#the incas

[meret118]

Researchers Have Found an Inca Tunnel Beneath the Peruvian City of Cusco

The dug-out passages may follow the exact path of the Inca capital’s aboveground roads

[ivandurak]

Both oral traditions and archaeology suggest that warfare was rife in the sierra from Ecuador to Argentina after ad 1200 or a bit later. Many communities settled on the peaks in protected villages well above the best farmlands. Some of the most powerful societies of the time, including the Lupaqa and Qolla, lived around Lake Titicaca. In the early Colonial era, they called their pre-Inca rulers kings, but they do not seem to have attained a state level of organization. Instead, the region’s societies seem to have lived in considerable instability, in which local conflict played a major role in both begetting chiefly alliances and fracturing polities (Arkush 2011). Radiocarbon dates suggest that the settlement pattern shifted radically about ad 1300, which may have been a result of a significant growth in conflict among neighboring communities (Arkush 2011). Groups living in the populous Peruvian sierra, such as the Wankas, lived in towns that contained as many as 4,500 densely packed circular houses and may have housed 10,000 or more people. Significantly, the shift to defensively situated communities occurred about the same time in that region as had occurred in the Titicaca area, suggesting that similar processes were in play in both areas (D’Altroy et al. 2001). In the south Andes, the largest towns contained a few thousand people, but regional polities still held no more than 20,000.

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Linguists have recently arrived at the view that the Incas may have adopted Quechua for imperial rule precisely because it was already widespread. Before then, the Incas spoke one or two other languages, most likely Aymara and possibly Puquina.

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The language that the Incas used to administer their domain is commonly known today as Southern Peruvian Quechua, but its speakers knew it as runasimi, or human speech.

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The term Quechua itself was probably imposed early in the Colonial period by Spaniards who mistook the word qheswa (valley) in the phrase qheswa simi (valley speech) for the name of the language (Mannheim 1991).

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Quechua was entrenched by 1532 as the language in which all official business was supposed to be conducted.

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the home region of Quechua lay along the central Peruvian coast (figure 2.6a). The language had split into two major branches and was already widely distributed in the highlands at least five centuries before the Inca rise to power. The variant that the Incas adopted appears to have been Chincha Quechua. Its roots lay on the south-central coast, but it was used in parts of the Andes from Ecuador to south Peru (Adelaar and Muysken 2004). The Incas’ major contribution to the geographic spread of this form of Quechua was in the south Andes, and even some of that distribution can be attributed to Spanish Colonial practices (DeMarrais 2012).

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Drawing from historical linguistic and toponymic (place-name) evidence, some linguists suggest that the Incas probably spoke Aymara well into the early imperial era, since that was the language of the southern Peruvian highlands in late prehistory and Aymara place-names are even found as far north as the central Peruvian highlands (Adelaar and Muysken 2004; Cerrón-Palomino 2004, 2008; Heggarty and Beresford-Jones 2012; figure 2.6b). Quechua and Aymara speakers apparently interacted a great deal, to the extent that the two languages now overlap about 30 percent (e.g., in lexicons)

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The leading Andean linguist today, Rodolfo Cerrón-Palomino (2012), suggests that the shift may have occurred as late as the rule of Wayna Qhapaq, that is, no more than three or four decades before the Spaniards’ arrival, because its widespread use in the lands to the north made it an effective sociopolitical tool. Intriguingly, a few chroniclers (e.g., Garcilaso, Murúa) reported that the Incas maintained a secret language that only they were allowed to learn. Many scholars have dismissed that idea as fancy, but those who accept its existence have settled on Aymara or Puquina as the most likely candidates.

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key Inca terms for sacred places (the capital qusqu, lake Titicaca) or beings (e.g., the Sun deity Inti) arguably have Puquina origins or were filtered through mixed Aymara–Puquina structures (Cerrón-Palomino 2004, 2012).

Terence D'Altroy. The Incas. Second edition.

[intothestacks]

Knot Your Average Writing System

What’s this you’re looking at? A fancy necklace, perhaps?

Nope.

That, friends, is a 15th-century government document.

We used to think the Inca couldn’t write. It turns out they could, just not in a way we would readily recognize. Instead of writing with symbols inked or carved on a surface, they wrote with knots on strings. The style of writing and storing information shown in the picture is called a khipu (aka a quipu).

What they were for

This intricate and ingenious method of communication was used by the Incas and a few other Andean cultures to store all sorts of information: meticulously detailed censuses, tax obligations, accounts, livestock, land measurements, military organization, poems and stories, and even as letters delivered by post.

