The Inca Empire

Podcast Transcript

The Inca Empire was the largest and most sophisticated state ever created in the pre-Columbian Americas, stretching along the Andes from present-day southern Colombia to central Chile and Argentina by the early 16th century.

What makes it historically significant is that the Inca managed to build and administer this enormous realm without many technologies that Eurasian civilizations relied on, such as iron tools, wheels, draft animals, or a conventional writing system.

As great as its accomplishments were, its fall at the hands of the Spanish was just as dramatic and sudden.

Learn more about the Incan Empire on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

At its height, the Inca territories extended more than 2300 miles or 3680 kilometers along the Andean Coast of South America and governed as many as 13 million people.

The Incan practice of split inheritance propelled the Incan world into a cycle of never-ending conquest. Under this principle, the political inheritance passed from the ruler to a chosen heir, also known as the Sapa Inca. The deceased ruler’s material wealth, known as the panaca, was passed to the heir’s male descendants.

The panaca was to provide the new ruler’s descendants and extended family, and also to support the deceased Incan rulers.

The Inca venerated their rulers as semi-divine beings and treated them with extraordinary reverence. Even in death, the Empire provided these mummified monarchs with constant care, elaborate rituals, and their own vast estates.

This financial obligation meant that the incoming Incan ruler had to rebuild their own physical wealth with each succession cycle, creating a perpetual cycle of conquest.

The Incas called their empire “Tawantinsuyu” in the Quechua language, meaning “The World of the Four Quarters.” The empire was centered on the city of Cuzco, from which it stretched outwards in four directions, encompassing not only vast distances but also considerable vertical terrain.

The Inca governed a vast area but also had to govern a vertical archipelago of communities that extended well above 12,000 feet or 3,600 meters across several climate zones.

Given its central location in the empire, Cuzco became an important cultural and political center.

Governing such an expanse required a unique political system. In the Incan political system, the emperor was the son of the sun. Incan mythology held that the first Incan ruler was sent to the earth by the Sun God Inti. From this lineage, a dynasty of rulers carried divine blood through their veins.

This unique form of political legitimacy gave Incan rulers unquestioned power and influence over the world of the four quarters.

The Inca emperor governed over a large and elaborate bureaucracy staffed by noble families, within which every Inca subject played a role. The primary focus of the bureaucracy was overseeing the Mit’a, an elaborate labor-based taxation system.

The Inca were unique in world history as they were the only state without a market economy or money for financial transactions. The Inca lacked a formal currency and instead relied on shared labor, and each person paid a set amount of labor to the state annually to help complete important tasks, such as road building.

Their lack of currency is not surprising, as the Inca also hold the unique distinction of being the only major civilization in world history to lack a written script. The Inca maintained records of grain, trade, and labor using a quipu. A quipu was a series of colored cotton threads tied with a distinct pattern of knots.

The direction of the thread and the nature of the knots formed an elaborate decimal system that enabled the interpreter of the quipu to understand the information encoded in the threads.

That the Inca achieved such a remarkable feat, constructing the largest civilization in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, is all the more extraordinary given the challenges they overcame without a written script.

Their reliance on labor as a commodity inspired the Spanish, who distorted this system into the encomienda system that dominated the Spanish Empire in the Americas.

The encomienda system was a colonial labor arrangement in which the crown granted settlers the right to demand tribute and forced labor from Indigenous communities in exchange for supposed protection and Christian instruction.

While the Inca used Mit’a as a labor-based system of taxation, the Spanish transformed it into forced labor for sugar cultivation and mining. The Incan system was based on reciprocity, while the encomienda system was based on force and exploitation.

The Incan mit’a system never kept people away long enough to harm agriculture or the harvest. The Inca people managed to be highly self-sufficient in a system with limited economic exchange.

The Incan state gathered food at storage sites throughout the empire called quollqas. In times of famine or need, the state allowed people to take food from these storehouses.

The Inca were masters of farming in the difficult environment they inhabited. The Inca pioneered agriculture based on the terracing of the mountainous geography of the Andes. Terrace farming is still the norm in this part of the world today.

These terraces allowed the Inca to cultivate a wide array of crops, including potatoes, corn, and quinoa, across varying altitudes, soil types, and rainfall.

A 17th-century descendant of the Spanish conquistadores described the farming practices by noting: “In this way, the whole hill was gradually brought under cultivation, the platforms being flattened out like stairs in a staircase, and all the cultivable and irrigable land being put to use.”

Analyzing the agricultural success of these terraces fell to the domain of the Incan priests, who made predictions about the upcoming harvest and rainfall by interpreting the entrails of a sacrificial Llama.

