The Inca

The Inca

‘Four parts together’
In speaking of the Inca capital of Cuzco, Pedro Sancho could not help but marvel at the city’s walls, “because they are of stones so large that anyone who sees them would not say that they have been put in place by human hands.” Even the “Spaniards... say that neither the bridge of Segovia nor any other...edifices which Hercules of the Romans made is so worthy of being seen as this.” Impressive to Spanish eyes, the fact that the Inca erected such works without draft animals, iron tools, or the wheel, tells you something of Inca power and prestige. Further, it was hewn from the very face of the Andes itself, at such punishing altitudes, that Francisco Pizzaro had to hurry himself off to lower-level Lima, because his Spanish lungs could not withstand the air-thin elevation. It was here, in Cuzco, that the four quadrants of Inca power converged into a unified center. Tawantinsuyu - ‘four parts together’ - was its Inca name.
In telling the story, however, Spanish accounts dominate the historiography of the Incas, because, as far as we know, the Incas had no written system. Knotted cords, called ‘Quipu,’ may have served a greater purpose than merely a numeric system for taxation and census purposes, but because those who were able to interpret them were butchered in the Inca civil war, and the rest killed off by the Spanish, we may never know. In light of this, Spanish accounts - written by men on the ground, by their descendants through marriage with Incan women, or as travelers who arrived in the wake of Pizarro’s conquests - predominate the written record of Inca culture and imperial organization. They have problems, to be sure, but the insights they provide of the Incan imperialist infrastructure, mythology, hierarchy, architecture, and history are invaluable.
The Inca were a minority elite, ruling a vast empire across the western face of the Andes, from Ecuador to northern Chile. High atop the mountain slopes, they dwelt in stone carved palace cities, like Cuzco and the sanctuary of Machu Picchu, while in the lowlands below, lived their conquered subjects: people from a dozen different ethnicities, whose rulers learned Quechua annually, as a matter of course. A cosmopolitan empire, barely a century old when Pizarro’s handful came along, it fell through endemic disease and fratricidal bloodshed. It did not, however, fall quietly.
Believing themselves descendants of the creator, Viracocha, the Inca emerged to rule Cuzco in the late twelfth century. Authority was concentrated in the hands of the Sapa Inca, whose rule was aided in a very unique manner, for, “in the Inca regime, the mummies of long-dead Kings and Queens, as well as oracular idols, participated in affairs of state through cults staffed by their descendents.” Mummification is ancient and certainly not exclusive to Andean civilization, but the act of caring for them, even in death, can seem strange to outsiders. The dead still functioned in society; their bodies were not mummified in the Egyptian sense of embalming and planting in a sarcophagus, but preserved as the physical bridge between the natural world and the one beyond. As such, their advice was sought after and interpreted, and their beings looked after as if they were still alive, in order that they provide for the continued existence of the kingly lineage. Needless to say, the Spanish looked upon this practice with revulsion, calling it devil worship, and sought to end it.
With the aid of these ancestors, the Inca of Cuzco began to expand beyond their city in the 1430’s, led by a young warrior King, named Pachacuti - the ‘earth shaker.’ Conquering the warlike Chancas, Pachacuti established the foundations for Inca expansion taken up by his successors. He did not, however, revamp Inca succession policy, a problem that would cultivate bloody civil wars among the dead Inca’s many sons. Much to the detriment of the empire, these wars usually yielded a successor; the problem was, the final of these fratricidal conflicts coincided with the arrival of Pizarro, who exploited Inca confusion to the fullest.
In the century between Pachacuti and the Spanish conquest, Inca military expansion gobbled up the western coasts of South America. Movement of armies was aided by a highly sophisticated road network, stretching clear across the empire. Along the route, provisional storehouses furnished the Inca forces with nourishment, avoiding the unpleasantness of forcing the army upon the local people. Fueled by a system of runners, capable of bringing orders to various parts of the empire, the Inca maintained their expansion through an advanced strategic road network that traversed the imposing country of the Andean foothills. Its size and proficiency gobsmacked Pedro de Leon; “Oh! what greater things can be said of Alexander or of any of the more powerful kings who have ruled in the world, than that they had made such a road as this, and conceived the works which were required for it!” That should tell you all you need to know of Inca imperial administration.
Once under the Inca yoke, subject elites were to assimilate themselves into Inca society, specifically in the learning of Quechua (the Inca tongue). A lingua franca, it was to bring the local rulers and their families squarely within the imperial hierarchy, though always below the Inca themselves. Annual tribute and continuous aggressive wars did not endear the Incas. When endemic disease ravaged the empire late in the 1520’s, killing the Sapa Inca and sending his sons to killing one another for his throne, a bloody civil war battered the already weakened state. Exploiting these factions, Pizarro showed up with one hundred and sixty-eight men, got lucky - as few men have ever been - and proceeded to dismantle the greatest empire South America had yet known.

Incas did not use writing; they had no need for it, as theirs was an oral culture. However, among their numeric systems are the Quipus - twisted strings designed to represent decimals. Different color strings present an interesting conundrum for archaeologists who haven’t been able to decipher them. Does this hint at a possible written system within the corded string? We don’t know, at this moment, but it is a fascinating possibility. What, then, do the Quipus tell us about Inca imperial culture and administration? Since writing can relate so much of a culture’s way of thinking, what can these unearthed webs of string reveal of the Inca?

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