Inca Gold

The greed for the inca gold was the reason of the destruction of the inca civilization, the incas did not use the gold as we do it today; The gold, the silver and the copper were not use as exchangeable payment method like today; The only two methods of payment known by the incas were, the textiles and the Mullus, that is a big mollusc that only grows in the north of Peru, when the water of the pacific ocean get warmer.

The inca gold was not so pure gold as everyone believe, the incas did not have the same interest that we have for this metal, for the incas the gold minds the holy male image of the sun; The silver minds the holy female image of the moon and the copper was the holy image of the mother earth, so most of the gold art crafts of the incas contain this three metals.

The incas melt the 75 percent of gold, 15 percent of silver and 10 percent of copper, the resulting alloy was call Tumbaga, this alloy has a significantly lower melting point than gold or silver alone, it is harder than copper, maintains malleability after being pounded and produce more quantity of metal with a very nice gold appearance; The tumbaga was the standard inca gold alloy use in all inca jewelry.

Using the Tumbaga, the incas create objects for funeral, ceremonies and personal purposes; The funeral objects were mainly masks, chest decorations, head decorations and other inca arts and crafts that decorate the funeral container; The ceremonies objects were rattles, cups, sculptures and a large knife call Tumi used to kill animals and some times enemies, that were sacrifice in complex religious ceremonies.

The personal objects made with the inca gold alloy were sandals, bangles, ear rings, gold bibs, crowns, necklaces, cnemis protections, nose rings, falconry and anything that their imagination could conceive; Some old inca tells, talk about rich inca women from important families, that use to dress all their body decorated with plaques of gold everywhere.

The gold was consider social status and it was not inherited by your descendants, so when the owner died all his gold was buried with him, reason why the best inca gold collections where found in tombs by archaeologist or inca treasure hunters; The incas use all the gold that they have to create all kinds of inca artifacts and for decoration of their temples.

If today you take gold from a government, the economy will be affected but in the case of the incas, when the spaniards take all the gold from their temples, it did not hurt the incas economy, it hurt their culture because the spaniards destroy the all the inca gods images from the temples; Imagine the suffering of the incas watching the images of their gods and religion symbols, been melt in bars to be send to Spain as trophy of war.

Practically all the inca gold was collected from rivers, using the technique of panning, which involves getting the gravel from the riverbeds or the gravel banks of a river, then they use a pan to wash out the gravel, because the gold is more dense, it normally stay on the bottom of the pan; The Incas collect large gold nuggets from their river banks, until today there is not a clear location of witch rivers the incas use to collect their gold.

When the world find out of the existence of the incas, all Europe wants to have a piece of it and they took it by force from the spaniard ships, that were send from Peru to Spain, in those days the pirates were hunting the spaniards ships; Just for a minute, imagine the greed of this people and how fragile were the ships in those days, so now you you can figure it out, that most of the inca gold treasures are in the bottom of the oceans.

Today, there is a legal battle that had been created by the treasure hunter shit odyssey, that had extract gold coins that were made in Peru more than 500 years ago; It is interesting to ask to whom this gold belongs, to the spaniards that took it by force from the incas, it belongs to the Odyssey that invest millions in find it and extracted or it belongs to the Peruvian government former incas empire; So no matter who wins the trophy, that gold still is inca gold and will always be.

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