Inca Ruins of Saqsaywaman and Qenqo (with Narration/Music)

The ruins of Saqsaywaman and Qenqo in Peru showcase the great resourcefulness and skills of the Incas. Saqsaywaman, at over 12,000 feet above sea level, is a walled fortress overlooking the city of Cusco, the ancient Inca capital. It took 20,000-30,000 men 60 years to move and put the massive stones in place for military and religious purposes. The stones were place on top of each other without mortar and even a credit card can't fit between them. Qenqo is a religious site located near Cusco which was carved out of a giant stone monolith. Underneath the rock is an underground burial chamber where mummies used to be stored.
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[@lyness1217]

These are not Inca ruins...

[@AndysAwesomeAdventures]

They are definitely Inca/Incan. Are you saying they're not Inca ruins or that they are not ruins?

[@jonbower194]

You are correct, these ruins predate the Inca by thousands of years. I'm sure the Inca used them, but they absolutely did not build them. Even the guide in the video says they were built by a pre-Inca civilization.

[@geneparcellano]

The fascinating thing is that the base of the Egyptian pyramids are also built in the same style as these giant stones.

[@BlackStarEOP]

@@geneparcellano Considering the oldest boat in the world is 8000 years old, and markings in caves dating back 40000 years have been found all over the world, how plausible is it that our very very ancient ancestors already travelled around the world? We have so little information of anything older than 5000 years. (Heh, we already have so little information from the past 5000 years..) The polygonal masonry in turkey matches the Inca masonry so much. Is it all just a big coincidence? We may never know. To get to the bottom of this, we can do 2 things: 1) Completely wreck and excavate this and see what we find on the way down 2) Wait for technology to get to a level where we can have a detailed look 3km down the surface I'd say option 2. Archeology will radically change within the next 30 years.

[@Azeraph]

I often wondered how they shaped them without constantly swapping them in and out. They either had them flat on the ground and worked them by flipping or they had a mud template. The shaping on the flat would be a pain. So i'm going for templates that can be used to line up and save the final placement as one movement. That's on the big ones.

[@BlackStarEOP]

I highly recommend a paper on this, it's called, "on the reddish glittery mud the inca used for perfecting their stone masonry", it describes a chemical process that they might have used.

[@gabejkish2167]

Nice video with pretty music but there are problems with the comments. Quite a few archaeologists and historians date the foundations of Saqsaywaman to a much earlier pre-Inca time. We even have a testimony from the year 1572 by an Inca prince to the Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo saying that "that the Cyclopean walls had ‘always’ been there; that his people did not even have a tradition as to who built them, and that they had always believed them to be the work of gods or made by magic." As to the construction, a Russian-Peruvian team of geophysicists from 2012 analyzed the siliceous limestone walls of Saqsaywaman, compared rock samples from the fortress and also from the quarry and stated clearly in their report that the rock material was obviously ground up, then chemically processed and molded(!) into blocks. By a technology the Incas simply did not have. Yours truly has actual micrographs of these samples, including the likely chemical formulas for the process and a lot more details of this whole issue in a book called The Saqsaywaman Mystery on amazon.com. Yes, the Incas did add to the old walls and built a palace on top of the hill which was later demolished by the Spanish and the stones reused for their own houses in the city. This is a wonderful subject and there is a great chance that Saqsaywaman may represent some of the oldest architectural structures of humanity, predating even Gobekli Tepe...

[@AndysAwesomeAdventures]

Thank you so much for the clarification. Sometimes the further we go back in history, the harder it is to be accurate. I'm sure different archaeologists have different opinions about the creation of many sites around the world, but you certainly sound like you know what you're talking about.

[@BlackStarEOP]

@@AndysAwesomeAdventures The only thing we know is that the Inca did use this site. Archeological finds have been carbon-dated to 1400. The big question here indeed is, did the Inca create this site? I'm pretty sure the Inca did in fact have a mastery of mortarless stone masonry, but the knowledge if likely to be far, far older. Considering the writings did mention the construction of walls (a reddish clay like material was used to make the joints so precise, and it vanished completely) I think Cusco (12 angle stone) is definitely made by the Inca civilization. But with these ruins? I'm not sure. There is evidence all over the world that certain cultures may be linked together and these walls might just be far older than we think.