Where do mummies come from? Most of us would answer ‘Egypt’ without missing a beat. But in 1823, George IV, king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover, learned that they also came from Peru. The king’s new knowledge was the result of a gift that Peru’s liberator, the South American revolutionary José de San Martín, had sent him as proof of Peru’s ancient glory and renewed sovereignty. San Martín hoped that the king’s gifted Inca mummy would end up in the British Museum (Figure 1).

The Inca did not look like any mummy in the British Museum in Bloomsbury, nor any then found in the more accessible Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where supposed pharaohs were unwrapped outstretched before a paying, murmuring public. By contrast, mummies from South America were preserved in a seated position. This made them seem positively lifelike, as Basil Hall, the British naval captain who escorted this particular ancient Peruvian across the Atlantic, noted. ‘My friend the Inca’, as Hall later remembered him, travelled with his ‘knees almost touching his chin, the elbows pressed to the sides, and the hands clasping his cheek-bones.’ To Hall, it was somewhat touching. In the Inca’s ‘countenance’, Hall recalled, ‘there was an expression of agony very distinctly marked’.¹ But the Crown seems to have thought otherwise. Rather than going to the British Museum, King George’s Inca counterpart went to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, where he was displayed not as a product of embalming but as a specimen of natural preservation, whose desiccation owed to dry Peruvian air and ‘the peculiar character of the soil’. The ‘painful-looking figure raised upon a pedestal’, as one London guidebook from the 1840s put it, was also demoted from royal Inca status. Instead, the mummy was presented as merely the ‘body’ of a lesser lord who had sacrificed himself before Peru’s conquest. King George’s Inca mummy had become neither Inca nor mummy, but a ‘dreadful instance of the lengths to which man’s wild imagination will carry him’.²

This view, however, was a dreadful mistake. Hiding within King George’s Inca mummy and his demotion by British experts to a ghastly specimen of naturalist curiosity was a neglected history of Andean and Hispanic science. Andeans had once applied their knowledge of local climates and the human body to project their ancestors into the future. Spaniards and their Peruvian descendants contested that lifelike and divining state by focusing on its science, claiming that Andean forefathers were not holy beings but skilfully embalmed ancestors. The removal of King George’s gifted Inca to the Hunterian not only threatened to bury that chain of Andean-Hispanic knowledge, but also extended Hispanic science’s earlier efforts to demote the Andean dead from sacred beings to mere specimens.

Did the Incas and other precolonial South American peoples and civilisations mummify their dead? The arid west coast of South America is in fact home to the world’s oldest mummy culture. The Chinchorro, of what is today northern Chile, began preserving their deceased family members upwards of eight thousand years ago, some two to three thousand years before the Egyptians. The Chinchorro did so for distinct spiritual and political reasons, as would every other South American culture that practised mummification over the millennia. Seated mummies were wrapped and plated along the Pacific coast like seeds to be watered, to summon fertility for their communities further inland. In the Andes, communities preserved their more select dead in open tombs so that they could consult and interact with them regularly, ‘feed’ them and carry and display them in processions (Figure 2).

The Incas made the practice an apex of empire – what ethnohistorian Isabel Yaya McKenzie has called an ‘embodied technology of power’.³ In the late 15th century, the Incas appear to have developed a set of more elaborate mummification rituals, removing the intestines and heart of the deceased Inca emperor and his consort, ‘seasoning him without breaking a single bone’, and then ‘[curing] him in the sun and the air’.⁴ Once dried, the ancestor was dressed and borne on litters adorned with feathers and gold, all of which rendered them yllapa, sacred and shining.

As yllapa, the Inca dead remained animate and socially alive. A year after their death, they were returned to the great plaza in the Inca capital at Cusco for a social reintroduction, or purucaya, in which they re-occupied their palace with the housewares, jewellery and clothing that sustained their immediate royal family line, or panaqa. Panaqa members interpreted their yllapa’s will and consulted them on a regular basis regarding royal marriage alliances. In the name of both living and dead, the mummies’ attendants sang their ancestors’ illustrious histories while planning their houses’ futures.

