City of the Gods

The Valley of Mexico, Otomí and Nahua alike, had no memory of "Teohuacan" / "Teotihuacan". (The Maya knew it as "Place of Reeds" ... when they cared, which as of 1300 AD they didn't.) "Teo/huacan" just means "place of gods". Similarly the Akkadians didn't know what "Babillu" meant so folk-etymologied it as KA-DINGIR-RA, Godsgate (Bâb Ilân). So: to South America, when the Quechua / Aymara lords of Cuzco happened upon Lake Titicaca.

Titicaca had a ruin of its own, southern edge, on the yonder side from Cuzco. "Three-week journey" according to Covey, 41; and the journey crosses what Coloradans call a "Fourteener" to get there. The Incas called that southern site "Tiahuanaco".

Most South Americans thought they'd come from the tropical north, a myth that has the virtue of being true. The Incas proclaimed a contrary myth: the god Viracocha himself came out of this lake Titicaca, whence at Tiahuanaco He made new stone men. As Covey, 45 points out, Tiahuanaco had a rich sculptural tradition, leaving behind copious broken statues and stone heads. Apparently these golems spread underground because Viracocha then went up and down the Andes calling men out of caves. The Inca, thereby, didn't come from Tiahuanaco itself; they were called out of a cave by the Tiahuanacan Creator.

Complicating matters, the Pachacuti Inca (note the name: pachacuti means something like "cosmic reconstruction") built Viracocha shrines up and down the route from Cuzco to Tiahuanaco. Covey, 43 notes as Inca: Maucallata and Huanacuari. So it has historically been difficult, both for Europeans and indeed for the later Inca, to know which was pre-Inca and which Inca. The Inca also didn't quite have the same linear concept of time that IndoEuropeans (or Mesoamericans) got. Although at least some of these "modern" Andean shrines were in view of truly ancient ruins, like "Pukara" which just means "hillfort" (p. 45). And, of course, like Tiahuanaco itself. The Incas rebuilt a lot of this stuff too (p. 44).

(To the reader: feel free to take a drink when you read since time immemorial. Pukara and Tiahuanaco do in fact precede Richard I Plantagenet.)

The Andean memory got better when it came to life before the Inca. Pro-Inca Andeans remembered it as the Fourth Age, the age of Pukara. The men of the Third Age had fled to the hills, living in fear. (So far, so Archaic Greek.) The Inca had brought the Fifth Age of peace and plenty (for late fourteenth-century Cuzcians).

We now know that "Third-Age" Tiahuanaco was the centre of a south-facing civilisation. Cuzco herself had been settled by a contemporary neighbour, from the north: the Huari. (These borders have rather reasserted themselves in the Bolivian / Peruvian border.) The Inca didn't know the difference. When they chanced upon a Huari gravesite in Urcos, that was their proof Viracocha had visited there too.

Covey doesn't say (since now we're getting out of Covey's scope) but Andean civilisation even by the Huari / Tiahuanacan era had already grown to share ideographical tropes - much like how Mesoamerica came to share, say, a feathered-serpent god and a calendar. Or like how Quechua and Aymara share linguistic aspects, or how most Mesoamerican languages join in a Sprachbund.

Covey does say (p. 49) that the fragmentation and warfare plaguing the Fourth Age highlands didn't reach the coasts. The coasts still enjoyed Third Age lifestyles. Which, when the Inca united the highlands, left the lowlands militarily vulnerable...