Inca gold llama

A History of the World in 100 Objects

BBC

History

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2010

⏱️ 14 minutes

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Summary

The history of humanity - as told through one hundred objects from the British Museum in London - is back in South America. This week Neil MacGregor, the museum's director, is with the powerful elites - exploring the great empires across the world 600 years ago. Today he is with a small gold model of a llama, the animal that helped fuel the success of the great Inca Empire that ruled over some 12 million people right down the Pacific West Coast. For a culture living at high altitude in rough terrain and without horses or pack animals, the llama proved all important - for wool, for meat and for sacrifice. Neil tells the story of the Inca, the ways in which they organised themselves and things that they believed in. And he recounts what happened when the Spanish arrived. The scientist and writer Jared Diamond and the archaeologist Gabriel Ramon help tell the story. Producer: Anthony Denselow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects
0:07.8	from BBC Radio 4. Some of you listening might just have recognized those plaintive moans as the humming of a lama. It's the sound that around 500 years ago
0:26.2	accompanied the building of an empire. The empire of the Inca, bigger than
0:31.2	Ottoman Turkey, bigger than Ming China, in fact the largest in the world.
0:36.0	Around 1500 the Inca Empire ran for over 3,000 miles down the Andes
0:42.0	and ruled over 12 million people from the Pacific coast to the Amazonian jungle. In 1532 the Spanish would come and everything would collapse but until then the Inca Empire flourished. It didn't
1:07.9	have writing but it was an efficient military society and ordered productive and wealthy civilization centered on Kusko in Peru.
1:16.8	Its economy was driven by manpower and, just as important, Lama power.
1:22.3	It's the biggest empire of the week,
1:24.0	but it's represented by the smallest object.
1:27.0	A Lama that sits in my hand, a tiny gold messenger
1:31.0	from a mountainttoped world.
1:33.0	I've seen Lamas carrying packs in the Andes
1:36.0	and elevations of up to 16,000 feet.
1:39.0	The other domestic animal of the Andes,
1:42.0	the guinea pig weighs about two pounds so you can't go very far with
1:46.1	a guinea pig carrying your suitcase.
1:47.8	A history of the world in a hundred objects. Inca Gold Lama, a small statue from Peru, made between 1400 and 1550.
2:14.0	This week's objects take us to empires all over the globe around five or six hundred years ago.
2:25.2	As the Ming dynasty was reordering China and the Ottomans conquering Eastern Europe,
2:30.0	the Inca were constructing their vast empire, spreading from their heartland in southern Peru to a territory 10 times the size by 1500.
2:40.0	Although this empire was highly organized militarily, socially and politically, the Inca had no script,
	...

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