The Magnificent People

 

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