Inca Empire

Villagers in Cusco, Peru, drape themselves in colorful shawls and mingle with townspeople and tourists during a festival. Jesse Lewis,

The Inca Empire was a vast empire that flourished in the Andean region of South America from the early 1500s to the 1530s when it was conquered by the Spanish. Even after the conquest, Inca leaders continued to resist the Spanish until its last city, Vilcabamba, was captured in 1572.

The Incas built their empire, known as Tawantinsuyu or "Land of the Four Corners," without the wheel, powerful livestock, ironwork, currency, or even what we think of as a writing system. The empire stretched from modern Argentina to southern Colombia and was divided into four "suyu" that met in the capital city of Cusco. These suyu were further divided into provinces. [Gallery: Tracing the Ancient Inca Empire]

Nestled between the Andes Mountains and the Amazon Basin in modern-day Peru, Machu Picchu is one of the most famous surviving archaeological sites of the Incas.

This breathtaking ancient city, consisting of some 200 buildings, remains mysterious. Archaeologists don't know the purpose of these structures, but according to UNESCO, its intricate system of roads, trails, irrigation canals, and agricultural areas suggest that humans used the site for a long time.

Inca Origins and Expansion

The Inca Empire is thought to have originated in the modern city of Cuzco in southern Peru.

In some myths, the Inca were created by the sun god Inti, who sent his son Manco Capac to Earth. Legend has it that he first killed his brother and then led his sisters into a valley near Cusco, where, according to history, they settled around 1200 AD.

Cusco is located at a point of connection between two early empires, one known as Wari and the other in the city of Tiwanaku. According to Tikka McEwan's book, The Incas: A New Perspective (ABC-CLIO, 2006), one of the main reasons the Inca empire was able to expand was because of the infrastructure that was already in place, such as hydraulics and highways that were left over from previous empires.

The expansion of the Inca Empire began when the fourth emperor, Mayta Capac, came to power, but did not gain momentum until the reign of the eighth emperor, Viracocha Inca. According to history, Viracocha began leaving military garrisons on the land to keep the peace.

However, the oral history of the Inca recorded by the Spaniards suggests that expansion began during the reign of Viracocha Inca's son, Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who ruled Cusco between 1438 and 1471.

Pachacuti became emperor after stopping an invasion of Cusco by a rival group called the Chancas. The invasion drove his father to a military outpost. Subsequently, Pachacuti worked to expand the territory controlled by the Incas, extending their influence beyond the Cusco region.

The Incas worked hard at diplomacy and tried to get their rivals to surrender peacefully before resorting to military conquest, Columbia University anthropologist Terence Altroy said in a 2007 public **** radio program in a new interview.

Cuzco

Pachacuti ordered the rebuilding and strengthening of the Inca capital, Cuzco. He is said to have built the city up completely so that it could be rebuilt in the shape of a puma.

"The animal was depicted in profile, with the city's residential neighborhoods forming its body ...... The great fortress or temple complex on the hills of Cuzco represented its head, "and the confluence of the rivers Talu and Safi its tail. " McEwan writes, and explains the record of Spanish chronicler Juan de Betanzos. "Between the puma's front and hind legs are the two great plazas of Cusco, where the highways to the four imperial districts of the empire, called the Suyus, converge."

McEwan added that civilians could not live in the cities and had to live in remote settlements.

One of the largest religious shrines in Cusco is a temple to the sun called Coricancha. The Spanish chronicler Bernabé Cobo writes (in translation) that "the temple was called Coricancha, which means "House of Gold", and "because of the immense abundance of this metal, it was inlaid in the chapels and walls of the sanctuary, ceiling and in the altar." (from Ancient Cusco by Brian Bauer, University of Texas Press, 2004),

The Spaniards would later plunder this gold and build a new city on the site of Cusco. While the Incas did not develop what we would consider a formal writing system, they did use recording devices such as the quipu, a knotted rope from which they hung. Most of the Inca's written descriptions of the Incas came from outsiders, as the Incas shared their knowledge with each other primarily through oral storytelling.

The Incas made quipu to record information. Inca Religion and Sacrifices

According to McEwan, the Inca pantheon had a range of gods, including the creator god Viracocha, the sun god Inti, the thunder god Ilapa, and the mother earth goddess Pachamama. There were also local gods worshipped by the people the Incas conquered.

Inca gods were honored in many ways, including prayer, fasting, and animal sacrifice, but the most potent form of honor was human sacrifice, usually of children and adolescents.

