Peru, Land of The Incas

ALL THE KING’S GOLD

By Robin Cembalest, Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán - Lambayeque, Perú

After midnight on February 16, 1987, Walter Alva, director of National Bruning Museum, in the northern Peruvian town of Lambayeque, was summoned by the local police. Word has spread that gold had been found in pyramids in nearby Sipán, and looters were feverishly digging through an ancient burial chamber. Alva, his colleagues, and a few officers rushed to the site, managing to scare the looters away. The objects they rescued were from the Moche culture, which dominated Peru’s northern coast for the first 600 years A.D., but were more sophisticated and opulent than any Alva had ever seen.

Fortunately, the looting was confirmed to one chamber. Subsequent excavations yielded one stunning find after another: a copper scepter topped with a complex architectural model; hundreds of ceramic vessels depleting people and animals; an intact oak sarcophagus tied with cooper strips: and most remarkably, a gilded ear ornament, intricately crafted of gold and turquoise, showing a warrior chief holding a shield and a scepter and wearing a crescent-shaped diadem, an articulated golden nose piece, and a collar of gold owl heads.

This tiny, exquisite figure, the team learned, foreshadowed the discovery or the similarly attired remains of the Lord of Sipán, a royal warrior and a priest who died around A.D. 300. He is the only American king whose tomb has ever been unearthed.

Ultimately, the tombs of 13 individuals (many buried with a retinue) were excavated at Sipán. "This discovery revolutionized Moche studies the way the discovery of King Tut changed Egyptian studies", Alva says, "We understood suddenly that the people we'd seen in drawings – and their ceremonies, their rituals – were real".

While highlights from the dig toured North America, Alva and his colleagues built the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán, a fascinating and innovative museum that opened in 2002 in Lambayeque, 485 miles north of Lima, which Alva now directs.

The museum, a dark red pyramid, rises out of the dry, flat streetscape. Visitors climb an exterior stairway and enter the building at the top. Descending through the galleries, they encounter objects in the same sequence as the archeologists did – hammered-gold sheets that cradled the lord’s head and rested on his eyes, nose, mouth and chin: bracelets strung with hundreds of turquoise, shell, and gold beads; a gold-and-silver scepter depieting a warrior and his nude prisoner; gold-and silver backflaps (sheets the Moche suspended from the back of their belts) inlaid with shell and semiprecious stones, depicting a figure with a large, ganged mouth holding a human head by the hair and a tumi, a sacrificial knife. Each object or jewel displays artistry and craftsmanship that astounds and delights at every turn.

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