Machu Picchu is an Inca settlement located in the High Andes of Peru in the Urubamba Valley, north of Cuzco. The site, perched high above the Urubamba river, has been variously described as a fortress, imperial retreat and ceremonial precinct. It was founded by Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui in c. 1450 CE, had capacity for around 1,000 residents at its peak, and ranked amongst the most sacred of all sites for the Inca. Following the collapse of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu was abandoned and forgotten, only to be rediscovered in 1911 CE by the explorer Hiram Bingham. Machu Picchu is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
Purpose
Machu Picchu (meaning ‘old hill’) was an imperial estate founded by and belonging to Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the Inca ruler, in the mid-15th century CE. The ownership of the site was later passed to Pachacuti’s successors. On its rediscovery by the explorer Hiram Bingham in 1911 CE (although local residents in the valley had always known of the site’s existence) it was claimed as the last capital of the Incas. However, this proved to be untrue when the actual final capital was discovered at Vilcabamba, further downstream in the Urubamba Valley.
Another hypothesis concerning the site posed by early historians was that Machu Picchu was a fortress and the strong walls, large towers, and dry moats were cited in support of this theory. The need for fortification perhaps sprang from a series of severe droughts which made the competition for resources fierce. This would also explain why the site was not occupied for very long as when the water situation improved the necessity for such citadel sites declined.
Once again though, further study has revealed that most of the architecture was designed for religious purposes and the fortifications may well have been put in place to ensure only a select few could enter this sacred site. In further support of this interpretation, a road was discovered which linked the site to several residential settlements dotted along the valley. The most likely purpose of Machu Picchu, then, was as a sacred site, probably to the sun god Inti and with the additional purpose of reminding the recently conquered local population of the power and might of Pachacuti and the Inca empire centred at its capital Cuzco.
The site was abandoned by the Inca shortly before Pizarro and the Spanish conquistadors arrived. The invaders never reached Machu Picchu, though, and the site would remain unknown to the wider world for 400 years.
Full Article by Mark Cartwright https://www.worldhistory.org/Machu_Picchu/
From UNESCO https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/274/
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Boy George has produced an AI song of nothing but hasbara talking points
In batman the animated series episode “appointment in crime alley” the villain is a developer who is going to illegally blow up a whole neighborhood for urban renewal purposes.
the word “fuck” has technically existed for hundreds of years (the first recorded usage was from 1310) people before 1310 be like “oh jeez oh shoot oh darn”
Rudimentary Peni were the best band ever. They still technically exist but ill srill go with were
Spiritually pretty woman is a gender reversed Adam sandler movie
Arch kernel 7.1.5-arch1-2 is still broken on Kabini APUs due to failing graphics detection. I will post this every time a new kernel comes out until Timur Kristóf and the gang sort it out. valve pls fix
The reason why Homer became alcoholic in the first place (beside from his father’s neglect) is because of Moe. That’s why Homer never spend more time with the family or get a promotion from work to earn more money because he always hangs out at Moe’s bar all the time.
it is july 28 and stalin saved the world from fascism
Growing up I used to fire across a corn on the cob acting like it was an old school typewriter going nuts across a page, the faster the better. Rabid is the only way to be
Malcom Holmes is en route towards your location.
Haven’t played Goldeneye since I was like 7 and man I did not remember how hard it went on the anti-USSR propaganda
A request for remote movie nights has led me to spinning up a simple cytube instance on my media server. I got as far as SSL being both needed and not configured for local files.
Any suggestions for other options? At this point I’m looking at modifying the source code so SSL is not required because there’s no way I’m going through all that.
Tunneling? I thought the internet was tubes? Do I look like I know what a reverse proxy is? I just want to share a gotdang video!
Started rewatching the X-files for the first time since its original run. I was a huge fan back then.
Still entertained, but not hard to see how this stuff has played into the weird lizard people/deep state right wing conspiracy stuff of the last decades.
Paper maps and landline phones, good lord I’m old.
cooling a bit on the Odyssey after seeing it
I find it extremely annoying that despite being set in mycenaean greece, the movie depicts odysseus as extremely calvinist. the original poem is horny as hell, with our hero taking a break to spend an entire year banging a hot sorceress, while in this one the only sex scene is one where he has missionary sex with his wife and he seemingly spends the following 18 years completely celibate.
granted, it would have been annoying in a different way if Nolan had just had all of the female characters throwing themselves at odysseus, which is how this aspect of the story is depicted in pretty much every other movie adaptation, but I guess what bothers me about it is that rather than make the story element more interesting by giving more agency to female characters, the modern liberal filmmaker’s response to feminist critiques of the films of the past is to simply excise sex altogether.
it’s the general pattern with filmmakers like Nolan. he’ll put lupita nyong’o as clytemnestra/helen, but he won’t change the fact that those characters are depicted strictly as objects who are acted upon by men. the right winger’s feral opposition to minority representation is the mirror image of the liberal’s surface level inclusion of it, with both of them fundamentally missing the point in different ways.
that said i do like the plot thread that odysseus is reckoning with how his plot at troy was a terrible idea with long reaching consequences. the very first thing we see odysseus and his crew do after the war is burn down a village for the crime of running away when a bunch of heavily armed strangers arrived on their beach, and by the end of the film odysseus realizes that the “people from the sea” are more or less blowback from the trojan war. that’s a cool way to adapt an old story to a modern framework.
it is unfortunately super idealistic. oddysseus’ plan seemingly introduced the idea of violating xenia to the mycenaeans, and this idea’s very existence spells the end for mycenaean civilization. the result is that the film positions the sack of Troy as bad because the greeks did it the wrong way, rather than being bad because murdering tons of people is bad. it’s both the liberal and fascist critique of the war on terror, incidentally - libs think we just needed more precise munitions, while fascists think that we just needed more indiscreet bombing campaigns, and neither can engage with the fact that we shouldn’t have been invading another country in the first place.
