Culture

Inca

Also Known As Incas · Inka

Peoples

The Inca were the Quechua speaking people of Cusco whose state, Tawantinsuyu, ruled the Andes from Ecuador to Chile until the Spanish invasion of the 1530s. Their religion set the sun, Inti, at the head of a state cult served from the Coricancha in Cusco, above an older Andean worship of the creator Viracocha, of the earth as Pachamama, and of the huacas, the sacred places and objects of each community. Lines called ceques ordered the landscape around the capital, and high mountain shrines received the offerings the Spanish called capacocha.

Facts

Origins

Origin Region

The Cusco valley in the southern Peruvian highlands, from which Tawantinsuyu ruled from Ecuador to Chile. 1

Language Family

Quechua, of the Quechuan family, which the Inca state carried across the Andes as its administrative language. 2

Traditions

Principal Religious Traditions

A state cult of Inti the sun, served from the Coricancha at Cusco and laid over an older Andean worship of the creator Viracocha and of the huaca, with the ceque lines radiating from the capital and the mummified rulers ordering the ritual year. 3

Practice

Practice Status

Discontinued as a state religion 4

Learn More

Inti, the Coricancha and the Ceque Lines

The Inca state cult set the sun, Inti, at its head, with the Sapa Inca as his son, and its centre was the Coricancha in Cusco, whose walls were sheathed in gold and whose enclosure held images of subordinate powers brought in from conquered provinces. Beside Inti stood Viracocha, a creator whose exact position in the system is argued over, and the thunder, Illapa, who mattered most to farmers.

Brian Bauer's reconstruction of the ceque system describes the apparatus that held it all together. Lines radiated from the Coricancha across the valley, each strung with shrines, and each shrine was assigned to a named social group responsible for its offerings on a fixed day. The system was calendar, land register and religious obligation at once, and it was recorded, according to the colonial sources, on knotted cords.

The most demanding rite was capacocha, in which children selected for physical perfection were brought to Cusco, feted, and then taken to high mountain shrines and left there. Frozen bodies recovered from Andean summits have confirmed the practice in detail, including what was given beforehand. The atlas records it as attested, and notes that the Spanish accounts describing it were written by people who used it as a justification for what they were doing.

Tawantinsuyu, and the Chroniclers Who Wrote It Down

Tawantinsuyu, the four parts together, was assembled in under a century. Terence D'Altroy's account describes an expansion from the Cusco valley in the early fifteenth century to a state running four thousand kilometres along the Andes, held together by a road system, storehouses, resettled populations and a labour tax paid in work rather than in goods.

Religion was one instrument of that expansion. Conquered peoples kept their own huacas, but their principal images were brought to Cusco where they served in effect as hostages, and the sun cult and the Inca calendar were imposed above them. The state also took women, the aqllakuna, into enclosed houses to weave and to brew for the cult.

The Spanish arrived in 1532 during a war of succession between Atahualpa and Huascar, seized Atahualpa at Cajamarca and executed him the following year. Everything written about Inca religion was therefore written after the collapse, by or for the victors. The partial exceptions are Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, who wrote from Spain half a century later, and Juan de Betanzos, who married into the Inca elite and is the closest thing to an insider account. The atlas treats all of them as testimony requiring the same scrutiny.

Connections

Associated With

Catequil

This source names Inca directly: "report, consultation by the Inca themselves before major undertakings."

Source Catequil: The Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnography of a Major Provincial Huaca (Topic and Topic)John R. Topic and Theresa L. Topic

Catequil: The Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnography of a Major Provincial Huaca (Topic and Topic)

This source names Inca directly: "including reported consultation by Inca elites, until Spanish colonial authorities recorded its destruction in the 1560s as part of a campaign against indigenous oracles."

Source Catequil: The Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and Ethnography of a Major Provincial Huaca (Topic and Topic)John R. Topic and Theresa L. Topic

Chachapoya

This source names Inca directly: "800 to their conquest first by the Inca in the late fifteenth century and then by the Spanish."

Source Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads (Church and von Hagen)Warren B. Church and Adriana von Hagen

Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads (Church and von Hagen)

This source names Inca directly: "niches, and their conquest by the Inca and subsequently the Spanish, while noting how little of the Chachapoya's own religious vocabulary survives, since they left no deciphered writing system and..."

Source Chachapoyas: Cultural Development at an Andean Cloud Forest Crossroads (Church and von Hagen)Warren B. Church and Adriana von Hagen

Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas)

This source names Inca directly: "Comentarios Reales de los Incas was written by Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, drawing on his own mixed heritage and childhood..."

Source Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas)Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca

Cristobal de Molina (Real Academia de la Historia biography)

This source names Inca directly: "Cristobal de Molina, the chronicler of Inca religion, giving his birth in Baeza."

Source Cristobal de Molina (Real Academia de la Historia biography)Real Academia de la Historia

Historia del Nuevo Mundo

This source names Inca directly: "in Peru and access to earlier now-lost Inca and colonial records, making it one of the most detailed surviving accounts of Inca religion, ritual calendar and cosmology."

Source Historia del Nuevo MundoBernabe Cobo

Inca Religion

Inca Religion and Customs (Historia del Nuevo Mundo)

This source names Inca directly: "missionary who wrote this account of Inca religion and customs from direct observation and interviews in colonial Peru, translated into English by Roland Hamilton and published by University of..."

Source Inca Religion and Customs (Historia del Nuevo Mundo)Bernabe Cobo; translated by Roland Hamilton

Inti Raymi, 24 June

This source names Inca directly: "The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega describes it as a major Inca state ceremony in Cusco honoring the sun god Inti, held at the sun's furthest point of retreat."

Source Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas)Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca

Qhapaq Raymi

This source names Inca directly: "of age and initiation rites of young Inca noblemen, who were tested in feats of endurance, pierced through the ears to receive the noble earspools, and formally admitted to adult warrior status..."

Source Comentarios Reales de los Incas (Royal Commentaries of the Incas)Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca

Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records

This source names Inca directly: "knotted-cord recording devices of the Inca and their predecessors, and this University of Texas Press monograph is his scholarly study of their structure, arguing that the pattern of knots, cords..."

Source Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String RecordsGary Urton

Suma y narracion de los Incas

This source names Inca directly: "de Betanzos's Suma y narracion de los Incas is a sixteenth century Spanish chronicle of Inca history and religion, written by a colonial interpreter who was married to an Inca noblewoman of the..."

Source Suma y narracion de los IncasJuan de Betanzos

The Incas, 2nd edition

This source names Inca directly: "both the archaeological record of the Inca state and the colonial Spanish chronicles describing it, and its real methodological strength, stated in its own approach, is reading those chronicles..."

Source The Incas, 2nd editionTerence N. D'Altroy

The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque System

This source names Inca directly: "sites, huacas, radiating from Cusco in Inca cosmology."

Source The Sacred Landscape of the Inca: The Cusco Ceque SystemBrian S. Bauer