March/April 2024 Issue

Slideshow: Rise of Peru’s Divine Lords

In the early first millennium A.D., a new class of rulers from different cultural groups claimed authority in northern Peru’s region of Ancash by highlighting their wealth and status as warrior lords and casting themselves as living embodiments of their divine ancestors. These leaders settled in easily defensible hilltop sites in the Andes Mountains, where they resided in large family compounds that also functioned as locations for ritual activity and ancestor veneration. Recent excavations at two sites in Ancash—Pashash, in the northern highlands, and the coastal settlement of Cerro San Isidro—have uncovered early examples of the emergence of divine lordship, a form of leadership that would endure in Peru for more than 1,000 years.

Slideshow: Deciphering the King’s Script

An inscription carved into a boulder high in the Almosi Gorge of Tajikistan’s Hissar Range has enabled philologists to decipher a writing system known as “the unknown script,” which was used during the centuries when the multiethnic Kushan Empire (ca. A.D. 50–250) held sway over Central Asia. Local shepherd Sanginov Khaitali first spotted the inscriptions in the 1970s, and in July of 2022, he guided a team led by archaeologist Bobomullo Bobomulloev of Tajikistan’s National Academy of Sciences to the site. They found the inscription was written in both the unknown script and Greek letters, which allowed linguists using the team’s photographs to decipher the mysterious writing system. The inscription is dedicated to the Kushan “king of kings” Vema Takhtu (reigned ca. A.D. 80–90). Bobomulloev believes that remains of a stone wall near the inscription may have once belonged to a Kushan royal hunting enclosure. (Credit for all images: Bobomullo Bobomulloev.)