Inca Empire
The Inca Empire built one of the greatest imperial states in human history without the wheel, draft animals, iron, steel, or a system of writing. The anthropologist Gordon McEwan made that observation, and it captures the puzzle at the center of this story. Here was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. It joined modern-day Peru with what are now western Ecuador, western and south-central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, a sliver of Colombia, and much of Chile. It did all of this without money and without markets. A small nobility, probably numbering only 15,000 to 40,000 people, ruled a population of around 10 million. How does a state of that scale hold together when it cannot write a letter, mint a coin, or harness a horse? How do you tax people who use no currency? And what did the rulers in Cusco actually want from the millions of farmers and herders scattered across the Andes? The answers run through knotted strings, stonework a knife cannot pierce, and a king who called himself the son of the Sun.
Tawantinsuyu was what the Inca called their own empire, a name that means the suyu of four parts. In Quechua, tawa is four and the suffix -ntin names a group taken together, so the word describes a union of four regions whose corners met at the capital. Those four regions had names and directions. Chinchaysuyu lay to the north, Antisuyu to the east toward the Amazon jungle, Qullasuyu to the south, and Kuntisuyu to the west. When the Spanish arrived, they transliterated the name as Tahuatinsuyo, and they gave the land a new name entirely: Peru. The word Inka itself carried more weight than a single crown. Today it is often translated as ruler or lord, but it did not refer only to the Sapa Inca. It also named the nobles, a thin layer of people atop millions. The phrase Inca Empire is not native at all. It came from the chronicles written in the 16th century, after the conquest had already begun.
The Andean civilization is one of at least five in the world that scholars call pristine, meaning it developed on its own rather than borrowing from another culture. The Inca were the last chapter of that long, independent story. Two large empires came before them in the same mountains. Tiwanaku rose around Lake Titicaca between roughly 300 and 1100 AD, and the Wari flourished near Ayacucho across a similar span. The Wari occupied the Cuzco area for about 400 years, and much of what the Inca later perfected, the roads, the administrative centers, the terraced mountainsides, descended from these earlier peoples. The geographer Carl Troll pointed to the land itself as an aid to Inca power. He noted that chuño, a potato dried at the freezing nighttime temperatures of the southern highlands, could be stored for long periods. He also observed that the empire's maximum reach roughly matched the range of llamas and alpacas, the only large domesticated animals in pre-Hispanic America. Yet Troll rejected pure environmental determinism. He argued that culture, not climate, lay at the core of the Inca achievement.
Tambo Tocco was the place where, in one origin story, the Inca people first stepped into the world. Four brothers and four sisters emerged from the central cave, called Capac Tocco. Ayar Manco carried a magic staff of the finest gold, and the people were to settle wherever it landed. The journey thinned their number. Ayar Cachi boasted of his strength, so his siblings tricked him back into the cave and sealed him inside. Ayar Uchu climbed to the top of the cave to watch over the people and turned to stone. Ayar Auca grew tired and wandered off alone. Only Ayar Manco and his four sisters reached Cusco, where the staff sank into the ground. The people already living there fought to keep their land, but Mama Huaca hurled her bolas at a soldier and killed him on the spot, scattering the rest. After that, Ayar Manco took the name Manco Capac, founder of the Inca. A second legend, recorded by the mestizo chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in Los Comentarios Reales de los Incas, tells of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo rising from the depths of Lake Titicaca, sent by the Sun God, marching north until a golden staff sank at Mount Guanacaure. There they taught the people agriculture and weaving.
