go with it and he launched this expedition into the jungle. The image we have of him as of this sort of Indiana Jones adjacent jungle adventurer, what would it have been like? Did he risk his life? How gnarly was it? It wasn't as bad as he made it out later on, particularly the first half of the trip. We've all been there, man. We've all been there, trust me. The first half of the trip, he was following a road. And the road to Huadquina, just below Machu Picchu, was recently cut out of the mountain with dynamite for the laying of a railroad track. And eventually, the railroad that visitors to Machu Picchu take today follows the path that Bingham was taking. So for much of it, he was just riding along on his mule. And he had a very hard walk up the hill, up several thousand feet from the river to Machu Picchu, in which he talks about

getting hit in the head with branches and the wildlife threatening him and being afraid that he would put his hand on a snake. But really, this was a place that people had been living for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so, if you kept to the paths, it wasn't so bad. And he had some excellent Peruvian guides. When he finally got to this place named Huancuña, there's a man on the river named Melchor Arteaga. And on July 24th, 1911, Arteaga leads Hiram Bingham up the mountain along with a Peruvian soldier that Bingham was traveling with for his protection, up into the Saddleback Ridge between two peaks that we today know as Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu. And there he's met by the families that were already living there,

the Richarde family and the Alvarez family. And the son of the Richarde family, a young boy, leads Hiram Bingham into the ruins that he would come to call Machu Picchu. What would he have seen? What was uncovered? Much of the site was covered in maleza, or undergrowth, that was in vines and roots that had grown over the fine palace structures over the last 300, 400 years. over the last 300, 400 years. There was a main plaza surrounded by the Temple of the Three Windows, as Bingham called it, and two other temples that the families had cleared

and they were farming in it. They were using Machu Picchu or Huayna Picchu as a farm. But there was still enough visible that Bingham couldn't grasp the architectural magnitude of the site. And also a number of features that hadn't really survived in other places. The buoy led him up to the highest point in the site, to the Intiwakana, or the sometimes called the hitching post of the sun, although it was more

like a gnomon that was used to trace the sun's movement across the sky. And Bingham realized that there wasn't one of these left anymore in the Inca Empire, that the Spaniards had all broken the tops of these things off because they saw them as like objects of idolatry. And the other thing that the Tcharte boy led him to that I think is one of the most important features of the site and that immediately affected Bingham was the Temple of the Sun. And beneath that Temple of the Sun was what Bingham called the Royal Mausoleum, a cave that had a combination of finely carved stones, but also sculpted rock. The bedrock itself had been shaped to resemble stepped stairs, which

reflects Inca understandings of the three worlds. And inside of it were niches in which Bingham presumed, and we think he was right, that the Inca and Andean mummies might have been placed when they visited Machu Picchu in the time of Pachacutecan afterwards. One of the most magical moments in history discovery. It's just extraordinary. And yet he thought, this doesn't feel to me like the descriptions I've read about the last city of the Incas. So he kept going. He didn't get distracted. It's crazy.

Yeah, he didn't sit down and take a minute. He was a strenuous guy. And he actually did reach the sites that we archaeologists and historians now know are Vitkos and Vilcabamba, the last cities of the Incas. Vitkos and Vilcabamba, the last cities of the Incas. He decided to go back to Machu Picchu because he knew that it was the most photogenic of places. And it was the place that he imagined that if he excavated, he could learn new things about the Incas. What was the effect of Bingham discovering Machu Picchu on the rest of the world? The first effect was in Peru, where the Peruvian knowledge that there was this North American wandering around Cusco, bumping into cities, began to make them

very nervous about whether or not he would excavate as well. And so Bingham comes out of the countryside in 1911 and learns that the Peruvian government has announced very clearly that there's a new decree saying that there can be no excavation and export of ruins without permission from the Peruvian government. And there had been some versions of those laws before, but this was a new hardening that showed a rise of a new sentiment in Peru that sites like this needed to be controlled and guarded by Peruvian people. When Bingham left Peru, though, his announcement in his much beloved New York Times was as stellar as you can imagine.

