80 MOCHE KINGS Divinity and Power in Ancient Peru ART on View For its reopening, the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève (MEG) is holding a world-premiere exhibition of the treasures from a royal Moche tomb that was excavated by Steve Bourget and his team in the summer of 2008. The hitherto unseen pieces from the Huaca El Pueblo archaeological site near the village of Ucupe on the north coast of Peru form the nucleus of this exhibition, which will be on view until May 3, 2015. It also features exceptional pieces from other royal tombs, including those of Sipán and Dos Cabezas. With more than 300 works, of which sixty are on loan from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture and 180 from European museums including those of Berlin, Stuttgart, and Schaffhausen, Les rois mochica. Divinité et pouvoir dans le Pérou ancien (Moche Kings: Divinity and Power in Ancient Peru) is an homage to one of the most important of the Pre-Columbian Peruvian civilizations, which flourished between the first and eighth centuries. The show will be accompanied by an ambitious program of related activities. Art in the Service of the Elites The Moche (sometimes rendered Mochica), so named by archaeologists for the eponymous river located close to what today is the town of Trujillo, preceded the better remembered Inca Empire by more than eight centuries. The culture was astonishingly complex and consolidated itself from scattered cities into a nation-state with a centralized and hierarchical social, political, and economic system in short order. It exploited the abundant resources of the Pacific Ocean and built a sophisticated irrigation system, which was the engine of a prosperous agricultural economy based on the cultivation of crops such as maize, squash, and beans. This ancient Peruvian society manifested its power and opulence through the extravagance of its temples, the luxuriance of its adobe palaces that were decorated with polychrome mural frescoes, and the scale of the cities that surrounded them. The latter were inhabited by weavers, potters, metal workers, and other kinds of craftsmen and artists, who were masters in the working of feathers, wood, shell, clay, and stone. These artisanal and artistic professions catered primarily to the elite, for whom sumptuous objects of precious metals, such as diadems, crowns, and gold, silver, and copper jewelry were manufactured. The gold pieces they produced were remarkable works of art, often decorated with multicolored feathers, turquoise, lapis lazuli, or particular marine shells obtained through long-distance trade. FIG. 1 (top left): Funerary mask. Moche, tomb 2, Dos Cabezas, North Coast, Peru. Middle Moche, 6th–7th century. Copper, gilded copper, shell, resin, stone. H: 20 cm. Museo de Sitio de Chan Chan, Trujillo. Inv. reg. nac. 0000178734. © MEG, J. Watts/Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, Lima. FIG. 2 (top center): Necklace bead in the form of a human head. Moche, Sipán, North Coast, Peru. Middle Moche, 6th–7th century. Gold, silver, resin, stone. H: 16 cm. Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán, Chiclayo. Inv. MTRS-37-INC-02. © MEG, J. Watts/Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, Lima. FIG. 3 (top right): Funerary mask. Moche, Huaca de la Luna, North Coast, Peru. Phase IV, 6th–7th century. Gilded copper. H: 22 cm. Linden-Museum, Stuttgart. Inv. 119.155. © Anatol Dreyer, Linden- Museum, Stuttgart. By Steve Bourget and Leonid Velarde
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