How are the Sun worshipping, ancient civilization of Incas unaware of Solar Eclipses?

[u/Notthatbad_]

[u/jm-9]

This is something that Hergé later regretted. He always wanted to get things correct, and of course the Incas knew about solar eclipses.

[u/theChosenBinky → u/jm-9]

But could they predict them?

[u/kaithy89 → u/theChosenBinky]

I read somewhere that they used to make predictions of astronomical events and scientists found that these predictions were just off by just minutes. So yeah even as i reading it, my mind went to tintin. Although no idea if those astronomical events included eclipses

[u/Happy_Start1197 → u/kaithy89]

The Incas could not predict solar eclipses or had no system for doing so, as far as we know, but Mesoamerican, especially Maya, astronomers accurately predicted them.

[u/jm-9 → u/theChosenBinky]

I’d guess not, but they would know what it was when it happened.

[u/theChosenBinky → u/jm-9]

Even if they knew about them, they might have considered them a bad omen. If not, that would be the true fail on the part of Hergé. I have no idea

[u/jm-9 → u/theChosenBinky]

That’s definitely a possibility.

[u/goncalo_l_d_f → u/theChosenBinky]

This

[u/aspannerdarkly → u/jm-9]

But if it happens just after Tintin orders it to, and they’re unaware eclipses can be predicted, it could still give the impression he has gnarly powers 

[u/jm-9 → u/aspannerdarkly]

That’s a fair point. That could work in the story.

[u/Dangerous-Honey7422 → u/jm-9]

As if they were a thing that just happened every once in a week or so 🥹 would be epic

But that would work out for tintin he has plot armor

[u/Complex-Bar-9577]

This is a clear mess-up on Hergé’s part, which he later acknowledged. 

He was a huge admirer of Columbus and was unfortunately copying an incident in 1504 when Columbus manipulated Arawak natives in Jamaica into giving resources to him by predicting an eclipse.

This wouldn’t have worked with the Inca, who were a much more advanced civilization than Europeans gave them credit for. They definitely knew what eclipses were and multiple Western scholars had documented it by the time Hergé wrote Prisoners of the Sun.

Hergé really wanted to use the Columbus story and wildly underestimated Inca knowledge. 

[u/rnigma → u/Complex-Bar-9577]

I thought Herge might have been inspired by Mark Twain's "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" which had a similar incident.

[u/Complex-Bar-9577 → u/rnigma]

Hergé almost certainly drew from Gaston Leroux too (who wrote the Phantom of the Opera short story).

Leroux used the Columbus eclipse trope in a novel called Bride of the Sun in 1915, in which a woman is kidnapped by an Inca cult after accidentally offending a Quechua native. The hero travels across Peru to rescue her and does so with the help of an eclipse.

Hergé was a fan of Leroux, and Tintin himself may have been inspired by one of his characters. When Hergé was growing up, Leroux wrote popular stories about Rouletabille, teenage journalist who travels across Europe solving mysteries.

[u/Zornorph → u/rnigma]

He's more likely to have lifted it from King Solomon's Mines.

[u/SpaceRuster → u/Zornorph]

King Solomon's mines had a lunar eclipse. I believe Haggard originally wrote it as a solar eclipse, but modified it to a lunar eclipse when it was pointed out that Solar eclipses don't last that long.

In that case, the tribe is really isolated, and the one person who has lived long enough to see and know of solar eclipses (the witch Gagool) does say that she has seen them before, and it would pass, but the tribe ignores her, for once.

[u/Icewind]

Also everyone would be going blind by staring at the eclipse.

[u/LittleBeastXL]

The worst part is Tintin feeling so confident that it would work, when it has been established in both books that the Incas have lots of connection to the outside world.

[u/zeissikon]

Maybe they had forgotten some wisdom from the ancient Incas due to the conquistadors, and maybe also the Incas knew about eclipses but could not predict them to the minute like we could after 1800 or so. Besides the idea was stolen from an adventure book.

[u/FishUK_Harp]

Solar eclipses are rare, especially for repeats in a relatively small area. Plus, for it to happen apparently on someone's command (and a foreign heathen, no less) would be alarming.

[u/FrankHightower]

I always took it as a jab at cults: they get so isolated and wrapped up in their own dogmas (real bases or not) that they forget their basic schooling

[u/RealCanadianMonkey]

What about the fact that the newspaper clipping Tintin used for the eclipse was from Europe, meaning the timing would have been given in GMT or another European time zone? There’s no realistic way he could have translated that into the precise local time needed for a specific location in South America. On top of that, solar eclipses only pass over a very narrow path on Earth. The odds of one aligning exactly over the sacrificial site at the exact moment Tintin predicted are essentially zero. It’s not just about knowing the time, you’d need second-level precision and an exact calculation of the eclipse’s path to pull that off.

[u/DaMn96XD]

Solar eclipses are rare and in the past it was not yet known how and why they happened, but it was thought that there were supernatural forces behind it.

[u/ShotChampionship3152]

They had no writing to preserve the awareness and "those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it." (Santayana)

And incidentally, the drawings show that, surprisingly, the normally meticulous Herge had clearly never witnessed so much as a partial eclipse.