ROLE OF THE EGYPTIAC 'OLD KINGDOM* 685

that this was the scene of successive experiences of growth, breakdown,
and disintegration through which the Andean Civilization passed before
its coastal birthplace was eventually united politically with a culturally
parvenu highland province to constitute an Andean oecumenical empire
as a result of the conquest of the lowland coastal states Chimu and Nazca
by the highlander militarist Pachacutec (imperdbat circa A.D. 1400-48).*
The reason why we are able to see Andean history now in this true
perspective is because, in Peru, the coastal province that was the true
birthplace of the culture happened, like the Sa'id in the Egyptiac World,
to be 'a natural museum' in which climate and soil conspired to preserve
the incriminating material evidence of Civilization instead of conspiring
to destroy it; and, by the time of writing, this Peruvian 'natural museum*
had been explored by the enterprise of experienced twentieth-century
Western Americanists with a skill and energy that would have done
credit to the pioneer nineteenth-century Western Egyptologists. The
bearing of these triumphs of Archaeology in Peru on the interpretation
of Egyptiac history was indicated by the revolutionary violence of the
change in the interpretation of Andean history which these Peruvian
archaeological discoveries had dictated.

Before the archaeologists started operations in Peru, Modern Western
knowledge of Andean history had been virtually confined to evidence
concerning the Empire of the Incas; and, while this evidence had partly
consisted in the massive material monuments of Cyclopean architecture
constructed by these empire-building highlanders and their neighbours
and predecessors on the Plateau, the main source of information at the
disposal of Western scholars at that stage had been the Incaic imperial
tradition preserved in Castilian literary dress and more or less mislead-
ingly travestied in the process.3 In the picture presented in this tradition
the rise and fall of the Incaic Power were equated with the beginning and
end of Andean history; and, while Modern Western scholarship correctly
divined, on the strength of the internal evidence, that little credence was
to be given to a version of the Incaic tradition, picked up by the seven-
teenth-century Spanish Jesuit historian Fernando Montesinos,3 which
professed to carry the record of Incaic history back to a high antiquity,
this well-justified rejection of an apocryphal prelude to genuine Incaic
history was merely a negative result of historical criticism, and the most
acute analysis of the Incaic traditional evidence would never have
brought to light the authentic early history of the Andean Civilization
in a coastal province of the Andean World where neither the Incas nor
their predecessors in the highland province had pkyed any decisive
part before the fifteenth century of the Christian Era.

The true perspective of Andean history could only be brought to
light by the instrument of Archaeology; and, when an archaeological

^ The life and work of the Herodian half-breed Garcilaso de la Vega have been
noticed in IX. viii. 597»

3 A critique of Montesinos* Memorias Antiguas Historians y Politico* del Per& ™&te
found in Baudin, L.: L'Empire SodaKste des Inka (Paris 1928, Institut d'Etfanologie),
pp. 17-18. Montesinos wrote this book in A.D. i6sz, in the fifth generation after the
Spanish conquest of the Andean Empire of the Four Quarters.