National Geographic decided to fund his second expedition, which was a massive expedition. And the idea was that this time, Bingham wouldn't just come back with a story. He'd come back with reams of photographs of the cleared site of Machu Picchu as well as, and this is what had these unbelievable centerfolds of the site using these Kodak cameras. And it really changed the course of National Geographic beforehand. They hadn't really funded archaeological expeditions before. You mentioned artifacts. What was he finding? What did he find as well as the beautiful gigantic stone edifices? What did he find there? They found the tombs of the people who had worked in Machu Picchu mostly. A few higher class individuals, maybe priests or elites or priestesses. But what's truly affecting to me is that this wasn't a site where there was tremendous gold or silver to be found. The Spaniards really looted the heck out of the Inca Empire. And what was important about its cult of and its religion of mummies was that they continued wearing their wealth in death.

And so it was actually very obvious where the gold and silver was. It wasn't really buried. And so, Bingham had some idea that maybe they'd find some sort of lost treasure. But when they started digging at the site itself amongst the temples, they really didn't find anything. It was perhaps because it had been looted before. So, what we're left with are the tombs of about 174 or more individuals that were in caves around the site who were the workers of Machu Picchu and whose objects are a little bit more modest

and that tell us how people lived. That is one of the most marvelous things that I have ever seen. Almost unspoiled royal city on a mountain top bathed in sunshine. Look at that. Maybe it's because I'm tired but I'm feeling very emotional. I think it's that you have to work so hard to get to this point that it feels so, so special. There are many things in life that are a bit of a disappointment when you've been looking

forward to them for so long. I can report that Machu Picchu is not one of them. I've never seen anything like it. You listen to Dan Snow's History. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. History's Heroes This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. So I'm walking through the ruins of Machu Picchu now. It isn't any less impressive close up. It's like an entire mountainside has been turned into a pyramid and on top the most important religious and political centres. It's amazing how it has survived hundreds of years of neglect.

Walls still standing, stairs still even. You can still see irrigation channels carrying any rain that's fallen higher up on the mountainside down into the valley below. We think it was built sometime in the 15th century by the great Inca, the great emperor Paxacutec. I'm going to meet Bibiana Melci, who has spent 20 years researching Inca sites right across Peru. Bibi Hayding, where are we standing now? Describe what we can see around us. Okay so as far as I know Machu Picchu has an

urban section, a section of workshops where they would work with textiles and ceramics. It also has besides the urban, the royal section of palaces. But there's also a very important religious component. So you have several temples along the entire citadel. And you have the terraces, these amazing terraces that were used for agriculture. But not only for that, there were also structural terraces to support the weight, and those you can find at the bottom of the site. Why on earth did they build this city in the clouds?

It's so high, it's so hard to reach. OK, so it might sound like a very easy question, but it's actually not, Because in archaeology and history, you always have different researchers trying to find out and discover. Incas did not have a written language. Okay? So there is no way of knowing, like leave a record of this was used for this. But as far as we know know there are like two main theories one is that it was like a royal palace built for pachacutec by pachacutec who was the great

builder of the incas okay so that is one. And the other one is that this place is very important administrative, political, and religious center that connects the Andes, the city of Cusco, which was the center of the world and the center of the empire of the Incas with the Amazon. And you have so many roads that bring you here, more than 11 roads that are part of the entire Qhapaq Ñan or the Inca Royal Road network. You have 11 entrances and they bring you from the Salcantay, which is a sacred mountain. They bring you from Cusco.

They take you to the other side of the mountains and the river. So you have those theories. So you mentioned terraces. We've got urban areas, rural areas. What are the key sites in Machu Picchu? Well, some of the most fascinating and beautiful places is the Temple of the Sun.

So if you come here and it's the only construction that has a rounded wall and that looks exactly, it's a replica of the Coricancha, which was the Temple of the Sun in Cusco. So those two rounded towers, very important. Then you also have the Temple of the Condor right behind me, which is absolutely beautiful with a different shape. Then you have this sacred plaza with a tree in the middle. For me, the most fascinating place. Besides the sacred plaza that has the three windows, and up there you can see the Intiwatana,

they said that they could tie the sun and they could read the time with that intiwatana But right behind that is the quarry and that's where the stones to build Machu Picchu came from So people think that the stones were down there by the river. Okay, maybe a hundred meters down below us No, the stones were up here at the top of the mountain. How did they build this city on top of the mountain? They used different methods and they had hundreds of people building these places. We already know the method that they used to break down these stones. So what they did was basically percussion, you know,

and that's where they would hammer them, one rock against the other, okay, to crack it. Then they would put like wedges, continue, open it in half, okay. The weather also helped because if you leave a very gigantic piece of stone, the heat, the cold, that also helps them crack, okay. And then they would use sand and water to fine and to polish, okay? So those were their tools. Probably they used logs to pull them and to have traction.