This practice of propagating living Inca ancestry was a spur for empire-building. Inca rulers encouraged their subjects to venerate them as the solar ancestors of humanity, justifying their rule. And because each new living Inca emperor could only inherit the title of Sapa Inca, or supreme Inca, from his father, potential heirs were spurred on to make conquests of their own. To support their own future mummy cult with new territories and tributes, Inca heirs marched south from Cusco to what is today northern Chile and Argentina and north to what is today southern Colombia. These campaigns were successful, in part, because they were preceded by a shared Andean culture of ancestor mummification. Shared Andean understandings that ancestry inhered in mummies or other sacred forms meant that the Incas could ‘honour’ their subjects by carrying their embalmed or living dead to Cusco. Archaeologist George Lau has suggested that this practice of ‘collecting’ the honoured dead was ‘not unlike that of many colonial projects in world history which filled the treasuries, museums and zoos of expanding nations’.⁵

We know as much as we do about Inca and Andean technologies of the living dead because of how closely Hispanic chroniclers, friars and doctors studied them in the 16th century. In 1533, the first Spaniards to arrive at Cusco entered the palace of the recently deceased Inca emperor Huayna Capac and his coya, or empress. They proceeded to strip their bodies of their gold, although not before removing their shoes, as the royal couple’s gold-masked attendant demanded. By 1534, other Europeans could read about this encounter through the words of one of Pizarro’s secretaries, who described the Inca couple using a very specific term: ‘two Indians in the manner of embalsamados’, that is, ‘embalmed ones’.⁶

This account was not just a description. It was anatomical and botanical intelligence, which reduced Andean practices of ancestor worship to what interested early modern European elites: knowledge of the art and anatomy of preserving and memorialising their own dead. To write that the Incas ‘embalmed’ their dead was to evoke the ancient Egyptians, whom Europeans sought to emulate using expensive Near Eastern materia medica: aromatic spices, myrrhs, aloes, resins, bitumens and, of course, liquor from the balsam tree, whose Egyptian supply is believed to have dried up in the early 16th century. If the Incas embalmed their dead, then they might have their own balsam. The Spanish crown seemingly confirmed this in 1536, when it received a sample of ‘balsam of Peru’, still stocked in medicine cabinets today.

The Inca yllapas had shorter shelf lives than the Peruvian balsam. In 1559, after a quarter century in which the Incas engaged creatively with early modern Christianity while continuing to venerate their living dead, crown official Juan Polo de Ondegardo rounded up the surviving embalsamados around Cusco and packed them off to the viceroy in the new coastal capital founded by Pizarro at Lima. Church and state officials worried that the ruling Inca dead were being venerated as false saints. But the confiscation likely also resonated for Andean subjects. Like the Incas who came before them, the Hispanic crown asserted their empire by taking hostage the elite dead of its subjects, including the emperor Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui; his eldest son, Amaru Topa Inca; Mama Runtucaua, the emperor Viracocha’s wife; Mama Ocllo, Huayna Capac’s mother; and Huayna Capac himself, who was so well ‘cured’ that he ‘appeared to be alive. His eyes were made of a thin golden cloth; his hair grey, and he was completely preserved, as if he had died the same day’ (Figure 3).⁷

This hostage-taking yielded its own fraught knowledge. These Inca embalsamados were displayed in Lima’s Hospital of San Andrés. The Jesuit scholar José de Acosta examined them and theorised the means of their incredible preservation. He wrote that Pachacuti was ‘so well preserved and adorned with a certain betún’ – a resin or bitumen with powerful Egyptian associations – ‘that he seemed alive’. It is possible that Acosta may have done more than merely observe and speculate, however. Years later, another Jesuit erudite observed that the faces of the Andean dead were so well preserved ‘because under the skin there was a calabash rind in each cheek, over which, as the flesh dried, the skin stayed tight, with a nice gloss’. At some point, the Jesuits probably started dissecting the ancestors of their Andean subjects.

That process of anatomical investigation may have contributed to the vanishing not just of the yllapa but of countless other mummified ancestors as well. By the early 17th century, some friars were confiscating the venerated dead of more rural Andean communities and burning them, accusing their descendants of idolatry. Our last recorded glimpse of the preserved Incas places them in a corral at the Lima hospital in the mid 17th century, after which – it is presumed – they fell apart and were buried somewhere nearby.

