Posted on 02/11/2012 11:44:55 AM PST by blam
The Legenday White-Skinned Cloud People Of Peru
Village of the Cloud People
Archeologists have discovered a 12-acre lost city deep within the Amazon rain forest that may shed light on a long-lost tribe of white-skinned, blonde-haired people known as the Cloud People.
The Cloud People, also known in legend as the white warriors of the clouds established expansive kingdom located in the northern regions of the Andes in present-day Peru during the ninth century. Bordered by the Maranon and Utcubamba rivers, in the zone of Bagua, their civilzation extended up to the basin of the Abiseo river, and to the very edges of Perus northern Amazon jungle. The Cloud People were defeated by the Incas but later conquered them by aligning with the Spanish Conquistadors. Unfortunately, diseases brought to the New World by their allies eventually wiped the Cloud People out.
Past archeological discoveries were so heavily looted that little was left to learn about the Cloud People, who are referred to as Chachapoyas in Inca legends. Other pre-hispanic groups referred to the Cloud People as White Gods due to their height, blonde hair and blue eyes.
The spanish conqueror Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote they wore woolen clothing and wollen turbans, and described them as the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple. He also noted the Cloud People were significantly taller than the Spaniards, indicating they were Nordic and not Mediteranian. Another Spanish conqueror, Orellana, wrote similar descriptions. Verification of the Cloud Peoples racial makeup came two years ago, when archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair.
According to Inca legend, the Chachapoyas remembered that their ancestors came from the East. The Amazon river is on the East and far east is the Atlantic Ocean. Archeologists have discovered paintings and drawings of large ships on the buildings of the Chachapoyas, indicating that they possibly traveled from Europe to South America by sea, passing through the Amazon river flows until they reached a more tolerable climate, away from the unbearable tropical heat of the Amazon jungle.
The Cloud People are probably best known for the Kuellap fortress on the top of a mountain in Utcubamba, which can only be compared in scale to the Incas Machu Picchu retreat, built hundreds of years later.
The newly-discovered fortress is tucked away in one of the most far-flung areas of the Amazon. Sitting at the edge of a chasm which may have been used as a lookout post, it was extremely isolated and very well-preserved.
The main encampment is made up of circular stone houses overgrown by jungle over 12 acres, according to archaeologist Benedict Goicochea Perez.
Rock paintings cover some of the fortifications and next to the dwellings are platforms believed to have been used to grind seeds and plants for food and medicine.
A previous posting on the subject:
Kuelap - The Machu Picchu Of Northern Peru (Chachapoyas - White, blonde haired people)
Legenday? Sequel to I Am Legend?
I invite each of you to speculate as to who are these people. I'll start:
* King Solomon's exiled miners. (They were forgotten there when ancient Israel fell into turmoil)
I would guess they were lost Vikings that made it a little too far south, and never bothered returning.
Have DNA analysis of their origins been able to be done?
LOL. It was this earlier article posted By SunkenCiv that inspired me to post this article.
In the 1500’s, the conquistador Pizarro described the Incan rulers as “corn blond” and “whiter than the people of spain”. Interesting indeed!
So...can Norway demand restitution from Mexico for the slaughter of her people?
Yep.
Verification of the Cloud Peoples racial makeup came two years ago, when archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair.
Heck no, are you crazy?
They were white people.
Oops
They were in Peru by the way.
I'm thinking this is "O rel lana" which clearly means (in Welsh or Breton) "From Lana rel" ~ odds are good he was as tall and blue eyed as any other Northern European.
Recall from your French history that much of Brittany was conquered by the Normans back in Viking times.
Of course the Bretons were already pretty much more like the Northern Europeans (Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, etc.) than Souvrners or North Africans. They used to go down to Spain during the Reconquista and vie for fame and fortune.
I'd be careful with the translations that give you a Heavy Mounted Knight as being anything other than a blue eyed blond (or redhead with green eyes) and shorter than an Indian except for a Mohican or Mohawk back in the 1500s.
Not all Spaniards in that time looked all that Spanish!
That "Lana Rel" part, would be "wool kingdom", "sheep country" ~ maybe even something in Basque, but I don't have a basque translator handy.
Another translation: They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in the Indies, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas' wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.
That puts a different complexion on the Chachapoyas. For Indians they were light-skinned, but they weren't necessarily so by European standards.
lost tribes of israel?
Oh, and that Spanish was filled with all sorts of unassimilated words ~ from French, Breton, English, Arabic, Berber, Basque ~ and Italian. That was one of the reasons for the establishment of the SpanishAademy ~ to make the language standardized, and to regularize Spanish spelling conventions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chachapoyas_culture#Origin_of_the_Chachapoyas
Contrary to erroneous assertions, no early Spanish accounts describe the Chachapoyas as “blond haired” or “blue eyed”. The oft-quoted Cieza de Leon merely records that they were the “whitest” in coloration he had seen. There is no indication of “racial” connotations in this description - another early Spanish source, Pedro Pizarro, describes all the Indians of Peru as “white”. Hair and eye color are not mentioned. Thus the supposedly “enduring mystery for scholars of the region as to their ultimate origin” is a modern slant based on a misunderstanding of the sources, and seems largely driven by a desire to find a trans-Atlantic origin for the Chachapoyas.
All that seems to be indicated by Cieza de Leon is that the Chachapoyas were among the lightest in skin color, of the Andean natives the Spanish contacted. Inge Schjellerup’s book Incas and Spaniards in the Conquest of the Chachapoyas (1997) refers to anthropological examinations of the physical remains of Chachapoyans. There is no reason from these to conclude that the Chachapoyas had any exotic origins different from other ancient Peruvians. For instance, the teeth show an almost complete absence of Carabelli’s cusp on the upper molars, while shovel-shaped upper incisors are universally present - in both of these the Chachapoyas resemble other Amerindians, and differ from “white” Europeans.
When did they start storing people on the cloud?
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