A: Aalu to Aztlan 61
residency at their distant homeland impossible. Their leader was Manco Capac
and his wife, Mama Ocllo. They established the “Flowering Age,” when the
“Master Craftsmen” built Tiahuanaco about 3,500 years ago. Indeed, radio-
carbon testing at the ceremonial center yielded an early construction date of
+/-1600B.C. (Childress, 139). Their sinful homeland was destroyed in a flood sent
as punishment from the gods, who spared Manco Capac and his large, virtuous
family. The Ayar-chaki were refugees from geologic violence that beset much
of the world with the return of a killer comet between 1600 and 1500 B.C., the
same celestial phenomenon that forced the earlier Ayar-manco-topa and the
later Ayar-aucca to flee their seismically unstable oceanic homelands for higher
ground.Ayar-manco-topa
Bands of men and women who arrived along the northern coasts of Peru,
where they built the earliest cities, raised the first pyramids and other monumen-
tal structures, understood applied mathematics, cured illnesses with medicines
and surgery, and instituted all the cultural features for which Andean civilization
came to be known. In the Chimu version, they were led by King Naymlap, who
landed with his followers in “a fleet of big canoes.” The Ayar-manco-topa corre-
spond to the Salavarry Period in Andean archaeology, when the first South
American pyramidal platforms with rectangular courts appeared in Peru. The
Ayar-manco-topa were probably Lemurian culture-bearers fleeing the worldwide
geologic upheavals that particularly afflicted, but did not yet destroy, their Pacific
Ocean homeland at the close of the fourth millennium B.C.
(See Lemuria)Azaes
The ninth king of Atlantis listed in Plato’s Kritias. On the Atlantic shores of
Middle America, he was known as Itzamna, leader of the ancestral Mesoamericans’
“Greater Arrival,” that first wave of Atlantean culture-bearers from across the
Sunrise Sea, recorded by the Mayas. Portrayed as a fair-skinned, bearded figure
among the beardless natives, his title was “The First One.” He holds up the sky in
the temple art of Yucatan’s foremost Maya ceremonial center, Chichen Itza, which
was named after him and his descendants, the Itzas. Chichen Itza is particularly
noted for its Atlantean statuary and sculpted relief.
Azaes-Itzamna was probably a real colonizer from Atlantis, who established
his allied kingdom, which eventually took his name. In Yucatan, Azaes means “the
Parched or Thirsty One,” appropriate to the arid conditions of Middle America,
where sufficient drinking water was always a question of paramount importance
and the Atlantean Tlaloc was a rain-god of highest significance. Another title for
Itzamna was “Lizard,” the Mayas’ symbol for a bringer or harbinger of rain and,
hence, abundance.