And in the construction of this site, they could have had thousands of people. So it looks very grey, doesn't it? There's a lot of exposed rock here. What would it have looked like in the 15th, 16th centuries? That is one of the most fascinating things I learned as a journalist when I was doing reporting, that when you see this place, you don't imagine, you know, how it really looked. But there is evidence in some places, really looked. But there is evidence in some places in the workshops that you see, oh my god,

this is like a little bit yellowish, ochre, and then there's this part that is reddish. It was covered, some sections, not all, and painted in a color, in a beautiful golden-like, mustard like color or reddish. So just imagine in this mountaintop, surrounded by green, you know, lush Amazon cloud forest, and then these buildings that are yellow and bright red. So I've just hiked the Inca Trail. I came over the crest of the mountain. I walked through the sun gate. The view is obviously breathtaking. When Bingham found it, it was covered in vegetation.

It took him days to reach. And he therefore claimed to rediscover it. But locals knew about it, didn't they? And were even spending time here. Well, here in Bingham saying that he discovered it. What we say now here in Peru is that he revealed it to the world. All the people that lived around it knew of its existence. And now it has been discovered that there is evidence, even in maps, where Machu Picchu appears.

You know, maps from the 1800s, maps from the 1700s, mentions of this place. 1700s, mentions of those plays. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Not only was Bingham not the first person to step foot into Machu Picchu, it looks like he wasn't even the first Westerner to turn up at the ruins. In 1978, 50 years after Bingham first set eyes on Machu Picchu, a researcher named Paulo Grier discovered some clandestine documents which shed light on a dark chapter in the monument's history. The documents showed the site had been looted in the 19th century, seemingly with the permission of the Peruvian government. Greer discovered a map with the two peaks clearly marked on them as Huaynepichu and Machu Picchu,

drawn by a German prospector named Augusto Burns in 1874. He then found a booklet which indicated Burns, who was in Peru to trade precious metals and wood, had looted Machu Picchu, apparently with the blessing of Peruvian officials, and sold the artefact to European galleries and museums. These documents state that Burns purchased 25km of land along the river in the Sacred Valley in 1867 and set up a sawmill, which Bingham notes in his expedition diary. But by 1881 he'd abandoned his logging and he'd set up a company called the Inca's Gold and Silver Mining Company. But if you look at the geology of this region, the only thing to mine is granite. The gold and silver were obviously coming from elsewhere.

Abandoning all pretence, he went on to publish a pamphlet, amazingly setting out his intention to raid the citadel of the Inca. A separate letter from the same year shows that Burns received permission from the Peruvian president to loot Inca tombs. Anything he found was his takeaway, but the government wanted 10% of the spoils. In his private letters, Burns himself wrote that Machu Picchu will undoubtedly contain objects of great value and form part of those treasures of the Incas.

Burns may not have been the first or only treasure hunter to covet the riches of Machu Picchu, but judging from these documents, he was certainly the most open about his intentions. What's the significance of gold for the Inca? We have to understand that for them gold was precious, not because of the value of it, but it was because it represented the sun, which was a god to them. And their main leader, the Inca, the son of the sun. So he also had to have this medal for him in his different, you know, jewelry. So that was very important, representation of one of the most important gods. So there were several Inca leaders along their history,

the first one being Manco Capac and the last one being Atahualpa, okay, when the Spanish came. While I've been here in Peru learning about the Inca, I'm really beginning to understand that it's just really difficult, more so than other periods, I think, to be certain about what anything is. There are just so many different theories and ideas about the Inca, their ruins, their artefacts.

This definitely goes for Machu Picchu itself. Scholars and the guides differ over what the place was actually built for. Some have told me it's centre of administration, others that it was a kind of grand summer palace for the great Inca leader who built it, Pachacuti. Now there's certainly evidence that Pachacuti did spend time in Machu Picchu. I've seen what seemed to be his royal quarters. The ruins show us that there was only one toilet in Machu Picchu. It must have been Pachacuti's. And rightly so. He was one of the most powerful and successful Inca rulers. Let the man have his own bathroom.

