buildings. The complex contained a garden where the plants, birds, insects and even a fountain
were all fashioned from pure gold in intricate detail. The main temple had a courtyard in which
there stood a field of maize of which every stalk was fashioned from silver and the ears of corn
from pure gold. The yard contained an amazing 180,000 square feet of golden and silver corn!
Every year, gold was brought by his subjects and paid in tribute to the king but none was
ever allowed to leave Cuzco, under pain of death. There in Cuzco it was held in storage for the
gods to whom the people believed it actually belonged and who would one day return to claim it.
Many of the buildings in Cuzco were also draped with decorated gold sheeting fashioned into
elaborate plaques and fixed to the walls by silver nails. The nails that were removed from one
Temple alone in Cuzco, weighed in excess of 13,000 ounces of silver.
During the subsequent looting of the civilization by the Spanish, in what can only be described
as one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in our history, over a period of about 10 years
upwards of 11,000,000 ounces of golden artifacts were melted down and sent to Spain as gold
bullion. Between 1519 and 1749 some 300,000,000 ounces of gold were pillaged and removed
from the country.
Yet despite all of this vast wealth of precious metal the civilizations of South America used no
currency and remained completely unaware of the concept of money. And though master goldsmiths,
they also possessed no knowledge of metal tools.
So, without metal tools, how did they produce megalithic structures? How were they able to
obtain such vast quantities of gold if they were unable to mine it? And why have there been found
the traces of ancient mines in the region? If the were not mined by the Indians then by whom
were they made? What were the enigmatic sites of Cuzco and Tiahuanaco on the shores of Lake
Titicaca used with their myriad of underground tunnel systems used for? Why were they built in
such an inaccessible region?
The answers to these questions still puzzle many scholars and the actual recorded accounts that
have survived are extremely limited. South American civilization was totally decimated within ten
years of the Spanish landing, except for possibly one or two strongholds the Spanish did not
manage to find and much of the Mayan history and culture was recorded on the elaborate gold
plaques and Stele that were stolen and removed by the Spanish who melted most of what they
found into ingots for shipment back to Spain.
Many papyrus scrolls had also once existed but the Religious culture of the South American
Indians was so different and so bizarre with its strange, sometimes even Christian beliefs and
conflicted with the Roman Catholic Church in so many ways that the very existence of the texts
and even the Mayan language itself was considered to be an abomination and the first Archbishop
of Mexico is claimed to have burned tens of thousands of such scrolls in the 1500’s.
To the Catholic Spanish, the beliefs of the Natives appeared as some horrible travesty of
Christianity because the Mayan religious system did actually contain many elements that can be
found in Christianity but by the time of the Aztec rule, many new rites involving other much
more barbarous practices had also been introduced and the two apposing belief systems had
become intertwined. The Spanish were also convinced that the Megalithic structures of the
civilization had undoubtedly been built by demons and there were some priests who even
believed the Devil himself had created the entire culture and religious system in a heinous
mockery of Christianity that assured the pagan souls of the Natives would be more effectively
damned to an eternity in hell. Due to this attitude, apart from a few Temple inscriptions, today
only four Mayan books remain. These were saved and smuggled away by an honest priest who
could see the historical significance of the culture and the evil that had been wrought on the
Natives by his people in the name of his church.
These four books are called: the Dresden Codex, The Paris Codex, the Madrid Codex and the
Grolier Codex.
So how was it, that Cortez and his men were able to destroy the Mayan Empire so completely
and so effectively? It happened so quickly that it would almost seem that they had ‘God on their