Peruvian historians find 2,000-year-old Nazca lines in shape of cat
The Nazca Lines of Peru have yielded yet another mysterious animal figure, one very familiar to feline fans.
Archaeologists from the Peruvian Ministry of Culture have discerned the faint outlines of a 40-yard-long cat geoglyph etched into a hillside, within the boundaries of the UNESCO World Heritage Site delineated in 1994.
The 170-square-mile region on the coastal plains in southern Peru is home to dozens of intricate designs depicting animals, geometric designs and human figures that date back 2,000 years or more, as History.com explains.
The Peruvian officials found the figure while conducting maintenance work at the site, the culture ministry said in a statement.
“The figure was barely visible and was about to disappear due to its location on a fairly steep slope and the effects of natural erosion,” the ministry said. “Representations of felines of this type are frequent in the iconography of ceramics and textiles of the Paracas society.”
This 40-yard-long cat — pictured lounging — dates all the way back to 200 B.C. or 100 B.C., the archaeologists said, noting that it may be the oldest such figure ever unearthed at the site. The theory is that the geoglyphs were made by the Nazca civilization, a people who pre-dated the Inca and lived in the region for 800 years, starting in 200 B.C., Discover Magazine reported in a recent profile of the site.
The first figures were discovered in 1927, but more continue to be found. A year ago, Japanese researchers discovered 140 of them.
“It’s quite striking that we’re still finding new figures,” Johny Isla, Peru’s chief archaeologist for the Nazca lines, told the Spanish news agency Efe, according to The Art Newspaper. “But we also know that there are more to be found.”