By that point, however, their preservation on paper had been guaranteed by a slow-moving scholarly conversation over whether they were in fact ‘mummies’ – a category of embalmed dead originally associated only with Egypt and the Near East, whose flesh Europeans consumed as medicine. In the mid 16th century, French writers entertained but then rejected the possibility that such medicalised mummies could also come from Peru: mummies came only from Egypt. But in the early 17th century, two important Andean chronicles or histories, one world famous and the other unpublished and largely unknown before the early 20th century, provided suggestive evidence of the extent and meaning of Inca mummification practices. The Jesuit-trained Andean chronicler and scribe Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote and illustrated a 1,180-page Letter to the King that described in some detail the social lives of the embalsamados and the differences in how Andean ancestors were preserved (Figures 2 and 3). Far more widely read and translated was the Comentarios reales de los Incas of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, whose father was a Hispanic conquistador and whose mother was a niece of the Sapa Inca Huayna Capac. Readers across Europe marvelled at Inca Garcilaso’s memory of encountering the yllapa body of his great-uncle and his fellow embalsamado dead in 1559, in the home of the viceregal official Polo de Ondegardo, who had collected them. Inca Garcilaso lamented not having asked his family for the exact means of their preservation. ‘They would not have denied me, as they have denied the Spaniards.’⁸

Translators burnished Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s memory of his ancestors’ embalmed bodies still further. In the first full English edition of The Royal Commentaries of Peru in Two Parts (1688), translator Sir Paul Rycaut expanded on Inca Garcilaso’s speculations as to the manner of embalming using ‘bituminous matter’ with a bold claim. For Rycaut, ‘these Bodies were more entire than the Mummies, wanting neither Hair on the Head, nor Eye-brows, and even the very Eye-lashes were visible.’⁹ Rycaut was not saying the Inca dead were mummies like the Egyptians: they were, in terms of the skill employed in embalming, even more impressive.

Some readers were suspicious, but in the 18th century, a French naturalist and anatomist named Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton thought that the accounts of Acosta and Inca Garcilaso of the Peruvian dead were credible enough, and in a key essay of the Enlightenment allowed that Incas made mummies like the Egyptians. In 1792, during the dedication of Lima’s first anatomical theatre, the enlightened Peruvian anatomist and statistician José Hipólito Unanue noted that the Incas were anatomists par excellence. ‘If the progress that the ancient Peruvians made in that science had been measured by the preparation and conservation of cadavers, which requires a certain skill and intelligence, without a doubt they would dispute the precedence given to the Egyptians.’ Likening them to the famed Dutch embalmer Frederik Ruysch, Unanue opined that ‘the Peruvians perpetuated the life of their mummies, while the Egyptians only prolonged the death of their own’.¹⁰

It was in the name of these lost Inca or ancient Peruvian mummies that General José San Martín sent to King George IV his own specimen – a potent symbol of Peruvian sovereignty and enlightenment, bound to the patriot cause of independence from Spain. That the ‘Inca mummy’ was the body of another precolonial Andean unfortunate, disinterred to reincarnate the lost yllapa, does not lessen the powerful message, even if the demotion to the Hunterian Museum, to status of an anonymous, naturally preserved corpse, suggests that much was lost in translation. If anything, these transformations set the ironies of King George’s Inca in starker relief. Just as Hispanic friars and royal officials tried to overwrite the radically animate potential of Inca ancestor-making by calling it embalming – a practice whose products and science Europe might claim – England’s surgeons overwrote the mummy’s embodied history of Andean and Hispanic science by labelling him a ‘natural’ specimen of Peru’s climate and its ancient ‘race’.

This demotion of King George IV’s embalmed Inca was only a British blip on the screen in what became the global career of Peruvian mummies. In the decades following, more and more ‘ancient Peruvian’ and ‘Inca’ mummies were collected and displayed not only in Great Britain but in France, Prussia, Portugal and the United States. Today, the idea that the Incas and other Andeans made mummies is accepted as a matter of course by scientists, even if they are still seen as the junior partners to their more storied siblings the Egyptians.

