What is so special about Machu Picchu?

Show all answers

memorex

Wow! now that was a very scientific explanation!

Me on the other hand could complement it with a rather simple one:

In general what is very outstanding about the Inkas is how they made great efforts to live in empathy with their surrounding world. They appreciated any outstanding landscape and consider it Holy, so they would do everything in their power to live in harmony with that place therefore building cities on the hill tops instead of doing so next to a nearby river (like the spaniards did in PISAQ).

My point is, that the Inkas could make it happen in any place they chose no matter how difficult the task and of all the places they built their cities, Macchu Picchu is by far the most impressive.

Macchu Picchu is also a city that shares 2 different environmental conditions: On the city itself and the Inka trail that takes you there is very much like cuzco and the highlands, but on all the surroundings below, there is a much hotter environtment, so there they could grow a much greater vaiety of agriculture goods than any other place near Cuzco

princess

its breath taking

AttorneyKearney

The ruins of Machu Picchu which means 'Old Peak' in the Quechua language, were rediscovered in 1911 by Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham, are one of the most beautiful and enigmatic ancient sites in the world. While the Inca people certainly used the Andean mountain top (9060 feet elevation), erecting many hundreds of stone structures from the early 1400's, legends and myths indicate that Machu Picchu was revered as a sacred place from a far earlier time.
Whatever its origins, the Inca turned the site into a small (5 square miles) but extraordinary city. Invisible from below and completely self-contained, surrounded by agricultural terraces sufficient to feed the population, and watered by natural springs, Machu Picchu seems to have been utilized by the Inca as a secret ceremonial city. Two thousand feet above the Urubamba river, the ruins have palaces, baths, temples, storage rooms and about 150 houses, all in a remarkable state of preservation.
These structures, carved from the gray granite of the mountain top are wonders. Many of the building blocks weigh 50 tons or more yet are so precisely sculpted and fitted together with such exactitude that the mortarless joints will not permit the insertion of even a thin knife blade. Little is known of the social or religious use of the site during Inca times.
The skeletal remains of ten females to one male had led to the casual assumption that the site may have been a sanctuary for the training of priestesses and /or brides for the Inca nobility. However, subsequent osteological examination of the bones revealed an equal number of male bones, thereby indicating that Machu Picchu was not exclusively a temple or dwelling place of women.
One of Machu Picchu's primary functions was that of astronomical observatory. The Intihuatana stone (meaning 'Hitching Post of the Sun') has been shown to be a precise indicator of the date of the two equinoxes and other significant celestial periods. The Intihuatana (also called the Saywa or Sukhanka stone) is designed to hitch the sun at the two equinoxes, not at the solstice.
At midday on March 21st and September 21st, the sun stands almost directly above the pillar, creating no shadow at all. At this precise moment the sun "sits with all his might upon the pillar" and is for a moment "tied" to the rock. At these periods, the Incas held ceremonies at the stone in which they "tied the sun" to halt its northward movement in the sky. There is also an Intihuatana alignment with the December solstice (the summer solstice of the southern hemisphere), when at sunset the sun sinks behind Pumasillo (the Puma's claw), the most sacred mountain of the western Vilcabamba range, but the shrine itself is primarily equinoctial.

Shamanic legends say that when sensitive persons touch their foreheads to the stone, the Intihuatana opens one's vision to the spirit world. Intihuatana stones were the supremely sacred objects of the Inca people and were systematically searched for and destroyed by the Spaniards. When the Intihuatana stone was broken at an Inca shrine, the Inca believed that the deities of the place died or departed. The Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, even though they suspected its existence, thus the Intihuatana stone and its resident spirits remain in their original position. The mountain top sanctuary fell into disuse and was abandoned some forty years after the Spanish took Cuzco in 1533. Supply lines linking the many Inca social centers were disrupted and the great empire came to an end.

Lic.Gregory Kearney Lawson.

Crilaw

Believe me...when you see it you understand why is so special!!!

Qveencita & PLC 4 ever

I think Macchu Picchu is very special because is a city made of big stones and it was building in the mountains, where there aren't that kind of stones, and nobody knows how the Incas took those stones to the mountains.

Enter Your Message or Comment

User Name:
User Email:
Post a comment: