The Inca

"The Inca

By Kevin Lane

Reaktion, 207 pages, $25

The Incas have the double distinction of presiding over the largest empire of the ancient Americas and one of the shortest-lived. Sprawling along the Pacific Coast and across the Andes Mountains to the edge of the Amazon rainforest, their domain took in parts of present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, encompassing nearly 800,000 square miles and perhaps 12 million people. Yet the empire endured only from about A.D. 1400 to 1532. In "The Inca," Kevin Lane, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, offers a concise and well-illustrated introduction to this bygone realm, describing its history and culture and chronicling its rise and fall.

Like much about the Incas, their origins are open to debate. Mr. Lane -- with this subject and many others -- sorts through competing theories, showing how recent scholarship is reshaping traditional ideas and providing a more persuasive explanation for the limited archaeological evidence. The people we know as the Incas, he says, may have originated around Lake Titicaca, on the border of present-day Peru and Bolivia. In the 11th and 12th centuries, they settled around the city of Cuzco (in modern Peru), making it their capital. Sometime after 1400, they began their conquest of weaker neighbors, and about a century after that their empire reached its high-water mark.

The Incas' domain, which they called Tahuantinsuyu, was a religious state in which the emperor (the sapa Inca, meaning "ruler" in the Quechua language) held ultimate authority over all facets of life: sacred, social, political and economic. To administer his far-flung, diverse realm, he enlisted a corps of civil servants to collect taxes, preserve food stores, supervise public works, conduct the census and perform the myriad day-to-day tasks of managing an empire. To defend and expand its borders, he kept an elite force of professional warriors that he could augment with conscripts to more than 100,000 troops.

Mr. Lane's discussion of the Inca economy is particularly revealing. "Unique for ancient civilizations," he writes, "the Incas and their predecessors developed an economic system almost without markets or commercial mercantile interaction." Although the Incas had the materials and the expertise, they minted no coins, and, aside from a few minor exceptions, such as the shells of the Pacific thorny oyster, they used nothing resembling money. Instead they relied on an intricate network of barter, in which human labor was "the principal currency and main taxable commodity." This labor tax was collected through a system known as the mit'a, wherein the empire's inhabitants satisfied their obligations to the ruling Incas by toiling two or three months a year on public works, in the fields or in the army or by engaging in other collective tasks. The arrangement worked so well that Spanish colonizers later adopted it, even retaining the name.

The technology of the Incas was formidable. They smelted minerals such as copper, tin, lead, bronze, gold and silver. They were expert engineers, building hundreds of rope suspension bridges and thousands of miles of roads, which were used by relays of runners and caravans of llamas to connect all corners of the empire. They transformed the landscape with irrigation canals and mountainside terraces for raising crops, most notably the potato. They also constructed finely detailed stone buildings, many of which still stand, most famously at Machu Pichu, the 600-year-old royal mountain retreat in the mountains of Peru.

Besides farming, hunting and fishing, the Incas supported themselves by herding, especially herding the load-carrying, meat-giving llama. Calling llamas "the cornerstones" of the empire, Mr. Lane notes that the Incas' territory coincided almost exactly with the animals' natural range. Much of their meat was eaten dried, a form that the Incas called charqui, giving us one of the few words to come into English from Quechua -- "jerky." They also raised alpacas, mainly for their fleece, from which they wove some of the finest cloth ever produced. In fact, the Incas gauged wealth not in gold or silver but in textiles, which were so highly valued that they were used as offerings to the gods.

Despite an impressive resume in other areas of knowledge, the Incas never invented a written script, relying on colored, intricately knotted cords called quipu to keep accounts (using the decimal system), preserve genealogical records, register property deeds and transmit messages. Untold quipu were destroyed by the Spanish, but about a thousand still exist; though progress is being made, so far they have resisted scholars' efforts to fully decode them.

The Incas' spiritual beliefs were densely constituted and, like other facets of their culture, drew on Andean traditions. Blending animism, oracular divination and ancestor worship, their religion incorporated human sacrifice, especially of children and adolescents. Also central was the veneration of deities representing natural phenomena, such as the sun, moon and thunder. Considered a direct descendant of Inti, the sun god, the Incas' leader -- the sapa Inca -- was revered as a deity. Inconveniently for the reigning leader, all past emperors were believed to live on after death, still exerting power through their relatives, who retained the emperors' property, cared for their mummified remains and often used their considerable influence to oppose the policies of imperial successors.

The issue of royal succession repeatedly launched the kingdom into crisis. Instead of adopting primogeniture, as European monarchies did, the Incas employed a complicated process that could give several of the sapa Inca's many sons a credible claim to the throne. Treachery and civil war often resulted, including a disastrously timed conflict that helped to bring down the empire.

When Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro landed with 167 men in northern Peru in 1532, the kingdom was tottering. His countrymen had already introduced smallpox to the Andes, and between 1524 and 1525 the disease took a horrific toll, killing nearly half the population. Among the victims were the reigning Inca, Huayna Capac, and his son and designated successor, Ninan Cuyuchi. Another son, Huascar, claimed the throne but was challenged by his half-brother Atahualpa, who after a bloody three-year struggle emerged victorious in 1532, the year Pizarro arrived.

Weakened by disease and civil war, challenged by rebellious vassal states and overwhelmed by European weapons, the empire didn't survive the year. On Nov. 16, 1532, in the city of Cajamarca, the conquistadors massacred thousands of Incas and captured Atahualpa, whom they executed after accepting an enormous ransom for his release. Though the Spanish would install a series of puppets on the throne, and though the Incas would resist militarily for another 40 years, the vast empire had ceased to exist.

"The Inca" is a volume in the "Lost Civilizations" series, which prompts Mr. Lane to wonder: "How lost are the Incas?" He reports that, 500 years after the Incas' conquest and marginalization, their descendants retain a vital culture, experiencing a "steadily growing pride and revindication" of their indigenous past, including their language and religion. The Inca empire may have gone the way of all empires, but, like the sapa Inca, who lived on after death, its spirit is very much alive.

---

Mr. Helferich's most recent book is "Hot Time," a detective novel published under the pen name W.H. Flint." [1]

1.  REVIEW --- Spring Books: The Empire That Ended
Helferich, Gerard.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Apr 2022: C.6.