In 1999, archaeologists discovered three mummified children left as sacrifices in a shrine near the summit of a volcano in Argentina. A young girl, now known as "the Maiden," and a man and woman, thought to have been her attendants, appear to have been the main offerings. Research suggests that in the year before their sacrifice, the trio ate a special diet rich in corn and dried lamb, and were fed mummies drugged with coca leaves and alcohol

Mummification was an important part of Inca funeral rituals, even for ordinary people.

After the Spanish conquest, a man named Guaman Poma, who spoke Quechua and was a native of the Andes, published a chronicle describing November as "the month of the carrying of the dead," when people would try to feed the mummies of their ancestors.

"In this month they bring the dead out of their storehouses, which are called pucullo, and they give them food and drink, and they dress them in the most splendid clothes ...... and they sing and dance... ...They walked with them to and fro, through the streets and squares," (in translation, from the book Food, Power and Resistance in the Andes, Alison Kr 2011).

Krógel noted that the civilian mummies ate only on special occasions, while the royal mummies "received their own specially prepared meals (including corn beer) every day.

Three Inca mummies sacrificed 500 years ago were regularly treated with drugs and alcohol before their deaths, the researchers found, especially the oldest child called the virgin (shown here) to make them more compliant. (Copyright Johan Reinhard) Food, feasting and lack of money

Corn and meat were often considered elite foods for the Incas, and were consumed by the "maiden" and her attendants a year before they were sacrificed. In addition to these elite foods, other commodities consumed in the Inca diet included sweet potatoes, quinoa, beans, and chili peppers.

In exchange for labor, the Incas *** were expected to provide feasts for the people at certain times of the year. According to Tamarabure's book, The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), feasting served payment in a society that lacked money.

The "most unusual aspect of the Inca economy" was the lack of a market system and "oni," McEwan writes. With few exceptions, there were no merchants in the Inca Empire. "Every citizen of the empire received the necessities of life from the treasury, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and did not need to buy anything."

There were no stores or markets, so "there was no need for a standard currency or money, and no place to spend or buy or McEwan writes:

Art and Architecture

The Incas made magnificent objects in gold and silver, but perhaps their most striking art form was textiles.

Cloth, above all, was especially prized by the Incas and represented their greatest artistic achievement, writes McEwan:

The Incas grew cotton, sheared wool, and used looms to make their elaborate textiles. The finest fabrics were called cumpi and were reserved for emperors and nobles.

"Made of alpaca or alpaca wool and cotton, or sometimes more exotic materials such as bat hair or hummingbird fluff, [cumpi] was a tapestry decorated with intricate multicolored patterns," McEwan writes.

It was Inca stone-making that was also powerful. Their "artisans built stones together without using any mortar at all, so that an object as thin as a razor blade could not be inserted between the stones," writes Peter V.N. Henderson in his book Andean History (University of New Mexico Press, 2013). The ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu, Peru. The Inca fell to Spain

The empire, which reached its zenith after the conquest of Emperor Huayna Capac, who ruled from 1493 to 1527, included as many as 12 million people and stretched from the Ecuadorian-Colombian border to about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of modern-day Santiago de Chile. To support this empire, a road system 25,000 miles (about 40,000 kilometers) long, about three times the diameter of the earth. When the Spaniards conquered the Inca Empire,

they were impressed. McEwan wrote: "The Inca cities were as large as those of Europe, but more orderly, and, according to all accounts, cleaner and more pleasant." . Indeed, at the time, the Andes had a superior road and ferry system to that of Europe,

Crossing the waters, the Spaniards brought with them one of their most powerful stealth weapons - a disease to which the Incas had never been exposed. Smallpox wiped out most of the Incas, including Capac and his chosen successor. After Capac's death, Capac's relatives fought for power, and his son Atahualpa eventually succeeded. But the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro succeeded in seducing and capturing Atahualpa - eventually killing him - and easily took over Cusco with their more advanced weapons.

According to history, the Spaniards installed a "puppet king", Manco Inca Yupanqui, in order to keep peace with the natives. But he and his men were later forced to retreat to a village in the jungle called Vilcabanba, which was the last remaining bite of the Inca Empire until it disappeared in 1572.

A monumental legacy

Today, the Incas live many of their traditions in the Andes. Textiles are still popular, the food they ate is consumed around the world, and archaeological sites like Machu Picchu are popular tourist attractions. Even their ancient language, Quechua, is still widely spoken.

"Today, Quechua, or runa simi ("language of the people"), is the most widely spoken of the surviving indigenous languages of the Americas," Judith Noble and Jamie LaCasa wrote in their book, An Introduction to Quechua: Languages of the Andes (Dog Ear Publishing, 2007).

"Between six and ten million people in the Andean region, from southern Colombia through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia to northwestern Argentina and northern Chile, le use Quechua as their everyday language.