Yet there was something of the uncanny in the Peruvian mummies that the Egyptians lacked and that the British naval captain Basil Hall had noted while escorting King George’s Inca across the Atlantic. Through the 1840s, Peruvian mummies were carted about the English and Scottish countryside as travelling natural history spectacles; their life-like quality allowed them to settle alongside Egyptians in new tombs – the museums and the collections of antiquarian societies – throughout Europe and the United States. After an encounter in Paris with a Peruvian mummy like that of King George, artist Paul Gauguin hid them in his paintings as signs of fertility and death. It has even been suggested that Edvard Munch took from a Peruvian mummy in France the pose of existential horror that made his famous painting The Scream, now hanging in sombre Oslo, so haunting.¹¹

FURTHER READING

Barrera Osorio, A. (2006) Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

Cañizares-Esguerra, J. (2006) Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations in the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).

Garcilaso de la Vega, I. (1989) Royal Commentaries of the Incas, parts 1 and 2, translated by H.V. Livermore (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press).

Heaney, C. Empires of the Dead. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Heaney, C. (2018) ‘How to make an Inca mummy: Andean embalming, Peruvian science, and the collection of empire’, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, 109 (1): 1–27.

Lau, G.F. (2013) Ancient Alterity in the Andes: A Recognition of Others (London/New York, NY: Routledge).

Pringle, H. (2001) The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead (New York, NY: Hyperion).

Ramos, G. (2010) Death and Conversion in the Andes: Lima and Cuzco, 1532–1670 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).

Salomon, F. (1995) ‘“The beautiful grandparents”: Andean ancestor shrines and mortuary ritual as seen through colonial records’, in Tombs for the Living: Andean Mortuary Practices, edited by T.D. Dillehay, 315–53 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection).

Silverblatt, I. (1988) ‘Imperial dilemmas, the politics of kinship, and Inca reconstructions of history’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30 (1): 83–102.

Thurner, M. (2011) History’s Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida).

Yaya McKenzie, I. (2015) ‘Sovereign bodies: ancestor cult and state legitimacy among the Incas’, History and Anthropology, 26 (5): 639–60.

¹ Basil Hall, Extracts from a journal, written on the coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the years 1820, 1821, 1822 [1823] (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co. Edinburgh/ London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1825), vol. 2, 71; Basil Hall to James Paroissien, 22 December 1823, and James Paroissien to Sir William Knighton, n.d., Records of James Paroissien and the Beuzeville Family (RJP), D/DOb C1/29, Essex Record Office, UK.

² Charles Knight, ed., London (London: Charles Knight, 1841–4), vol. 6, 207.

³ I. Yaya McKenzie, ‘Sovereign bodies: ancestor cult and state legitimacy among the Incas’, History and Anthropology, 26, no. 5 (2015), 641.

⁴ F. Hernández Astete and R. Cerrón-Palomino, eds., Juan de Betanzos y el Tahuantinsuyo: nueva edición de la suma y narración de los Incas [1550s] (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontifica Universidad Católica del Perú, 2015), f. 97v.

⁵ G.F. Lau, Ancient Alterity in the Andes: A Recognition of Others (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 87.

⁶ Anonymous, ‘La conquista del Perú, llamada la Nueva Castilla (Sevilla, 1534)’, in A.M. Salas, M.A. Guérin and J.L. Moure, eds., Crónicas iniciales de la conquista del Perú (Buenos Aires: Editorial Plus Ultra, 1987), 110.

⁷ B. Cobo, ‘Historia del Nuevo Mundo’, in Obras del P. Bernabé Cobo de la Compañia de Jesus, F. Mateos, ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1956), vol. 2, 82.

⁸ I. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas (Lisbon, 1609), vol. 1, 127.

⁹ I. Garcilaso de la Vega, The Royal Commentaries of Peru in Two Parts, P. Rycaut, trans. (London: Miles Fletcher, 1688), vol. 1, 182, 193.

¹⁰ J.H. Unanue, ‘Decadencia y restauracion del Peru: oracion inaugural, que para la estrena y abertura del anfiteatro anatómico, dixo en el Real Universidad de San Marcos el día 21 de Noviembre de 1792’, Mercurio Peruano (Lima, 1793), 117.

¹¹ R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 111.