The Australian Museum’s record-breaking blockbuster Ramses & the Gold of the Pharaohs was always going to be a hard act to follow.
The great Inca citadel, instantly recognisable as Peru’s world heritage-listed Machu Picchu, is the drawing card for the museum’s major summer exhibition. And while Incan civilisations may not hold the same universal fascination as Egyptology, visitors may be surprised about how little they had known about the complex societies that disappeared with the Spanish invasion, before experiencing Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru.
Beneath such sensational fodder as the most opulent collection of gold to ever travel outside Peru, plenty of impossible-to-wear jewellery, and bloodthirsty tales of human sacrifice, the exhibition tracks the existence of six different Andean societies over 3,000 years – Chavín, Moche, Chimú, Nazca, Lambayeque and Inca.
While all distinct cultures in themselves, they were united in a worldview where the gods of the overworld and the dead of the underworld interacted up close with the living in daily and spiritual life. Achieving and maintaining equilibrium was the agrarian community’s collective goal to ensure harmony and its very survival.
The exhibition is a collaboration between Lima’s privately owned museum of pre-Columbian art, Museo Larco, the Ministry of Culture of Peru and immersive experiences creator Neon Global, the latter providing a virtual reality tour of Machu Picchu, which visitors prone to vertigo are probably wise to forgo.
The Andean worldview is brought to life with more than 130 artefacts, many emphasising the balance between the three distinct realms of sky, land and earth.
The many snakes that decorate the pottery for everyday use and rituals, and the funereal finery discovered buried with the nobility that began to be excavated at the turn of the 20th century, symbolise the dark damp subterranean world, a place of the afterlife yet also where seeds are sown and germinate, a place from which all life springs.
The big cats of the Andean-Amazonian region, the jaguar and the puma, represent the world of the living, the terrestrial sphere, predatory in nature but also agile and resilient.
Amazonian birds of prey, eagles, falcons and majestic condor, represent the upper world, the realm of the gods.
To keep the equilibrium in place between all three world to ensure the crops would yield and civilisation prevailed against El Niño events and earthquakes, the gods had to be placated.
While the practice of child sacrifice in Incan culture has been extensively documented, this exhibition focuses on the lesser-known ritualistic sacrifice of adult warriors drawn from the nobility – a practice that appears unique to the Moche culture.
High-ranking individuals donned ornate gold costume armour that clattered and glittered as they fought in these ritualistic battles that thrilled the public.
The losers were disrobed, their bodies decorated with spiritual motifs and they were paraded through the streets to the temple, where they became stewards of sacred blood, offered up to the gods in return for assurances of their community’s ongoing survival and prosperity.
Also distinct in Moche culture was the creation of erotic ceramics. Archeologists continue to debate who these figures, engaged in various sexual acts, represent.
“They’re possibly ancestral beings, they could be elites, they could be deities. It’s very hard to tell,” says American archeologist Dr Jacob Bongers, a postdoc in archaeology at the University of Sydney.
What makes them fascinating is that most of the sexual acts portrayed in the ceramics do not appear to be for the purposes of procreation.
That one artefact in the exhibition actually does depict a man and a woman having sexual intercourse is in fact quite a rarity, says Bongers. Museum staff have affectionately dubbed it the “sex pot” collection, prompting the Australian Museum director, Kim McKay, to joke this exhibition could see the museum’s first sealed section in its catalog.
The theories surrounding the purpose of the “sex pots” are varied, Bongers says.
“But we do have to be very careful with our western biases. What they considered reproductive and non-reproductive may not be the same as us. So even though it may not have been biologically reproductive for them, that is, all about fertility, it was still sex, perhaps a way of channelling energy, vitality to the different realms, from the celestial realm to the earthly realm to the underworld of the ancestors.
“The other main theory is that what we’re seeing is not the world of the living, not daily life, but the world of the dead, and yes, they’re all having sex in the afterlife.”
The Moche culture even had it own superhero, a figure whose many heroic acts and daring adventures are captured extensively in pre-Colombian art.
As there was no written language, however, his name remains a mystery.
In this exhibition he is called Ai Apaec, a term borrowed from the Muchik language. But there is no mistaking this human superhero with animal attributes taken from all three spheres of the Andean worldview – the fangs of a big cat, the feathers of a bird and snake ornaments dangling from his ears.
Ai Apaec, it appears, was the north coast of Peru’s take on pop culture, circa 100-800 CE.
Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru is on at Sydney’s Australian Museum until May 2025
