The Peruvians (Indian Races) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: "There arises before the prophetic eye a great picture in which the lofty roads of Peru, the sumptuous temples, palaces and gardens are . . . to be numbered with Babylon, Nineveh and the things that have been." ?SIR Arthur Helps, In " Spanish Conquest Of America." THE PERUVIANS CHAPTER I Introduction Confusion of Names.?Great confusion exists in regard to the names of the races and tribes occupying the western world at the time of its discovery, conquest and colonization by Europeans. It was due to an error that the native races of America came to be called Indians in the first place, and after the error was discovered it was thought unnecessary to devise another name by which to designate the red race. This but illustrates the first difficulty that confronts us in an attempt to write accurately and intelligibly, albeit briefly and concisely, of the people who are the subject of this book. We have called them in the title to the book, "The Peruvians," which is our English form of the Spanish "Peru- anos." The latter means the natives of Peru. Looking at a modern map of South America, however, we may observe that the country, now called Peru, is bounded on the south by Chile, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the east by Brazil, and on the north by Ecuador, and has an area of about 450,000 square miles. The people of whom we are writing occupied in the early years of the Sixteenth Century a country which knew no such boundaries. It was not until the early part of the Nineteenth Century that the states of Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile were definitively partitioned off from a country which has retained the name of Peru. The Piruas.?Previous to the Eleventh Century of the Christian era, there existed a people in the highlands of the Andes, in the vicinity of what ...