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The Gold Museum of Peru and Weapons of the World is a Peruvian museum, located in Lima.
In the 1960s, Miguel Mujica Gallo used his private collection, gathered throughout his life, to open the "Gold Museum of Peru and Weapons of the World", located in the district of Santiago de Surco. It is in a two-story building made of reinforced concrete and accessed through a vault-style entrance.
The museum was donated to the state of Perú by Gallo and is now administered by Foundation Miguel Mujica Gallo, which is currently directed by Victoria Mujica Diez Canseco. [1]
Gallo's acquisition of more than seven thousand artifacts was inspired by an admiration for Peruvian history. He desired to leave a legacy to this country as homage to the Peruvian pre-Columbian cultures in its various manifestations, containing materials such as precious metals like gold, silver and some of platinum, multiple textiles, ceramics, mummies and other valuable objects.
The collection demonstrates what the Spanish found when they came to South America, resulting in fighting between the ancient Peruvians and the Spanish. The collection is valued at over $10 million. The works were found mostly in the Republican era and acquired at the time by They demonstrated advances in metallurgy, customs, beliefs and life.
Gold and silver are ubiquitous in the complex religious and magical symbolism of Peruvian cultures. For pre-Inca civilizations, these metals represented the sun-moon, day-night, male-female duality. In the Inca Empire, the sun god or Inti represented sovereignty on the divine plane and Mama Killa ("mother moon"), the moon goddess, was Inti's wife, mother of the sky. The Temple of the Sun is an order of priestesses.
The forms that these metals acquired indicated the seniority and power of those who used them and their importance for burials. The ancient Peruvians developed techniques unknown to Europeans at the time, such as adding color to other metal surfaces with gold or silver plating.
Four pre-Incan cultures stood out at the highest level of goldsmithy. They are Vicus, Moche, Sican and Chimu that developed on the northern coast of Peru. The Inca Empire was richer in possession of metal objects in gold and silver and the quality and finesse of its finished than its predecessors.
Victoria Mujica, referring to historical documents found in the Archive of the Indies, cites one that says:
In the magnificent temple of Koricancha (Cusco) was a solid gold disc the size of a wagon wheel representing the sun god, golden idols-size human figure with gold and silver llamas also life-size and many of the same metal plates covering the walls of the temple.
Gallo also collected weapons from around the world. The oldest dated from the 13th century.
Twenty thousand weapons of all times and countries are exhibited in the museum. This collection is one of the world's foremost, for its quantity, quality, superb condition and the famous original holders.
The collection also includes military uniforms, saddles, armor, spurs and other objects that define the early through time and characters of history for more than three thousand and three hundred years.
In the early 2000s, accusations arose that a vast majority of gold pieces in the museum were false. [2] The BBC reported that "The Consumer Defense Institute has examined 4,257 artifacts from the Peruvian Museum of Gold and concluded they were 'false without a shadow of a doubt'. [3]
The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu by its subjects, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political, and military center of the empire was in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization rose from the Peruvian highlands sometime in the early 13th century. The Spanish began the conquest of the Inca Empire in 1532 and by 1572, the last Inca state was fully conquered.
Cusco or Cuzco is a city in southeastern Peru near the Urubamba Valley of the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cusco Region and of the Cusco Province. The city is the seventh most populous in Peru; in 2017, it had a population of 428,450. Its elevation is around 3,400 m (11,200 ft).
Pachacámac is an archaeological site 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Lima, Peru in the Valley of the Lurín River. The site was first settled around A.D. 200 and was named after the "Earth Maker" creator god Pacha Kamaq. The site flourished for about 1,300 years until the Spanish invaded. Pachacamac covers about 600 hectares of land.
The Inca religion was a group of beliefs and rites that were related to a mythological system evolving from pre-Inca times to Inca Empire. Faith in the Tawantinsuyu was manifested in every aspect of his life, work, festivities, ceremonies, etc. They were polytheists and there were local, regional and pan-regional divinities.
Chimor was the political grouping of the Chimú culture. The culture arose about 900 CE, succeeding the Moche culture, and was later conquered by the Inca emperor Topa Inca Yupanqui around 1470, fifty years before the arrival of the Spanish in the region. Chimor was the largest kingdom in the Late Intermediate Period, encompassing 1,000 kilometres (620 mi) of coastline.
The Huaca del Sol is an adobe brick pyramid built by the Moche civilization on the northern coast of what is now Peru. The pyramid is one of several ruins found near the volcanic peak of Cerro Blanco, in the coastal desert near Trujillo at the Moche Valley. The other major ruin at the site is the nearby Huaca de la Luna, a better-preserved but smaller temple.
The Ica stones are a collection of andesite stones from the Ica Province in Peru, known for their engraved motifs. Largely regarded to be modern hoaxes, the stones in some cases utilize art styles from various pre-Columbian Peruvian civilizations and often depict anachronistic scenes or objects, including dinosaurs and advanced technology.
Pre-Columbian art refers to the visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas from at least 13,000 BCE to the European conquests starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The Pre-Columbian era continued for a time after these in many places, or had a transitional phase afterwards. Many types of perishable artifacts that were once very common, such as woven textiles, typically have not been preserved, but Precolumbian monumental sculpture, metalwork in gold, pottery, and painting on ceramics, walls, and rocks have survived more frequently.
