TAPESTRY FROM THE GRAVES OF ANCON.
[After a cut in Ruge’s Geschichte des Zeitalters der Entdeckungen, p. 429, following the colored plate in The Necropolis of Ancon. Wiener reproduces in black and white many of the Ancon specimens.—Ed.]
[II.] The Quichua Language and Literature.—No real progress can be made in the work of elucidating the ancient history of Peru, and in unravelling the interesting but still unsolved questions relating to the origin and development of Inca civilization, without a knowledge of the native language. The subject has accordingly received the close attention of laborious students from a very early period, and the present essay would be incomplete without appending an enumeration of the Quichua grammars and vocabularies, and of works relating to Inca literature.
Fray Domingo de San Tomas, a Dominican monk, was the first author who composed a grammar and vocabulary of the language of the Incas. He gave it the name of Quichua, probably because he had studied with members of that tribe, who were of pure Inca race, and whose territory lies to the westward of Cuzco. The name has since been generally adopted for the language of the Peruvian empire.[1311]
Diego de Torres Rubio was born in 1547, in a village near Toledo, became a Jesuit at the age of nineteen, and went out to Peru in 1577. He studied the native languages with great diligence, and composed grammars and vocabularies. His grammar and vocabulary of Quichua first appeared at Saville in 1603, and passed through four editions.[1312] A long residence in Chuquisaca enabled him to acquire the Aymara language, and in 1616 he published a short grammar and vocabulary of Aymara. In 1627 he also published a grammar of the Guarani language. Torres Rubio was rector of the college at Potosi for a short time, but his principal labors were connected with missionary work at Chuquisaca. He died in that city at the great age of ninety-one, on the 13th of April, 1638. Juan de Figueredo, whose Chinchaysuyu vocabulary is bound up with later editions of Torres Rubio, was born at Huancavelica in 1648, of Spanish parents, and after a long and useful missionary life he died at Lima in 1724.
The most voluminous grammatical work on the language of the Incas had for its author the Jesuit Diego Gonzales Holguin. This learned missionary was the scion of a distinguished family in Estremadura, and was befriended in his youth by his relation, Don Juan de Obando, President of the Council of the Indies. After graduating at Alcalá de Henares he became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1568, and went out to Peru in 1581. He resided for several years in the Jesuit college at Juli, near the banks of Lake Titicaca, where the fathers had established a printing-press, and here he studied the Quichua language. He was entrusted with important missions to Quito and Chili, and was nominated interpreter by the Viceroy Toledo. His later years were passed in Paraguay, and when he died at the age of sixty-six, in 1618, he was rector of the college at Asuncion. His Quichua dictionary was published at Lima in 1586, and a second edition appeared in 1607,[1313] the same year in which the grammar first saw the light.[1314] The Quichua grammar of Holguin is the most complete and elaborate that has been written, and his dictionary is also the best in every respect.
While Holguin was studiously preparing these valuable works on the Quichua language in the college at Juli, a colleague was laboring with equal zeal and assiduity at the dialect spoken by the people of the Collao, to which the Jesuits gave the name of Aymara. Ludovico Bertonio was an Italian, a native of the marches of Ancona. Arriving in Peru in 1581, he resided at Juli for many years, studying the Aymara language, until, attacked by gout, he was sent to Lima, where he died at the age of seventy-three, in 1625. His Aymara grammar was first published at Rome in 1603,[1315] but a very much improved second edition,[1316] and a large dictionary of Aymara,[1317] were products of the Jesuit press at Juli in 1612. Bertonio also wrote a catechism and a life of Christ in Aymara, which were printed at Juli.
A vocabulary of Quichua by Fray Juan Martinez was printed at Lima in 1604, and another in 1614. Four Quichua grammars followed during the seventeenth century. That of Alonso de Huerta was published at Lima in 1616; the grammar of the Franciscan Diego de Olmos appeared in 1633; Don Juan Roxo Mexia y Ocon, a native of Cuzco, and professor of Quichua at the University of Lima, published his grammar in 1648; and the grammar of Estevan Sancho de Melgar saw the light in 1691.[1318] Leon Pinelo also mentions a Quichua grammar by Juan de Vega. The anonymous Jesuit refers to a Quichua dictionary by Melchior Fernandez, which is lost to us.
In 1644 Don Fernando de la Carrera, the Cura of Reque, near Chiclayo, published his grammar of the Yunca language, at Lima. This is the language which was once spoken in the valleys of the Peruvian coast by the civilized people whose ruler was the grand Chimu. Now the language is extinct, or spoken only by a few Indians in the coast village of Eten. The work of Carrera is therefore important, as, with the exception of a specimen of the language preserved by Bishop Oré, it is the only book in which the student can now obtain any linguistic knowledge of the lost civilization. The Yunca grammar was reprinted in numbers in the Revista de Lima of 1880 and following years.[1319]