Evoe!

 

I was about fourteen when I read The Forest Ship, a Book of the Amazon by Richard Bermann. It is the story of Francisco Orellana (1511 – 1546), the first explorer of the Amazon, and of the dream of El Dorado.

As a youngster, when reading stories like The Deer-slayer and The Last of the Mohicans, I usually took sides with the natives – history has given them a rough deal and those smallpox infected blankets were a particularly nasty touch. But now, when looking at the alternative – which would be nothing but forest and endless prairie dotted with the scowling buffalo – this most powerful and most creative nation on Earth, literally reaching for the stars, almost justifies whatever atrocity these old Puritans had on their conscience.

Further to the South, the native nations had built impressive cities – in its days Tenochtitlan was the best-sanitized metropolis of the two hemispheres – and their astronomers calculated the Venus periods down to a second. In the Andes the people spoke of the darkness in the beginning before Viracocha came from Lake Titicaca, bringing his light to this world. He was also the god of the storms, holding thunderbolts in his hands, and from his eyes fell tears and moistened the land as rain. He created the earth, the sky, the stars and mankind, and he traveled the land in the guise of a beggar.

The plights of his creation made him weep until his tears drowned the old world in a big flood. Then he made everything new and took to the road again, working miracles and teaching the basics of civilization. Viracocha eventually departed somewhere near Manta, Ecuador, walking on the waters of the Pacific Ocean, never to be seen again.

This is the version of a Christian chronicler, recording the tales of his indigenous parishioners. Needless to say, the good padre filtered and percolated what he heard according to his own preconceptions, giving us “bearded” warrior angels” and a “prophecy” of the saintly Viracocha’s return. In the actual story Viracocha didn’t bring about a deluge, but had turned his creation to stone.

The climate in the Andes can be of an almost extraterrestrial harshness. Cuzco is the capital with the highest amount of UV radiation outside of the Polar Regions. The altitudes have changed the genotype, and the people here have the highest count of red blood cells anywhere; El Niño has a history of obliterating entire civilizations. The history of the Incas seems to have risen from a saga of exile, defiance and revenge. For many years Inca Manco Capac (1207/1230) and his siblings stayed hidden in the cave of Pacariqtamba in the Valley of Cuzco. We hear of fighting between the brothers before the leader of the rebels, the Andean Aeneas of this founding saga, set himself up as the first Inca. It would be wrong to speak of Incas in the plural. There was only one Inca, the ruler.

The last Inca, Sapa-Inca Tupaq Amaru, 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, of his eldest son, his uncle, and of the brother-in-law. Then they tortured him, and finally had him torn to pieces with four horses chained to his limbs. The revolt continued, and the Spanish murdered the rest of Tupac Amaru’s family, except for his eleven-year-old son Fernando. The kid was shipped to Spain to rot in prison for the rest of a 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.

From approximately 1200 AD to 1438 AD the Incas ruled over an insignificant provincial tribe that populated the vicinity of Cuzco. Then Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (1438 – 1493), the ninth Sapa Inca, introduced sweeping reforms and created the largest empire of the Americas, the “Tahuantinsuyu” (the united four provinces). Initially he was not the man meant to succeed his father, but when tribal enemies invaded Cuzco’s hinterland, Pachacuti was the man of the hour while his father and the crown prince literally ran for the mountains. Pachacuti rallied the army and defeated the invader – legend says even the stones rose to fight for Pachacuti. If anybody, Inca Pachacuti truly deserved the appellative “the Great.” He was a tyrant and his objective was the usual for every tyranny: dominion and prestige. Yet it was a dominion over people with a share in the common wealth. The rules were simple: “Ama suwa, ama llulla, ama quella ­­– do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy” and you shall prosper. There are lesser causes. The Inca didn’t make a promise of paradise, but he offered a sustainable world against the three riders of the Andean apocalypse: El Niño, earthquakes and landslides. 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. 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 meet every challenge. 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 Guinea pig provided the protein.

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 as beasts of burden they have remained an indispensable means of transportation in the extremes of the Andes. 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. 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 over swinging suspension bridges across the gorges. An extensive network of roads and storehouses secured food supplies for five years in advance. Newly discovered crops were methodically tested in Cuzco’s equivalent of Kew Gardens, a botanic station in the shape of a Greek amphitheatre with soil samples from every region of the empire. At present we know of fifty indigenous varieties of the potato. (Wrapped in a shiny laminate, a single tuber from a blue variety has become a much sought for and expensive greeting gift in Japan. Oh these Japanese!)