The Inca society was the society of the Inca civilization in Peru. The Inca Empire, which lasted from 1438 to 1533 A.D., represented the height of this civilization. The Inca state was known as the Kingdom of Cusco before 1438. Over the course of the empire, the rulers used conquest and peaceful assimilation to incorporate a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andes mountain ranges. The empire proved relatively short-lived however: by 1533, Atahualpa, the last Sapa Inca (emperor) of the Inca Empire, was killed on the orders of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, marking the beginning of Spanish rule. The last Inca stronghold, the Neo-Inca State in Vilcabamba, was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.
Coricancha, Koricancha, Qoricancha or Qorikancha was the most important temple in the Inca Empire. It is located in Cusco, Peru, which was the capital of the empire.
The Sican culture is the name that archaeologist Izumi Shimada gave to the culture that inhabited what is now the north coast of Peru between about 750 and 1375 CE. According to Shimada, Sican means "temple of the Moon". The Sican culture is also referred to as Lambayeque culture, after the name of the region in Peru. It succeeded the Moche culture. There is still controversy among archeologists and anthropologists over whether the two are separate cultures. The Sican culture is divided into three major periods based on cultural changes as evidenced in archeological artifacts.
Inti is the ancient Inca sun god. He is revered as the national patron of the Inca state. Although most consider Inti the sun god, he is more appropriately viewed as a cluster of solar aspects, since the Inca divided his identity according to the stages of the sun. Worshiped as a patron deity of the Inca Empire, Pachacuti is often linked to the origin and expansion of the Inca Sun Cult. The most common belief was that Inti was born of Viracocha, who had many titles, chief among them being the God of Creation.
Tumi, is a generic term encompassing the many kinds of sharp tools utilized in pre- and post-colonial eras of the Central Andes region, Tumis were employed for a diverse set of purposes such as kitchen knives, agricultural tools, warrior or hunting secondary weapons, sacrificial knives, barber implements, pendants, or medical tools. In addition, the tumi form, in metal, was used as a type of coin. Pre-columbian Tumis were usually made of metal or stone.
The Larco Museum is a privately owned museum of pre-Columbian art, located in the Pueblo Libre District of Lima, Peru. The museum is housed in an 18th-century vice-royal building. It showcases chronological galleries that provide a thorough overview of 5,000 years of Peruvian pre-Columbian history. It is well known for its gallery of pre-Columbian erotic pottery.
The Pre-Columbian Art Museum is an art museum in Cusco, Peru, dedicated to the display of archaeological artifacts and examples of pre-Columbian artworks drawn from all regions of pre-Columbian Peru. The museum is situated on Plazoleta de las Nazarenas in Cusco's San Blas district, and has on permanent display exhibitions of some 450 individual representative artifacts that are drawn from the wider collection of its parent museum, the Larco Museum in the Peruvian capital Lima.
Pre-Columbian Ecuador included numerous indigenous cultures, who thrived for thousands of years before the ascent of the Incan Empire. Las Vegas culture of coastal Ecuador, flourishing between 8000 and 4600 BC, is one of the oldest cultures in the Americas. The subsequent Valdivia culture in the Pacific coast region is another well-known early Ecuadorian culture. Ancient Valdivian artifacts from as early as 3500 BC have been found along the coast north of the Guayas Province in the modern city of Santa Elena.
Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America is the extraction, purification and alloying of metals and metal crafting by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century. Indigenous Americans had been using native metals from ancient times, with recent finds of gold artifacts in the Andean region dated to 2155–1936 BCE, and North American copper finds being dated to approximately 5000 BCE. The metal would have been found in nature without the need for smelting, and shaped into the desired form using hot and cold hammering without chemical alteration or alloying. To date "no one has found evidence that points to the use of melting, smelting and casting in prehistoric eastern North America."
Inca mythology is the universe of legends and collective memory of the Inca civilization, which took place in the current territories of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, incorporating in the first instance, systematically, the territories of the central highlands of Peru to the north.
The Peru–Yale University dispute was a century-long conflict between the government of Peru and Yale University about the rightful ownership of Inca human remains and artifacts from Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca site high in the Peruvian Andes active c. 1420–1532. In the several years following his re-discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911, Yale explorer Hiram Bingham III removed thousands of objects – including pottery, stone tools, and human bones – from the archaeological site and brought them to New Haven, Connecticut. The circumstances of these transfers were disputed, with some, including Bingham, claiming that Yale agreed to borrow the artifacts for a period of 18 months to conduct studies. Peru attempted to regain the collection in the 1920s, but Yale resisted. Tensions rose between 2006 and 2010 with a lawsuit, activism by Peruvians and Yale alumni, and a plea to then–U.S. President Barack Obama by then–Peruvian President Alan Garcia. On November 19, 2010, Peru and Yale reached an agreement that the remains and artifacts would be returned. In early 2011, Yale and University of Cusco (UNSAAC) signed a further agreement that the two institutions would partner to create a museum and research center in Cusco. The museum, the Museo Machu Picchu, was opened to the public in November 2011. The collection is regarded by experts to be among the most valuable collections of Inca artifacts.
Mama Quilla, in Inca mythology and religion, was the third power and goddess of the moon. She was the older sister and wife of Inti, daughter of Viracocha and mother of Manco Cápac and Mama Uqllu (Mama Ocllo), mythical founders of the Inca empire and culture. She was the goddess of marriage and the menstrual cycle, and considered a defender of women. She was also important for the Inca calendar.