The Inca’s Law

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 Nino 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.

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.

He became 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 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 supposed 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 plenipotentiaries 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 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 location at the extreme end of the empire suggests that the lines of communication began stretching too far, and it also had the potential of becoming bad news for the central government in Cuzco.

The Inca employed a surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy that without the assistance of letters administrated a patchwork of languages, cultures and peoples. The Chimu-people already used money in their commerce, while the empire’s economy as a whole was based on barter and taxation of luxury goods and on forced labor. 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 kept stored information in the form of “Quipus,” a system of knots and strings. Although lacking the use of letters this was not a world without education. There were schools - “Yachayhuasis” (houses of knowledge) for the boys and “Acllahuasis” for the girls - and the youngsters of the Inca’s clan attended together with the children of the provincial elites. 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 and source of royal bloodlines. 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 epitomizes a feature that can be observed everywhere.

It tells us something about the Inca’s master plan.

If anybody, Inca Pachacuti is truly deserving of 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.

Or was it?

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.

When Inca Pachacuti constructed his new capital, he 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 was by accident.

The Inca didn’t make a promise of paradise but he offered a sustainable world, politically as well as against the three riders of the Andean apocalypse: El Nino, 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 confidence in 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 the 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.) Centuries of experience prior to the Inca, had locally accumulated the know-how necessary for this degree of sophistication in agriculture and technology. Man impressed 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. An empire in which the people didn’t know how to write, but had found a way to jolt fading memories.

“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.

Very similar to 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. The Inca’s construction projects and fourteen thousand miles of roadwork compare with Roman engineering, and 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 puritanical in style Inca Pachacuti used to pass his days, but it does tell us of a man who shook the Earth.

Plato once 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.

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 resulted from the intuitive accumulation of the mason’s skills, like bees constructing their hives. These days nobody will doubt there was a master plan. The Quechua engineer, too, worked with scaled models.

The 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 true, and the rather sudden expansion of the empire over a short period of time testifies to plenty of initiative, but it may all have been in the service to the greater good. We know that individual life was valued. At the arrival of the Spanish the Inca’s surgeons were at 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.

If this would have been a society without appreciation for human life, then why the effort?

From the looks of it the penal system seemed barbaric enough. The Inca would not tolerate offenses against the dignity of his person nor could the 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 but was obliged until his dying days to take a seat at the market as a warning example. Forgiveness was not part of the program; yet if anything this indicates awareness that without people actually doing the work nothing is accomplished, and therefore they need 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 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 and this was due to the fact that 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 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.

Not that individualism and perhaps a more humanistic perspective hadn’t had a dog’s day in pre-Columbian America too. Some five hundred years before the Incas, the Moche people had sculpted amazingly realistic faces onto their pottery, and it was not all solemnity and dignity, there are faces falling apart in uninhibited hilarity; these people obviously had a sense of humor. This is unique for the artifacts of pre-Columbian America. No two faces are alike, we seem to look at genuine portraits. The Moche’s textiles are the most vibrant known to have survived. But in the end El Nino made the crops whither: the Moche could have become the Greeks of the Americas, instead they walked out with shamefully stained hands in a last blood-orgy of hopeless sacrifices, before putting to the torch their own temples and homes.

So with the Inca, the era of human sacrifices had not come to an end, but there was a shift in emphasis. Unlike people teetering on the edge of despair the Inca 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 and CAT-scans testify for the child’s distress; the little girl had defecated into the bandages.

To live, and live well under the shadows of El Nino and the Andes requires a determined response in every department. The Inca was about to deliver it 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.”