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CHAP. LXII - How the Indians of these valleys and of other parts of the country believe that souls leave the bodies, and do not die; and why they desired their wives to be buried with them

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2011

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Summary

Many times in this history I have said that, in the greater part of the kingdom of Peru, it is a custom much used and observed by all the Indians to inter, with their dead, all their precious things, and some of the most beautiful and best-beloved of their wives. It appears that this custom was observed in other parts of the Indies, from which it may be inferred that the devil manages to deceive one set of people in the same way as he does another. I was in Cenu, which falls within the province of Carthagena, in the year 1535, when so vast a quantity of burial places were found on a level plain, near a temple raised in honour of the accursed devil, that it was a thing worthy of admiration. Some of them were so ancient, that there were tall trees growing on them, and they got more than a million from these sepulchres, besides what the Indians took, and what was lost in the ground. In other parts great treasure has been, and is every day, found in the tombs. It is not many years since Juan de la Torre, who was Gonzalo Pizarro's captain in the valley of Yca, which is one of the Peruvian coast valleys, found one of these tombs, from which those who entered it affirm that he took more than 50,000 dollars.

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Travels of Pedro de Cieza de León, A.D. 1532–50
Contained in the First Part of his Chronicle of Peru
, pp. 221 - 225
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010
First published in: 1864

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