Pachacuti is the name that means the turn of the world, and it was earned. The 9th Sapa Inca, Pachacuti Cusi Yupanqui, took that epithet after defeating the Chancas in the Chanka-Inca War in modern-day Apurimac. In 1438 he launched the expansion that would carry the small Kingdom of Cuzco across western South America. He reorganized that kingdom into Tahuantinsuyu, with a central government at its head and four provincial governments under strong leaders. His methods were as much diplomacy as warfare. Pachacuti sent spies into the regions he wanted, gathering reports on political organization, military strength, and wealth. Then he sent the leaders gifts of fine textiles and messages promising that joining the empire would make them richer. Most accepted his rule as a fait accompli and submitted peacefully. Those who refused were conquered, their local rulers executed, and their children brought to Cuzco to learn Inca administration before returning home as indoctrinated nobles. His son Topa Inca Yupanqui pushed the conquests north beginning in 1463 and continued after Pachacuti died in 1471. Topa Inca's most important prize was the Kingdom of Chimor, the empire's only serious rival for the coast. Pachacuti himself is thought to have built Machu Picchu, perhaps as a family home, a summer retreat, or an agricultural station.
Not a single village of the highlands or the plains failed to pay the tribute levied on it, one colonial account insists. The form that tribute took explains how an empire ran without money or markets. Exchange rested on reciprocity, the obligation of one person and another, of groups and rulers, to give back. Taxes were not coins but labor, the duty a subject owed the empire. In return, the Inca rulers, who in theory owned all the means of production, granted access to land and goods and provided food and drink at celebratory feasts. The system had a name in practice: the mit'a, a corvee labor obligation. Alongside it, individual villages kept a pre-Inca tradition of communal work called mink'a, which survives to this day. The economy stood on the vertical archipelago, a method of reaching resources at many ecological levels, and on ayni, reciprocal exchange. Scholars have argued bitterly over what to call all this. Darrell E. La Lone, in The Inca as a Nonmarket Economy, listed the contradictory labels others had used: feudal, slave, socialist, a system of reciprocity and redistribution, a system with markets, or an Asiatic mode of production. The discipline of that labor could be severe. In provinces too poor to pay, the Inca once ordered each person to turn in a large quill full of live lice every four months, a way of teaching the habit of tribute.
168 men, one cannon, and 27 horses made up the force that Francisco Pizarro led against the empire. Before the Spanish, a Portuguese castaway named Aleixo Garcia had become the first European known to reach the Inca, arriving in 1524 on a raiding expedition with a Guarani army. Pizarro's conquistadors reached Inca territory by 1526, and in July 1529 the Queen of Spain signed a charter naming him governor and captain of all conquests in Peru. When he returned in 1532, the empire was already weakened. A war of succession divided the sons of Huayna Capac, Huascar and Atahualpa. Disease had arrived ahead of the Spanish, and an early epidemic in the 1520s may have killed Huayna Capac himself along with his designated heir, Ninan Cuyochi. The technological gap was stark. The Spanish carried steel armor, long swords, and arquebuses, while the Inca fought with wood, stone, copper, and bronze, and wore armor of alpaca fiber that no blade of theirs could pierce. Hernando de Soto carried back an invitation to meet Atahualpa, who was resting at Cajamarca with an army of 80,000, armed at that moment only with hunting knives and lassos. The friar Vincente de Valverde read out the Requerimiento, demanding the Inca accept King Charles I of Spain and convert to Christianity. Atahualpa dismissed it. The Spanish attacked the mostly unarmed retinue, seized Atahualpa as hostage, and held him for a ransom of a room filled with gold and twice that in silver. The Inca paid, Pizarro broke his word, and in August 1533 the Spanish executed Atahualpa, charging him in part with the assassination of his brother Huascar.
Vilcabamba was where the Inca state retreated to die slowly. The Spanish first installed Atahualpa's brother Manco Inca Yupanqui as a puppet, and for a time he cooperated. When Pizarro's associate Diego de Almagro tried to claim Cusco, Manco used the feud to recapture the city in 1536, only to lose it again. He then withdrew into the mountains of Vilcabamba and founded the small Neo-Inca State, where he and his successors ruled for another 36 years, raiding the Spanish and stirring revolts. In 1572 the last stronghold fell, and Manco's son Topa Amaru was captured and executed, ending organized resistance under the Inca state. What followed was systematic loss. The sophisticated vertical archipelago farming system was destroyed. The Spanish bent the mit'a labor system to colonial ends, forcing one member of each family into the gold and silver mines, above all the titanic silver mine at Potosi, where a worker often died within a year or two and the family had to send a replacement. Epidemics kept coming long after smallpox: a probable typhus outbreak in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, and measles in 1618. Even so, the memory did not die quietly. Indigenous leaders would try to expel the colonists and rebuild the empire into the late 18th century, in figures such as Juan Santos Atahualpa and Tupac Amaru II.
