The
Magnificent People
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Ama suwa, ama llulla, ama quella - do not
steal, do not lie, do not be lazy.
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The Inca’s Law
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In
the Andes the world can be of an almost extraterrestrial harshness. The
altitudes have changed the genotype, and the people here have the
highest count
of red blood cells anywhere. The climate is coming at us with a bipolar
fury;
El Niño has a history of obliterating entire civilizations. The
alpine beauty
is a sight to be seen, but it can be life threatening to pause and
behold it. For the Spanish it was the dream of El Dorado.
The
ancient rulers of the Incas presented themselves as descendants of the
Sun, and
the identification with the nourishing and at the same time fatal
presence of
our star was a close fit. Cuzco is the capital with the highest amount
of UV
radiation outside of the polar regions. Actually it is wrong to speak
of Incas
in the plural. There was only one Inca, the ruler. The last man with
this
title, was Sapa-Inca Tupaq Amaru. He was murdered – the Spanish say
executed –
in 1572. His people continued to resist. As late as 1780, Tupac Amaru’s
great-grandson, Tupac Amaru II (1742 –
1781) – born Jose Gabriel
Condorcanqui – became the leader of an indigenous uprising in colonial
Peru.
It
was the first major uprising against the colonial masters in two
centuries and made him a mythical figure in the Peruvian struggle for
independence and
for the
indigenous rights movement. The Spanish captured Tupac Amaru II and on
the main
plaza in Cuzco, the same place where his great-grandfather had been
beheaded,
they made him witness the execution of his wife, his eldest son, his
uncle, and
brother-in-law, then they tortured him, and finally had him quartered –
torn to
pieces with horses pulling at his limbs. The revolt continued, and the
Spanish
murdered the rest of Tupac Amaru’s family, except for his
eleven-year-old son
Fernando. He was shipped to Spain to rot in prison for the rest of his
short
life. It is not known if any other member of the Inca’s royal family
had
survived this final purge. It seems very possible. DNA testing on
imperial
mummies from approximately 1400 AD. has lately revealed that a direct
descendant is living and working in Washington DC.
In
the Inca’s empire the leadership on all levels was structured by
moieties: a
system that divided the clan in two branches, exactly mirroring each
other but
distinguished as upper branch – “Hanan” – and the lower branch –
“Hurin.” The leaders of such moieties were of
equal rank and expected to rule
together, but at the time of the Spanish conquest, prestige and
dominion was
with the leader of the Hanan moiety. He was the supreme leader of the
empire
and called the “Sapa Inca.”
It
has led to the misunderstanding that the Empire had been ruled by two
different
dynasties in succession. All that had happened was that the highest
office,
after five successions by Hurin rulers, had passed from the lower
branch to the
Hanan. The system did lead repeatedly to civil wars over the
succession, and
this, more than anything, helped the Spanish to became the Inca’s
undoing.
From
approximately 1200 AD. to 1438 AD. the Inca had ruled over an
insignificant
provincial tribe who populated the vicinity of Cuzco. Then Inca
Pachacuti (1438
– 1493), introduced sweeping
reforms and created the empire,
the “Tahuantinsuyu”
(the united
four provinces). The Inca’s rule came as a late arrival, almost as late
as the
Spanish.
Inca
Pachacuti employed a
combination of force and diplomacy. His emissaries traveled to
the
regions he had laid his eyes upon and explained to the local
authorities the
benefits of signing up to the Inca’s empire. The benefits must have
been real,
otherwise not that many local chiefdoms would have submitted without
firing a
shot. The children of the local elite were obliged to take residence in
the
Inca’s capital and receive an education in the new way of life. In
return the
Inca married out women of Inca nobility to local rulers. This created a
federalist
system under central rule, which was divided in four provinces: “Chinchaysuyu” (the seaboard to the north), “Antisuyu” (the eastern face of the Andes), “Qontisuyu” (the triangle between Nazca, Arequipa
and Cuzco),
and “Qollasuyu” (the
seaboard to
the south). The four districts intersected in the middle of the
capital, Cuzco.
Each
province had a governor overseeing the local officials, who in turn
supervised
agriculture, the cities and the mines. There were separate chains of
command
for the military and for religious institutions. The local officials
were
responsible for settling disputes and keeping track of each family's
contribution to the “mita,”
the
mandatory public service. Cuzco was designed and laid out as a virtual
representation of the entire empire. There was a sector of the city for
each
province centering on the road leading to that province; nobles and
immigrants
lived in the sector corresponding to their origin. Each sector was
further
divided into areas for the upper and lower moieties. The more
prestigious a
noble was, the closer he lived to the center.
