LOS INCAS (THE INCAS) PDF, EPUB, EBOOK
Patricia C McKissack | none | 01 Aug 1994 | Lioncrest Education Pty Ltd | 9780516512686 | English | Cessnock, NSW, Australia
The Incas, 2nd Edition | Wiley
Machu Picchu sits nestled between the Andes mountains of modern-day Peru and the Amazon basin and is one of the Inca's most famous surviving archeological sites. This breathtaking ancient city, made up of around structures built up on the mountains, is still largely mysterious. Archeologists don't know what purpose many of the structures served, but its intricate roads, trail systems, irrigation canals and agricultural areas suggest humans used the site for a long time, according to UNESCO. The Inca Empire is thought to have originated at the city of Cuzco in what is modern-day southern Peru. In some mythical tales, the Inca was created by the sun god, Inti who sent his son, Manco Capac to Earth. Legend has it that he first killed his brothers and then led his sisters into a valley near Cuzco, where they settled down around A.
Cuzco was located at a nexus point between two earlier empires, one called the Wari and another based at the city of Tiwanaku. The expansion of the Inca Empire began by the time the fourth emperor, Mayta Capac took hold, but didn't gain momentum until the reign of the eighth emperor, Viracocha Inca. Viracocha began the practice of leaving behind military garrisons in lands to maintain the peace, according to History. However, Inca oral history recorded by the Spanish, suggests that the expansion began in earnest during the reign of the emperor Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, the son of Viracocha Inca, who reigned from to Pachacuti became emperor after he halted an invasion of Cuzco that was being carried out by a rival group called the Chancas.
The invasion had driven his father to a military outpost. Subsequently, Pachacuti worked to expand the territory the Inca controlled, extending their influence beyond the Cuzco region. The Incas worked hard at diplomacy, and tried to get their rivals to surrender peacefully before resorting to military conquest, said Terence D'Altroy, an anthropologist at Columbia University, in a PBS Nova interview. Pachacuti ordered that the Inca capital, Cuzco, be rebuilt and strengthened. And, he allegedly had the city completely raised so that it could be rebuilt in the shape of a puma.
McEwan added that commoners were not allowed to live in the city and had to reside in the outlying settlements. The Spanish would later plunder this gold and build a new city in the place of Cuzco. While the Inca did not develop what we would consider a formal system of writing, they did use recording devices, such as the quipu, a cord with knotted strings suspended from it.
Most written accounts of Incas come from outsiders as the Incas primarily shared their knowledge with one another through oral storytelling.
According to McEwan, the Inca pantheon had an array of gods that included the creator god Viracocha, sun god Inti, thunder god Illapa and earth-mother goddess Pachamama, among others. There were also regional deities worshipped by people whom the Inca conquered. The Inca gods were honored in many ways, including prayers, fasting and animal sacrifice, but the most powerful form of honor was human sacrifice, typically of children and teenagers. In , archaeologists discovered the mummies of three children who had been left as sacrifices at a shrine near the summit of a volcano in Argentina. Research has revealed that, in the year before their sacrifice, the three consumed a special diet rich in maize and dried llama meat and were drugged with coca leaves and alcohol. In addition to these elite food products, other goods consumed in the Inca diet included sweet potatoes, quinoa , beans and chili peppers.
The discovery sparked a wave of interest in khipus. By the s, though, we still had no idea what the numbers meant. To answer that, you would ideally have a translation of a khipu into a familiar language. It would be an equivalent of the Rosetta stone , which contained a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics into ancient Greek and unlocked that picture language. In the absence of that, Urton has spent the last 25 years tracking down and carefully digitising the details of every khipu he could find in museums and private collections across the world. Today, his Khipu Database Project contains details of more than of them.
There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched.
Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information.
Without a khipu translation, however, the idea looked destined to remain untested. Then in , Urton was browsing his personal library when he picked out a book that contained a Spanish census document from the s. It was what the colonists referred to as a revisita , a reassessment of six clans living around the village of Recuay in the Santa valley region of western Peru.
The document was made in the same region and at the same time as a set of six khipus in his database, so in theory it and the khipus were recording the same things. Checking it out, Urton found that there were tribute payers listed in the text and cords on the khipus. The fine details fitted too, with the numbers on the cords matching the charges the Spanish document said had been levelled. It seemed to be the match he had been looking for. Even so, Urton was struggling to pick apart the detail of the connections between the Santa valley khipus and the Spanish documents.
