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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: CHAPTER III HISTORY Early History.?There is no doubt that, in pre- Spanish times, the portion of Western South America, which is now known as Peru, was far more thickly populated than it is at present. Garcilasso de la Vega and other early writers assign to the country a population of from 8,000,000 to 12,000,000; and even after the conquest of the country by Pizarro and his associates, in the course of which many massacres were perpetrated among the natives, the population was estimated at 8,000,000. During this period there were three distinct civilisations, of which a definite (though only oral) record remains. These concerned two distinct races, the Yuncas of the western lowlands, and the Aymara-Quichua race of the Andes tableland. The name Yunca, in the Quichua language, means merely the hot lowlands, and it was applied in error to this people, whose true name has been lost. Their language, known as Mochica, has been preserved in a grammar compiled by a certain Carrera, a native of the country, and was printed in 1644. It is by means of this grammar that the Yuncas are known to have been a separate race. The capital of the Yunca or Chimu kingdom was Chan Chan, a city of considerable extent, which was captured and destroyed by the tenth Inca, Yupanqui. The city had a north to south length of over 14 miles and abreadth of over 5 miles; and the massive character of its remains is proof of the power and wealth of this people, whose territory extended for nearly 700 miles along the coast, and who were a cultured race when the Incas were only beginning to rise from barbarism. The monuments left by this race prove a high state of civilisation, but of an order different from any other in the southern continent. The name Aymara was also applied in error like ...