How they worked

Khipus range wildly in intricacy, from being just a few short strands to having hundreds of long strands. The knots themselves each had meaning. How they were tied and how far apart from one another they were mattered just as much as the colour of the knot and where on the khipu it was located. This means a khipu, especially an intricate one, couldn’t be made off the cuff. It took painstaking planning and preparation to map out exactly what the end result would look like before you could so much as tie your first knot. Khipus also came with oral information so you could better remember what the stored data was about. The stories that went with each khipu were memorized by khipu-keepers (khipu librarians, if you will) called khipu kamayuq.

Khipus nowadays

This way of recordkeeping is old, dating possibly as far back as 3,000 BCE. Quipus were widely used until the 17th century. They’re still used in some areas of the Andes to keep track of livestock and ceremonial reasons, but their use is limited compared to what it used to be.

Alas, old quipus are hard to come by. The reason for this is twofold. First came a mass quipu-burning by Incan Emperor Atawalpa. When he took power, he sought to destroy the historical record regarding the reign of his bitter rival and half-brother, Waskhar. Then even more quipus were thrown in the flames when the Conquistadors took power. (They feared and mistrusted the information stored in the quipus.)

Khipus’ connection to Canada

Khipus are considered to be a sister communication system to the North American Wampum communication method. Wampums, unlike khipus, are traditionally made with shell beads and in horizontal rows. Like with khipus, their use is now limited in comparison to how they were previously used. Historically, they have been used for storytelling, as ceremonial gifts, and for recording important treaties and historical events. If the name “wampum” sounds familiar it is likely due to you having heard about the Two Row Wampum Treaty belt in history class.

Want to learn more about khipus? Check out the Khipu Database Project website!

Image Credit:

"Quipu" by Ancient History Encyclopedia is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

[ivandurak]

Though a powerful monarch, the Sapa Inca (“Unique Lord”) did not rule alone. He was counseled by mummies of his immortal ancestors and their other descendants, who all joined him in Cuzco’s most solemn ceremonies and drunken revelry. [...] Pedro Sancho and Pedro Pizarro, both members of the original expedition, have left us some impressions of the capital (plate 1.1): There is a very beautiful fortress of earth and stone with big windows that look over the city [of Cuzco] and make it appear more beautiful … [The stones] are as big as pieces of mountains or crags … The Spaniards who see them say that neither the bridge of Segovia nor other constructions of Hercules or the Romans are as magnificent as this. (Sancho 1917: 193–4) Most of the people [of Cuzco] served the dead, I have heard it said, who they daily brought out to the main square, setting them down in a ring, each one according to his age, and there the male and female attendants ate and drank. The attendants made fires for each of the dead in front of them … and lighting [them], burned everything they had put before them, so that the dead should eat of everything that the living ate. (P. Pizarro 1986: 89–90) [...] The Incas’ feats seemed all the more fabulous when the conquistadores heard that the realm was only about four generations old. As the Incas explained it, the empire was launched when Pachakuti usurped the throne from his father Wiraqocha Inka and began to annex the peoples around Cuzco. His successes and organizational genius were followed only by those of his son Thupa Inka Yupanki and grandson Wayna Qhapaq, and then by the final dynastic war (table 1.1). [...] [...] history was kept as oral tradition, supplemented by mnemonic registers. In Cuzco, poet-historians called amauta and knot-record masters called khipu kamayuq (figure 1.2) recited sagas of the royal past at the bidding of the court. The khipu themselves seem to have encoded information about the past in ways that had as much to do with cultural visions of hierarchy, power, and space as with sequences of events. Aristocrats also memorized epic poems, some of which they recited to the Spaniards. Not surprisingly, the descendants of different rulers called up versions of the past that favored their own ancestors, [...] Cieza (1967: 32) explained things this way: and if among the kings one turned out indolent, a coward, given to vices and a homebody without enlarging the domain of his empire, it was ordered that of such [kings] there be little remembrance or almost none at all; and they attended to this so closely that if one [king] was found [in the histories] it was so as not to forget his name and the succession; but in the rest they remained silent, without singing the songs [as they did] of the others who were good and valiant. [...] Many resolved the problem by favoring information provided by their oldest and most aristocratic witnesses and by dismissing reports by common Indians. Those circumstances mean that the documentary history of the Incas has been filtered through competing native views, translators, scribes, conflicting mores, and differing notions of the nature of the past. [...]

Terence D'Altroy. The Incas. Second edition.

[ivandurak]

Four years after Garcilaso completed his great work, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala sent a document of more than a thousand pages to King Felipe III that is a fount of information on life in the Inca realm (Guaman Poma 1980, 2006). A son of ethnically mixed ancestry like Garcilaso and Valera, Guaman Poma found himself caught between two cultures. He assisted the Colonial administration in varied capacities for decades, including efforts to stamp out idolatrous practices. Even so, he was conflicted in his loyalty to things Christian and Spanish and to traditional Andean ways of life. In 1613, he completed his epic work, which included hundreds of drawings of Inca personages, history, religion, and customs, as well as an illustrated litany of Spanish abuses. His drawings are an irreplaceable source of visual detail, while the text – an often incoherent mélange of Spanish and Quechua – contains many useful particulars. Like Garcilaso and Valera, Guaman Poma wrote about expansive imperial Inca conquests earlier than many Colonial Spaniards or modern scholars have been willing to accept.