Then,
on the eve of the
arrival of the Spanish, a second capital was constructed from scratch –
Quito.
The lines
of
communication began stretching too far, yet one can't help wondering
whether such a city at the extreme end of the empire didn't have the
potential
of
becoming bad news for the central government in Cuzco.
The
Inca employed a surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy administrating
without the
assistance of letters a patchwork of languages, cultures
and
peoples. The Chimu-people already used money in their commerce, whereas
the
empire’s economy as a whole was based on barter, forced labor and
taxing luxury
goods. The people used to say, that the Inca’s tax
collector
would even pluck the lice from the lame and old.
Relays
of messengers delivered oral missives at the speed of one hundred-fifty
miles a
day. The registrars stored information using strings and knots, the “Quipus.”
Not knowing how to write, other ways had been found to jolt fading
memory. “The Quipucamayu, the keeper of the quipus, would use a
black
cord, the color that indicated time, as the central string. Then he
would
suspend from it a lot of uncolored strings with many little knots tied
in them.
The reader would understand it to mean that before the first emperor
(crimson
thread) for a very long time (many threads and knots), the people had
no ruler
(no scarlet threads), no chiefs (no deep purple), no religion (no blue
threads), and no administrative departments (no variegated threads)”
(Louis Baudin, The Incas of Peru). This was indeed the message. For
centuries, local cultures had
accumulated the know-how necessary for this degree of sophistication in
agriculture and technology. Man had learned to impress his widely
visible presence upon the Andes. But it took an empire to open lines of
communication and make local skills available end to end. Not unlike
the Spanish, the Inca proclaimed that before
him there had been no culture, no religion, no civilization. And
weighing the benefits, many of the indigenous cultures, some far more
ancient than the Inca’s, found it acceptable to abandon their
traditions.
The
benefits were great. In the 16th century the Inca’s construction
projects and 14,000
miles of roadwork were second only to Roman engineering. Many
structures
of the
Inca are still in use. The
remaining quipus tell us how this was achieved. They give us the time –
four
knots on a scarlet thread, indicating the fourth year of the ruler –
and the
number of subdued regions, ten small knots on a grey string. The quipus
also
kept track on the costs in human terms. To each of the grey knots was
fastened
a green thread with knots indicating the number of enemies killed and a
read
string for the imperial army with color coded knots for the number of
casualties and the places where they came from. Yellow strands for
gold, and
white strings for silver, each suspended from the thread of a province
assisted
to the mental arithmetic of the imperial bookkeeper. This doesn’t sound
or look
very poetic, a quipu will not tell us how lavish in expenditure or
how puritanical
in style Inca Pachacuti used to pass his days, but it does tell us of a
man who
shook the Earth. A world without letters, but not without education.
Plato
said: "We must remain firm in our resolution that hymns to the
gods and praise of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be
admitted
into our State. For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to
enter,
either in epic or lyric verse, not law and reason, but pleasure and
pain will
be rulers in our state” (Plato, Laws), and to this end Plato devised
a system
of star chambers and
inquisitorial procedures, of collective upbringing, marching bands and
the
breeding of the blondest. The Inca, no doubt, would have agreed. Yet
his
thought police didn’t face much resistance. There were schools,
“Yachayhuasis” (houses
of
knowledge) for the boys and “Acllahuasis” for the girls,
virtually the only institution on the planet to educate girls at this
time, anywhere. The children of the provincial elites studied in the
same classroom with youngsters from the Inca’s clan. It was an
opportunity for
ideological indoctrination, but at the arrival of the Spanish the Inca
was
still trying to work out whether his descent from Manco Capac (1207/1230), a local warlord from the
neighborhood of Cuzco, had made him a direct descendant of Inti, the
Sun God, or whether Manco Capac had been the scion of colonists who in
some mysterious way had arrived from the shores of Lake Titicaca, the
empire’s holy land.
The
Inca’s empire became the largest in Pre-Columbian America, stretching
from Quito, Ecuador, to Tucuman, Argentina. The design of the capital
as a virtual representation of the entire empire epitomized a typical
feature of the Inca’s master plan. If anybody, Inca Pachacuti truly
deserved the appellative “the Great.” His objective was dominion and
prestige, but it was meant to be the dominion over people with a share
in the common wealth. There are lesser causes.
