92 books like The Secret of the Incas

Allen (1838-1906) was described as a "walking encyclopedia" by people who knew him. It was only after acquiring a reprint of his great book, a decade before the internet, that my own research into ancient cosmology took off. Star Names was first published in 1899 and as Wikipedia notes "there is no direct modern equivalent." As is the case with the internet, large sections can also be plucked out and read for pleasure.

This extraordinary book makes us understand what the ancients saw in the sky. It is one of those rare books that change our ideas about myth and archaic thought once and for all, explaining the myths of the whole world by an astronomical key. In a word, this is certainly an extraordinarily important book, which should definitely be read by anyone who is passionate about these topics.

Among the several fine essays here, Harald Reiche's "The Language of Archaic Astronomy: a Clue to the Atlantis Myth?" is a bonus treat. Reiche introduces the technological language of ancient mythology – the "tech talk of our ancestors" – and explains how "stories," recounted in the language of myth, track the "damage" to the heavens caused by the Precession of the Equinoxes. This easy-reading collection is a great aid for those with little inclination to study the heavens through light-polluted skies, or to plunge into the troublesome field of comparative mythology. 

Professor Richer, author of a half-dozen books, commonly commented on intellectual matters for French radio. My recommendation of his only book translated into English requires an explanation because the book contains multiple errors and is seriously flawed. In places, Richer neglects the effects of the Precession and elsewhere uses maps on which unrelated points are forced to fall along straight lines. But I once spoke with Richer and have read his other books knowing that the man had a secret. Indeed, more than one. Richer had access to papyrus texts indicating that the Ancient Greeks had set out temples, cities, and colonies across the Mediterranean in ways that reflected the zodiac. Another reason for his secrecy, which I discuss in my own book, is that the papyruses, discovered during Bonaparte's Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801), also included materials that ultimately gave rise to The Da Vinci Code.

Like the Stevenson book, this is also about travelling with a donkey, but what makes this narrative special is the author’s hatred of his pack animal. This will sound instantly off-putting but John’s descriptions of Dapple’s transgressions are very, very funny and his fury is never translated into violence towards the animal. There are lyrical descriptions of the landscape in northern Peru, but it is for the humour that I return to this book from time to time. I’m a sucker for any book about Peru, the subject of my early adventures and very first guidebook, and this is one of the most enjoyable. 

As a person from the Andes—and moreover from Bolivia, from a small town in an Andean valley—I also lived and grew up in the US, and I always had to explain where I was from, because so little was known of Bolivia’s geographical location, not to mention its indigenous cultures. The Huarochiri manuscript, in its English translation, is one of the earliest oral testaments of the experience of indigenous peoples under Spanish rule: it’s a testament to their oral tradition and beliefs, it’s a testament of cultural survival, coded in their myths, such as that of the Fox’s Tail, explained as cosmological knowledge in our Anthology. I love this book because it brought me back to understanding my own roots and traditions, it was a source of pride, and it undermined all the negative school teachings about Andean indigenous cultures. Originally written in Quechua, it underwent a translation into… show more.

This fabulous book tells not only of Bolivar’s struggle to create an independent united states of South America, but why. The author graphically describes what it means to be a colony, subject to Crown rule. The control exerted by Spain over her colonies was nothing less than feudal. This book illuminates what it is like to have your country pillaged as a colony. Franklin Roosevelt’s original 1941 reason for going to war, if we had to, was to help liberate all the enchained European colonies through a treatise called the Atlantic Charter. 

The classic account of this fascinating, historic, and tragic event, unfortunately little known by western readers, is here masterfully told by the former Director of the Royal Geographical Society in London.  His amazing story of the once-great Inca Empire and its destruction by Francisco Pizzaro's ruthless Spanish Coquistadores captured my imagination in 1982 and sent me on a 40-year Odyssey of travel, discovery, and adventure still as vivid today as it was back then. It will do no less for any reader with a curious mind and a love of history.

The story of the "discovery" of the now-famous Inca ruins of Machu Picchu by an obscure Yale professor in 1911. During his first exploring expedition in the jungles of Peru in 1909, the author learned of the final redoubt into which the Incas fled after the arrival of the Spaniards. Called "Vilcabamba," the city had since become lost in the rain forests of the eastern Andes and Bingham was determined to find it. He did but stumbled upon the much finer Machu Picchu, a world-class architectural wonder, in the process.

Published by the Costen Institute of Archaeology Press at UCLA, this is a report of the first and only truly scientific excavations done to date in Inca Vilcabamba. Told in a reader-friendly manner not calling for any technical background, Bauer confirms on and in the ground, much of the history recounted in the other books noted here as well as unearthing hundreds of 450-year-old artifacts left on site when Vilcabamba was abandoned, finally, to the jungle in 1572.