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An old review I came across from the year of publication/drf
The Miami News - May 31.1953
America's Ancient- Civilizations, by A. Hyatt Verrill and Ruth Verrill. Putnam; $5.
The riddle of the Andes, says A. Hyatt Verrill, is really very simple. Instead of supposing that the Incas developed the full blown civilization that the Spaniards destroyed and that archaeologists have been reconstructing busily ever since, you can credit most of it to the Sumerians of the Middle East.
Those ancients had the ships and men to carry their arts and sciences across the Atlantic some 2500 years before Christ, Verrill argues, and they even left records of expeditions to the "sunset lands" and to a "cloud lake" that in his opinion could only have been Lake Titicaca in Peru.
Being a sucker for new theories by experts in fields about which I know very little, I find this one fascinating. Verrill points out that the Incas had only a few hundred years in which to develop an unsurpassed agriculture, architectural wonders still unexplained, an exact calendar, marvelous highways, a system of higher education and standing armies. And this, he argues, simply would be beyond the powers of any one people in such a short time.
But grant that the Sumerian king Sargon was identical with the bearded Inca god, Wira Kocha, and such difficulties vanish. As a clincher, Verrill gives a long list of customs, words and symbols common to both Sumerians and Incas.
At the age of 82, Verrill is the author of 115 books and the possessor of stout opinions not only about the Incas but about the Aztecs and the Mayas with whom he deals also in this readable volume.
Joe Wing
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