Terence D'Altroy. The Incas. Second edition.

[ivandurak]

The mestizo chronicler Guaman Poma (1980) explained that all of creation had been wiped out four times in the ancient past, each time after a cycle of a thousand years (Urton 1999: 41). The first age was a time of darkness when the world was inhabited by a race of wild men. In each successive epoch, humans progressed, as they learned to farm, to make crafts, and to organize themselves for war and peace. The fifth “sun” was the age of the Incas. In their self-promoted vision, it was a glorious era during which they brought civilization and enlightened rule to a chaotic world. And under the circumstances, it was only right that the man who had created the empire took Pachakuti as his title. After all, he was the son of the Sun, a living divinity who remade the world. Less than a century after Pachakuti died and ascended to join his celestial father, Atawallpa’s forces closed the war with his half-brother Waskhar.

Terence D'Altroy. The Incas. Second edition.

[drjacquescoulardeau]

Launching Blog 3rd Episode

Md. Merajul Islam

The Incas Beyond Empire and Collapse:

Language, Bodies, and the Andean Science of Survival

The Incas Beyond Empire and Collapse

Table of Contents

Mohammad Merajul Islam, after a first episode on the Roman Empire and the consideration of all that was kept, even fructified, in the later historical periods, came to the idea that “collapse” is the wrong concept to explain the end of a historical form of development and the continuation of this phylogenetic development in the next historical periods. The Roman Empire did not collapse since we live on and with its direct legal, civil or criminal, codes, and numerous other institutions in education, politics, agriculture, science, even if the blocked social situation with massive slavery, and the military management of their world with constant wars and violence, necessitating massive security forces, is the real obstacle that brought the political apparatus down..

He then expanded his approach in the second episode, with the study of the “collapse” of the USSR. He showed how in fact it was a real trans-substantiation from an industrial empire to algorithms, from plans to platforms. They came to an end when they were confronted to the necessity to adapt to new conditions if they wanted to remain relevant in the new century.

But it was necessary to study other older cases to show it is a fundamental process in human history, which did not start with writing or representational paintings and entoptic signs that no one would still call “scribbling” like Hergé did before and after 1945. But it started with the abstract symbolic vocal elements (vowels and consonants and their rotation) that opened the door to naming objects, people, animals, situations, activities, and so many other things. From there, with observation, speculation, and discussion, hence communication that could only be vocal or body language, they went through the emergence of conceptualization somewhere around 300,000 BCE, as soon as they were able to produce a minimum of 500 (arbitrary estimation) VCV or CVC clusters

In the present third episode, he studies the case of the Incas in the Andes and their empire. The case is a lot more complicated because the Incas did not have a writing system with any real phonological symbolism that we consider to be a writing system. The interest here is that after considering what brought the political apparatus of the empire down, i.e., the genocide (military and with European diseases) and the culturicide performed by the Spaniards, still in the 20th century before and after the Second World War, some popular forms of culture, comic books in this case and Hergé’s Tintin, literarily try to bury the Incas in their own “death” by justifying the looting of Inca tombs and Inca kings’ mummies. The Incas are accused of being vengeful, barbaric, and, of course, totally primitive, with the naïve power of a sun eclipse, with people who were more advanced in cosmology than the Catholic Church, which forced Galileo Galilei to make amends about the earth turning on its own axis and around the sun.

Enjoy it. The next chapter will concern the Mayas, and this next chapter will lead Mohammad Merajul Islam to a real book on human development and phylogeny in sustainable conceptual invention and science. Are we not rediscovering the ecological mental achievements of humanity over very long hundreds of thousands of years, an ecological dimension we seem to have forgotten, and for some people, lost?

All this is only possible with the mentorship of

Prof. Dr. Jacques Coulardeau

University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Who does not qualify as an Artificial Intelligence humanoid robot … Yet?

Academia.edu Comment

Jacques Coulardeau uploaded a paper

It is urgent to re-evaluate civilizational phylogeny, because there is rarely any collapse: only evolution and development into a new and more advanced form of civilization.

The Incas Beyond Empire and Collapse: Language, Bodies, and the Andean Science of Survival

Mohammad Mirajul Islam & Jacques Coulardeau

2026 • Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com

113 Pages

Art History,  *  Phylogeny,  *  South American Indians,  *  Ancient civilizations,  *  Topics Related to Applied Linguistics and Communication