The
Inca’s policy was dictated by geology and climate. The public space at
the
center of Machu Picchu, a mountain fortress from the final days, is
surrounded
with rocks which seem to have no function. A closer look reveals that
their
shape is mimicking the surrounding mountains as a kind of scaled down
models.
Anthropologists are usually quick to assign to these rocks some sort of
religious significance, and as far as the Inca’s religion gave
expression to
his approach to the world, this is certainly true. However when we
visit the
capital we find there a terraced structure shaped like a Greek
amphitheater
that samples various types of soil, irrigated in a strangely irregular
fashion,
and exploiting shade and sunshine to mimic the differences of soil,
temperature
and moisture in the various altitudes and microclimates of different
and often
distant places in the Andes. The pollen analysis from the soil samples
doesn’t
leave much doubt: this was a botanic station, with ingenuity designed
to
experiment with various crops from all parts of the empire. When
the Spanish executed Inca Tupac Amaru in 1572 his last words were: "Mother
Earth, witness how my enemies shed my blood." Mother Earth! Not
Inti, the Sun God. The Inca received
divine sanction from a treaty with Mother Earth.
To
build his new capital, Inca Pachacuti imported craftsmen from Lake
Titicaca.
They taught the locals how to sculpt uneven sized stones in exact fits
to fill
the concavity of the masonry below, and whether by design or accident,
this
type of masonry is only more firmly shaken into position when hit by an
earthquake. However I don’t think this is by accident.
The
Inca didn’t make a promise of paradise but he offered a sustainable
world,
if not politically, then at least sustainable against the three riders
of the Andean
apocalypse: El Niño, earthquakes and landslides. All of which
had brought down entire
civilizations in the region, but the Inca’s masonry has passed the test
in 1615
and 1960 with flying colors. It was Inca Pachacuti’s mission statement,
hewn in
stone. In a system of comprehensive care from the cradle to the bier he
claimed
dominion, not just over man but over nature. Nobody was to go hungry,
nobody to
die without being cared for. Nobody was to go without clothing. This
Inca had
supreme confidence in the human capacity to cope, or at least
his
own capacity.
An
extensive network of roads and storehouses secured food supplies for
five years
in advance; every crop imaginable was tested and harvested in suitable
areas.
The diet was rich in tubers. The coca plant provided pain relief for
working in
high altitudes and in the surgery. In fact, after the demise of the
Roman
empire, the Inca’s realm was the only before modern times that was
prepared to
move considerable quantities of food stock over large distances to
supply regions in need. The Andes ascend through roughly four distinct
climate
zones.
The most inhospitable region around the peaks is the realm of the gods,
the
zone below is the arid home of the alpacas and it leaves the traveler
barely
functional if he doesn’t chew a wad of coca leaves. To this day the
alpaca and
the llama provide fiber for textiles and in the extremes of the Andes
they have
remained an indispensable means of transportation as beasts of burden.
The two
arable climate zones below are separated in countless pockets of
regional
micro-climates, each with its own indigenous varieties of tubers, yams,
beans,
bananas, bread fruit, squash, and coca. The protein in the Quechua’s
diet is
provided by the Guinea-pig. Under the Inca, extensive terracing and
irrigation
on a truly monumental scale utilized every inch of soil even in regions
so
rugged that soil had to be carried in baskets across the gorges, on
swinging
suspension bridges. At present we know of fifty indigenous varieties of
the
potato. (Wrapped in a shiny laminate, a single tuber from a blue
variety, blue
even inside, has become a much sought for and expensive greeting gift
in Japan.
Oh these Japanese.)
Entire
cities were
constructed from scratch in one go. Everywhere the planning mind is
clearly
visible in the irrigation systems, the terraces, the storage
facilities, the
roads and service stations. The Peruvian engineer had to make due
without slide
rule and blueprint, but he could rely on the skills and ingenuity of
the
craftsmen, and was assisted by his knotted strings which must have been
a tool
of great power, judging by the result. It has been debated whether our
medieval
cathedrals had been the result of detailed planning or emerged from an
intuitive accumulation of skills, almost like bees
constructing their honeycombs.
These days nobody will doubt there was a master plan. The Quechua
engineer,
too, used to plan his design on scaled down models. And assuming that
the empire
would have survived untouched by the outer world in a kind of splendid
isolation, it may very well have outlived our own civilization when
despite of all
the feats of superior technology one day things will come to their
natural end.
