Word: machu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...miles northwest of the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco, a handful of Peruvians and Americans met last week to dedicate a bronze plaque to U.S. Archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the mysterious lost city he discovered 50 years ago. Some experts believe that parts of the city, which Bingham named Machu Picchu (Old Peak), are 60 centuries old, which would make it 1,000 years older than ancient Babylon. More recently, if its ruins are interpreted correctly, it was at once an impregnable fortress and a majestic royal capital of an exiled civilization...
Built on a saddle between two peaks, Machu Picchu is surrounded by a granite wall, can be entered only by one main gate. Inside is a maze of a thousand ruined houses, temples, palaces, and staircases, all hewn from white granite and dominated by a great granite sundial. In Quechua, language of the sun-worshipping Incas and their present-day descendants, the dial was known as Intihuatana-hitching post...
...only to a few local Indians until Bingham came upon "a great flight of beautifully constructed stone-faced terraces, perhaps a hundred of them, each hundreds of feet long and ten feet high." Bingham died five years ago, after spending much of his free time exploring and writing about Machu Picchu. and watching it become a growing tourist attraction. Hundreds of others have studied, scraped and photographed the lost city. There are still great gaps in their knowledge, and little agreement on the significance of what they know. Fittingly enough, the best known-and most romantic-history of Machu Picchu...
According to Bingham, Machu Picchu was in reality the Tampu-Tocco ("Window Tavern") of pre-Inca legend, a mountain fortress maintained by the kings of the Amautas, who ruled the highlands of the Andes for 62 generations. The last king, Pachacuti VI, was mortally wounded in a battle with barbarian tribes of the Amazon jungles, probably in the 8th century A.D., and his body was carried by his loyal warriors to Tampu-Tocco. With the death of Pachacuti, the widespread kingdom of the Amautas broke into pieces...