The dominium of Pachacuti came as a late arrival, almost as late as the Spanish. The remaining quipus – strings and knots to aid the memory of a messenger – 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. To each of the grey knots is 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 district of their recruitment. Yellow strands represent gold and white strings silver; each is suspended from the thread of a province to assist the mental arithmetic of the imperial bookkeeper. This doesn’t sound or look very poetic, but it does tell us of a ruler who shook the Earth. Inca Pachacuti employed a combination of force and diplomacy.

His emissaries traveled far and wide, explaining to the locals the benefits of signing up to the Inca’s empire. Many of the local chiefdoms did yield without firing a shot. Weighing the benefits, indigenous cultures, some far more ancient than the Inca’s, found it acceptable to abandon their traditions. The benefits were great. The Sun God’s virgins in Cuzco’s nunnery practiced “pray and labor” with a capital “L.” Their example for an industrious life at the loom was of more importance than their prayers. The penal system seemed barbaric. 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 was made to sit in a public place as a warning example. There was awareness for the empire’s dependence on the common people’s labor and their right to be cared for. In the 16th century the Inca’s construction projects and 14,000 miles of roadwork were second only to the Romans. Many structures of the Inca have remained in use.

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 contracted craftsmen and tested his design with scaled down models. Had the Inca’s empire survived untouched, it may very well have had the potential to outlive our own civilization, despite of all the feats of superior technology. One day, things will come to their natural end and I can envision a future where our distant great-grandchildren watch from deep space the dying of the Earth. Then a rugged civilization like that of the Incas will be the last citadel of human habitation. 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. At the arrival of the Spanish, the Inca’s surgeons were on the forefront of medical knowledge; they are still remembered for their brain surgery. Quechua dentists were the first to restore teeth with fillings, using anesthetics to numb the pain. Although it must be admitted that neither on the account of hygiene nor of gastronomy the Quechuas left an impression. The Inca himself was seen to withdraw from his meal for a complete change of costume when he spilled his food, but the commoner didn’t even bother to wash or peel his potatoes before boiling them, and never changed his dress for a wash before it fell off his body in tatters.

Each province had a governor overseeing the local officials, who in turn supervised the 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 laid out as a virtual representation of the 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. Without the assistance of letters the Inca employed a surprisingly sophisticated bureaucracy, administrating 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 150 miles a day. The registrars stored information using strings and knots. “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. The Inca had ordered to erase all memories of the past.

He proclaimed that before his arrival there was no history and no civilization. His was a world without letters, but not without ideology and indoctrination! There were schools, “Yachayhuasis” (houses of knowledge) for the boys and “Acllahuasis” for the girls, at this time virtually the only institution to educate girls anywhere in the world.

The offspring of the provincial elites was obliged to take residence in the Inca’s capital and sat in the same classroom with the youngsters from the Inca’s clan. 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. On the eve of the arrival of the Spanish, a second capital was constructed from scratch – Quito. The lines of communication were beginning to stretch 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, just as Constantinople was bad news for Rome.

In fact in this system of centralized paternalism it did become bad news. There was only one person who was allowed to be a complete individual, and if another person was laying 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 intervention. In the end the Inca’s state, despite of all the knots and strings of the registrars, still remained an oral society where the constitution depended on individuals able and willing to recall the content of their covenant from memory. Things were 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 competence and initiative by the magistrate on the spot. There was no space for solicitation on the base of written prescripts and traditions. Even the practice of human sacrifices had not yet come to an end, but compared to the institutionalized cruelty and emphasis on inflicting pain by previous civilizations, there was a shift in emphasis. 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, yet X-rays reveal the distress; the little girl must have tried to get the wrappings off and in her struggle had defecated into the bandages.

Time, the real thing that weakens our knees, is made up of the stories we pass on to the future, and often these stories are not true. We invent golden ages that never were and we pick our heroes from the muck of poorly documented periods; we either glorify the ignominies of past horrors or try expunging them from the records altogether.

“Every author,” says Jorge Luis Borges somewhere, “is creating his own pedigree.” The same can be said about the nations. To obliterate the past we need not wait for asteroids or the next Ice Age. In the same spirit as Pachacuti, the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (259 – 210 BC) ordered to burn all records preceding his rule, including the writings of Confucius. And with the books of the master they also burned many of his students. Not everybody could be apprehended and the survivors hid the precious manuscripts behind the plastering on the walls of their houses.

The Inca was fortunate. His conqueror wrote him a gracious epitaph. In 1589, the last of Pizarro’s henchmen, Don Mancio Serra de Leguisamo, confessed his remorse: “I find myself guilty to have destroyed by evil example the people who had such a wise government as was enjoyed by these natives. 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 on our doors, they supposed it was out of fear and not because there could be thieves.”

© – 11/8/2009 – by michael sympson, 3,000 words, all rights reserved