A knife could not be fitted through Inca stonework. That is the standard by which their architecture is measured. The prime structures were built from stone blocks shaped to fit so exactly that no mortar held them, and they have stood for centuries through earthquakes and volcanic activity. The builders sculpted the fit by repeatedly lowering one rock onto another and carving away wherever the dust was compressed, producing a tight join and a stable concavity. The technique was first used on a large scale by the Pucara peoples and later at Tiwanaku, long before the Inca refined it at Machu Picchu. Without writing, the Inca recorded their world in other ways. The quipu, an assemblage of knotted strings, stored numbers in base-10 digits, the same base used by the Quechua language. Those figures could be worked on a yupana, a grid of squares that may have functioned as an abacus, with tokens or pebbles moved between compartments. The accountants who kept these records were the quipo camayos, and the strings are now believed to have held history and literature as well as numbers, though no one can decode them. Inca medicine was equally striking. Their surgeons cut holes in the skull to relieve fluid buildup from head wounds, and survival rates ran from 80 to 90 percent, compared with about 30 percent before Inca times. The chronicler Bernabe Cobo recorded that Spanish soldiers trusted an indigenous surgeon over the barbers who traveled with them. Quechua, the language those records were written in, was never the original tongue of the Inca, who spoke something closer to Puquina; yet they spread Quechua so widely that it is still spoken from Ecuador to southern Bolivia today.
Common questions
What was the Inca Empire and where was it located?
The Inca Empire, officially known as Tawantinsuyu or the Realm of the Four Parts, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. Centered on Cusco in the Andean Mountains, it joined modern-day Peru with western Ecuador, western and south-central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, a tip of Colombia, and much of Chile.
When did the Inca Empire rise and when did it fall?
The Inca civilization rose from the Peruvian highlands in the early 13th century, and the empire expanded between 1438 and 1533. The Spanish began their conquest in 1532, and by 1572 the last Inca state at Vilcabamba was fully conquered when the ruler Topa Amaru was captured and executed.
How did the Inca Empire run an economy without money or markets?
The Inca economy worked through reciprocity rather than currency or markets. Taxes took the form of a labor obligation called the mit'a, and in return the rulers granted access to land and goods and provided food and drink at feasts. The system rested on the vertical archipelago and on ayni, or reciprocal exchange.
Who conquered the Inca Empire and with how many men?
Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro led the conquest with a force of 168 men, one cannon, and 27 horses. The Spanish captured the Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, collected a ransom of gold and silver, and executed him in August 1533.
How did the Inca build without writing, the wheel, or iron?
The Inca built one of the greatest imperial states in history without the wheel, draft animals, iron, steel, or writing, as the anthropologist Gordon McEwan noted. They used mortarless stone blocks fitted so tightly that a knife could not pass through, and they recorded information on knotted strings called quipu.
What did the name Tawantinsuyu mean to the Inca?
Tawantinsuyu means the suyu of four parts, describing a union of four regions whose corners met at Cusco. The four suyu were Chinchaysuyu in the north, Antisuyu in the east, Qullasuyu in the south, and Kuntisuyu in the west. The Spanish renamed the land Peru.
How advanced was Inca medicine and skull surgery?
Inca surgeons performed successful skull surgery, cutting holes in the skull to relieve fluid buildup and inflammation from head wounds. Survival rates ran from 80 to 90 percent, compared with about 30 percent before Inca times, and the chronicler Bernabe Cobo recorded that Spanish soldiers trusted indigenous surgeons over their own barbers.