I can envision a future where our distant great-grandchildren watch
from deep
space the dying of the Earth with a rugged civilization like that of
the Incas holding
out as the last citadel of human habitation. It will not be a very
sophisticated
civilization, but adaptable and suited to the harsh conditions of an
increasingly hostile environment. Despite all the achievements of the
Inca
civilization – we even have evidence for hot air ballooning; it seems
some of the
Inca grandees received an air-born sendoff similar to the Viking
princes on
their burning burial ships in the open sea – there were inbuilt factors
that
inevitably slowed down progress and development. The Inca’s
achievements came at a price: a stern collectivism, that seemed to
frown on individual enterprise. However without a single document to
back it up, it is hard to tell whether this is entirely true. The
rather sudden expansion of the empire over a short period of time
testifies to plenty of individual initiative, and we know that the life
of individuals was valued.
At
the arrival of the Spanish the Inca’s surgeons were on the forefront of
medical knowledge anywhere on the planet, they are still remembered for
their brain surgery. Quechua dentists were the first to restore teeth
with fillings, using anesthetics to numb the pain. If this would have
been a society without appreciation for human life, then why the
effort? Although it must be admitted that neither on the account of
hygiene nor gastronomy the Quetchuas left an impression. The Inca
himself would withdraw from his meal for a complete change of costume
if he spilled his food, but the commoner didn’t even bother to wash or
peel his potatoes before cooking them, let alone change his dress for a
wash before it fell off his body in tatters. The penal system as well,
seemed barbaric enough. Naturally the Inca would not tolerate offenses
against the dignity of his person nor could a thief count on mitigating
circumstances. Invariably the penalty was loss of the offending hand.
But after the execution of the penalty, a doctor would attend to the
wound and restore the offender to health. He would continue to receive
his food rations and clothing like everybody else, yet until his dying
days made to sit in the public place as a warning example. Forgiveness
was not part of the program, yet there was awareness for the empire’s
dependence on the common people’s labor and their right to be cared
for.
Mother
Earth and the Sun dominated the polytheistic pantheon but the Sun-God’s
virgins
in Cuzco’s nunnery practiced “pray and labor” with a capital “L.” Their
example
for an industrious life and the textiles they produced were of more
importance
than their prayers. In this system of centralized paternalism there was
only
one person who was allowed to be a complete individual, and if another
person
laid claim to the same privilege the situation was rife for civil war.
This
was the constitutional weakness in the system, a weakness that could
have
brought it down even without the Spanish exploiting the situation; in
fact it
did bring it down. Civil war and a measles epidemic leveled the playing
field
for the Spanish. In the end the Inca’s state, despite the knots and
strings of
the registrars, still remained an oral society where the constitution
depended
on the people able and willing to recall the content of their covenant
from
memory. Which means, things had to be kept simple and generic. Loyalty
could
only be owed to the Inca, who was both, a person and a symbol, and
everything
depended on the readiness for immediate intervention by the magistrate
on the
spot. There was no space for solicitation on the base of written
prescripts. Even
the practice of human sacrifices had not yet come to an end, but
compared with
the institutionalized cruelty and emphasis on inflicting pain by
previous civilizations,
there was a shift in emphasis. Unlike previous cultures whose harvests
had been
entirely at the mercy – and the wrath – of El Niño, the Inca, in
very modest
numbers, continued the practice as a sign of gratitude for his success.
Tightly
swaddled and under the influence of narcotics, children of the nobility
were
left to die on the icy mountain peaks, face to face with the spirits of
the
ancients. Surrounded by its toys, the impression on the face of such
mummified
child seems to suggest a peaceful death. A romantic and therefore wrong
impression. X-rays reveal the child’s distress; the little girl must
have tried
to get the wrappings off and in her struggle had defecated into the
bandages.
To
live, and live well under the shadows of El Niño and the Andes
requires a
determined response in every department. Despite civil strife and
epidemics the
Inca was still capable to deliver when Pizarro and his hoodlums knocked
at the
gate. On his dying day in 1589, the last of these hoodlums, Don Mancio
Serra de
Leguisamo, dictated his will and expressed remorse. It sets a fitting
epitaph: “I
find myself guilty to have destroyed by evil example, the people who
had such a
wise government as was enjoyed by these natives. We found these
kingdoms in
such good order, that throughout them there was not a thief, nor a
vicious man,
nor an adulteress, or a prostitute. The men had honest and useful
occupations.
When they saw us putting locks and keys on our doors, they supposed
that it was
from fear of them, but not because they believed that anyone would
steal from
an other.”
© – 3/31/2009 – by
michael sympson, 3,500 words, all rights
reserved