Cuzco

CUZCO

The Cuzco1 (Southern Quechua: Qusqu, Qosqo, pronounced [qo̝s.qo]), or Cusco (recent official spelling) is a city in southeastern Peru, located in the eastern slopes of the Cordillera de los Andes, in the river basin Huatanay, a tributary of Vilcanota. It is the capital of the Department of Cuzco and also is found in the Peruvian constitution as the country's historic capital. Formerlythe capital of the Inca Empire and one of the most important cities of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1983, is often called, due to the large number of monuments which has, as the "Rome of America", 2 is currently the largest tourist destination in Peru, with an annual influx of about one million annual visitors in 2008.3 It has a population of 510 000inhabitants, which places it among the largest cities in the country.

PLACE NAMES

 

THE FIRST IMAGE OF CUZCO IN EUROPE. PEDRO CIEZA DE LEON. CHRONICLE OF PERU, 1553.

DOWNTOWN STREETS.

NIGHT LIGHTING OF THE CITY.

It is estimated that the name in Quechua Qusqu which was found at the time of the conquest of the Inca Empire was an Aymara origin of the phrase Qusqu Wanka ('Rock of the owl')from the account of the Ayar Brothers, 4 where Ayar Auca Cuzco takes the place of flying with their wings to land on a rock in the area and become a brand lithified occupation:
"Go there flying (they say he had wings Nasco), and sitting there taking possession in the same seat where it seems that milestone, because we will go then to settle and live." Ayar Auca, after hearing the words of hisbrother, he rose on his wings and went to the site that he sent Manco Capac, and sitting there and was turned into stone pillar holding fact that in the ancient language of this valley is called Cuzco , where he was the name of Cuzco to this site until today

JUAN DIEZ DE BETANZOS5

This name was losing its etymology in the popular consciousness, darkening, as the same Betanzos also cites:"... To which people [of up to thirty small thatched houses and base] called the inhabitants thereof, from its antiquity, Cuzco, and what this name means Cozco not know declare that anxiously over named former."
The first chroniclers noted the name of the city almost invariably as Cuzco or Cuzco by a few, that in the sixteenth century Spanish orthography, in the process of readjustment of thesibilant consonants, better sound approached the Qusqu [qo̝s.qo] . Thus, we find Cuzco in the Royal Decree of Charles I, in the chronicles of Francisco de Jerez (1534), in various documents of the Gaceta de Madrid and in the nineteenth century maps (from 1815) and XX (until at least 1976). This written form is going to other European languages and remains so far as the most used in Spanish outsideof Cusco Perú.1 can be found on historical maps of Peru in the sixteenth (from 1597 as can be seen in the map illustrating this article), XVII, XVIII and XIX to 1814.

A completely different etymology was given by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who asserts that:

Put point or center [Tahuantinsuyu] the city of Cuzco, in the particular language you want it said lncas navel of the earth withgood semejança call her navel, because all of Peru is long and narrow as a human body, and that city is almost half

ROYAL COMMENTARIES OF THE INCAS (1609).

This version has been mythologized in the folklore of the region, but takes the same ideas of myth Omphalos of Delphi, as did the Dominican Diego Duran in History of the Indies of New Spain and the Islands of the mainland, this time forof the name of Mexico to the same author, 'the navel and the heart of the world. "

REVISIONISM OF THE SCRIPT AT THE OFFICIAL LEVEL

The graphical form of <Cuzco> remained dominant until the mid-twentieth century, when in the same city of Cuzco, on the proposal of the American Institute of Arts, with support from the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, the March 12, 1971 Cuzco City...