He was recognised as the greatest builder in the entire empire. The sun is rising in Cusco. I've been up pounding the mean streets since before dawn. Jet lag and the Inca is a powerful combination to get you out of bed. Now the town's waking up and people are streaming through the streets, kids going to school, passing by the massive edifices of Spanish colonial rule built on top of Inca foundations that you can still see. Cusco's built in a high alpine valley. I'm about 3,300 meters now, which is twice the height of Britain's highest point. I'm in the historic center now,

and there's so much Spanish colonial building from the 16th and 17th centuries, towering churches, colonnaded arcades, beautiful balconies overhanging the streets. And the streets have got great names, like Ataud, meaning coffin, and the Siete Calebras, the seven serpents.

You're immediately struck here by the fusion, I suppose is the right word, between two mighty empires, serpents. You're immediately struck here by the fusion, I suppose is the right word, between two mighty empires, that of the Inca and that of the Spanish who conquered it and replaced it. Before the Spanish arrived here in 1531, Cusco was the centre, the beating heart of the Inca empire. It was the place that bound together their territories, east, west, north and south. It was overseen by the Sapa Inca,

the sole ruler or paramount leader. This emperor embodied all the dimensions of leadership. He was a political leader. He was a military commander. But he was also their spiritual figurehead. And he made sweeping economic decisions as well. Although he was obviously human, he presented himself as a divine, as a mythical figure. He transcended the ordinary. He only communicated through intermediaries. Anyone who dared to look him directly in the eye could be sentenced to death for their disobedience.

The idea was that he would be a charismatic leader who would be a kind of benevolent dictator. The Inca believed he was descendant of their most important deity, Inti, the sun god, making the Sapa Inca a semi-divine person living on earth I've walked now standing in the shadow of probably the greatest of all the Sapa Inca the ninth emperor Pachacutec he came to power right here in Cusco in 1438 this is a hell of a statue I'm looking up at bronze a bronze statue, nearly 40 foot tall,

atop a stone tower. Pachacutex, arms and head, held aloft wide towards the heavens, giving a sense of him acting as an intermediary between the divine and the human. And I think he's emphasising the Incas' deep connection to the sky. They're fascinated by the stars, the cosmos,

their buildings were often aligned to celestial movements, and they believed that everything in the universe existed in a state of interdependence. And although the scholarship is still in flux, we think it was really Patrick Kutek who took Cusco from being a small settlement, a city-state, and turned it into the imperial capital. settlement a city-state and turned it into the imperial capital the legends say that in 1438 Cusco was attacked by the Chanka tribe now this is really the the nemesis of the Inca the Sapa Inca was very cocher and he was Patrick Kutek's father and he fled the city and he left it open to the attacking forces but it was Patrick Kut then a prince. He stayed behind and valiantly led a rebellion.

He crushed the Chanka. He saved Cusco. That's when he earned his title, his nickname, which was Pachacutec, which means Earth Shatterer, which is just a considerably better nickname than Snowy, which is how I was known at his age. He changed everything about the Inca. He changed their fate.

He carved out an empire. From this homeland around Cusco, they expanded west across the mountains to what is now the coast of Chile and Peru. South into parts of Argentina, the Pampas. East into the jungles of the Amazon Basin. And north into what is now Ecuador and even Colombia. And as far as big empires go, this was not a particularly bloody process. There was violence, of course, but he employed a system of carrot and stick.

He convinced tribes and other peoples to submit, to buy in to the idea of an Inca empire. And in the next episode, we're going to trace that process, the rise of the Inca empire and the ingen next episode we're going to trace that process the rise of the Inca empire and the ingenuity of how they went about it they bribed they enticed and that explains why they were able to take so much power over so great an area so rapidly and with seemingly so little resistance and in the next episode we're going to be discovering what artifacts were found at Machu Picchu by Bingham and his team and learn what they revealed about the Incas how they lived how they survived this very hostile environment what their belief system was like how unlike it was to our own how they connected to the cosmos and the seasons as well as learn about their elaborate

rituals and practices you've been listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This episode was written and produced by Marianna De Forge and edited by Dougal Patmore. And here, as if it was planned, I'm entering the main square now and there seems to be a brass band playing. I'm going to check it out. this was the first episode in a four-part series called, unsurprisingly, Machu Picchu. If you want the whole thing, just go and check out the show notes. We've attached the links you need to get the rest.

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