The most unique feature of the Incan landscape was the tambo system. Like the Mongols, the Inca had to cover a vast territory and needed to provide travelers with the opportunity to rest and recover.

Whereas the Mongols used the yam system to provide fresh horses and food, the tambo system allowed Incan runners to rest and eat. The Inca oversaw approximately 2500 tambo stations, each approximately a day apart.

Messengers known as chasquis were crucial to the Inca Empire because they relayed information, goods, and official orders across the vast Andean road network with remarkable speed, allowing the centralized government to administer and coordinate such a large territory.

The Incan religion has long fascinated historians and cultural anthropologists. Inca religious values are erroneously associated with religious practices that mirrored those of the Aztecs, given their historical overlap and proximity.

However, there is no concrete proof that the two communities had any communication with each other.

Their lack of interaction is not surprising given that they were separated by nearly 2,000 miles or 3,200 kilometers, including some of the most difficult terrain on earth, and that they traveled solely on foot.

While the Aztecs relied on human sacrifice in religious ceremonies, the Incas preferred to sacrifice everyday items such as cloth and food.

The primary deity in Incan ceremonial life was Inti, the Sun God. The famed Temple of the Sun in Cusco is a testament to Inti’s importance in Incan life.

Another major deity was Viracocha, the creator. The priests of the last Incan emperor Atahualpa, interpreted the Spanish arrival in the region as a consort of Viracocha.

This misinterpretation had disastrous consequences for the Inca.

The Inca also believed in huacas, or holy shrines. Incan traditions held that huacas were everywhere in the natural world, in a mountain stream, the sky, or the ocean. Huacas could also be important tombs or sacred locations that required maintenance by local clans known as ayllu.

The ayllu mobilized community labor to maintain the sacred location as part of the Mit’a, a tax-based labor system.

Sadly, many of the Incan sacred sites, such as the Temple of the Sun in Cusco or the Temple Viracocha in Raqchi, were built over during the Spanish period that followed Pizarro’s conquest.

One site that avoided Spanish plunder and desecration was the legendary Machu Picchu. Amazingly, there are no references to the site in any of the Spanish chronicles.

The rediscovery of Machu Picchu by Hiram Bingham in 1911 occurred during an expedition he led through the Andes of southern Peru while searching for the lost Inca city of Vilcabamba, which was the last holdout of the Inca against the Spanish.

Guided by local farmers, Bingham was taken in July 1911, to a remote mountain ridge above the Urubamba River where dense vegetation covered extensive stone ruins. A local boy led him up the steep slopes to the site, where he found terraces, temples, and finely constructed stone buildings largely hidden by jungle growth.

Despite the veil of neglect and dense vegetation, Bingham knew he had arrived at a sacred location. Bingham wrote in his journal: “Dimly, I began to realize that this wall with its adjoining semicircular temple over the cave was as fine as the finest stonework in the world…It fairly took my breath away. What could this place be?”

What followed was one of the most important excavations in history. In the years to follow, Bingham and his team cleared the area of overgrowth and cleaned the monument.

Although local farmers living nearby had known about the ruins forever, Bingham’s expedition brought Machu Picchu to international attention through photographs, archaeological study, and articles in National Geographic Magazine.

In a first for the magazine, they dedicated the entire April 1913 issue to Machu Picchu.

It is literally the only issue from the last 115 years that I don’t have in my collection.

Thanks to Bingham and National Geographic, the discovery of Machu Picchu was a global sensation. His work helped establish Machu Picchu as one of the most important archaeological sites of the Inca civilization and eventually one of the most famous ancient sites in the world.

Bingham died in 1956, still believing that he found the historic city of Vilcabamba. The discovery of Vilcabamba had to wait until 1980, when the site was confirmed to be in the rainforests north of Cuzco.

The end of the Inca Empire began with the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1532 during a period of internal instability following a civil war between the Inca princes Atahualpa and Huáscar.

At the Battle of Cajamarca, which I covered on a previous episode, Pizarro lured Atahualpa into the town of Cajamarca under the pretense of a peaceful meeting, then launched a sudden ambush with fewer than 200 Spanish soldiers armed with horses, steel weapons, and firearms.

Thousands of unarmed Inca attendants were killed in the chaos, and Atahualpa was captured, an event that effectively crippled the centralized leadership of the empire.

Although Atahualpa later paid a massive ransom in gold and silver for his release, the Spanish executed him in 1533, and the resulting political collapse allowed the Spanish to seize control of the Inca state and ultimately conquer the empire.

The decline and fall of the Incan Empire was one of the fastest and most complete collapses of any major empire in world history. The speed of their collapse was even more stunning, given how large and powerful they were before the arrival of the Spanish.