He ended up letting a Harvard undergraduate student named Manny Medrano take a look. He turned out to have the perfect complement of skills for the job. He was a native Spanish speaker and, majoring in economics, he was a whizz with spreadsheets. Medrano painstakingly generated tables of the khipu data and combed through them in search of matching patterns. This year, he and Urton showed for the first time that the way pendant cords are tied onto the primary cord indicates which clan an individual belonged to. Gary has made things a lot more tractable. Urton was not the only one trying to find meaning beyond numbers and names in khipus. Sabine Hyland , an ethnographer at St Andrews University in the UK, has spent the past decade searching in the central Andes for communities with enduring khipu traditions.
She starts by looking for mentions of khipus in archives, before travelling to remote villages in the hope they might have survived. Having seen a documentary about her work, a woman in Lima, Peru, got in touch about the khipus in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, where she grew up. After months of negotiations with the community, Hyland was invited to see two khipus. Villagers believe them to be narrative epistles created by local chiefs during a rebellion against the Spanish in the late 18th century.
By that time, the people spoke Spanish too, so there are corresponding written records. The khipus were kept locked away in an underground chamber in the village church. Hyland and her husband were the first outsiders to lay eyes on them, and she was not disappointed. Under strict supervision, Hyland set about photographing the cords, reviewing the manuscripts and taking notes. Each khipu had hundreds of pendant cords, and they were more colourful and complex than anything she had ever seen.
It was clear the various animal fibres used could only be identified by touch. Her analysis eventually revealed that the pendants came in 95 different combinations of colour, fibre type and direction of ply. She has since hypothesised that the khipus contain a combination of phonetic symbols and ideographic ones , where a symbol represents a whole word. Earlier this year, Hyland even managed to read a little of the khipus. When deciphering anything, one of the most important steps is to work out what information might be repeated in different places, she says. Because the Collata khipus were thought to be letters, they probably encoded senders and recipients. That is where Hyland started. She knew from the villagers that the primary cord of one of the khipus contained ribbons representing the insignia of one of two clan leaders. Sabine Hyland holds one of the incredible Collata khipus.
Assuming that was true, she looked for cords on the second khipu that had the same colour and were tied with the same knot as the ones she had tentatively identified on the first khipu. The last was unknown. It was a golden-brown fibre made from the hair of a vicuna, an alpaca-like animal.
That, it turned out, was the name of another of the lineages involved in the revolt that these khipus recorded. Hyland claims that the Collata khipus show that the cords really do hold narratives.
Yet even if she is right, it is possible these later khipus were influenced by contact with Spanish writing. Equally, the Collata khipus might be a regional variation. Possibly even a one-off. She will spend the next two years doing more fieldwork in Peru, attempting to decipher the Collata khipus and looking for similar examples elsewhere. Urton too is turning his attention to narrative khipus, even if he has a different idea on how they encoded information. He suspects they are semasiographic, a system of symbols that convey information without being tied to a single language.
In other words, they would be akin to road signs, where we all know what the symbols mean without having to sound anything out. That makes sense, given that the Inca ran a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire, says Urton. There is no solid evidence that any Spaniard living at the time learned to read or make a khipu.
The Inca Empire | Live Science
Despite their power, the Inca were quickly overwhelmed by the diseases and superior weaponry of Spanish invaders, the last bastion of their immense empire overtaken in The Inca first appeared in what is today southeastern Peru during the 12th century A. According to some versions of their origin myths, they were created by the sun god, Inti, who sent his son Manco Capac to Earth through the middle of three caves in the village of Paccari Tampu. After killing his brothers, Manco Capac led his sisters and their followers through the wilderness before settling in the fertile valley near Cusco circa The Inca began expanding their land holdings by the reign of their fourth emperor, Mayta Capac. However, they did not truly become an expansive power until the eighth emperor, Viracocha Inca, took control in the early 15th century. Bolstered by the military capabilities of two uncles, Viracocha Inca defeated the Ayarmaca kingdom to the south and took over the Urubamba Valley.
He also established the Inca practice of leaving military garrisons to maintain peace in conquered lands. When the rival Chancas attacked circa , Viracocha Inca retreated to a military outpost while his son, Cusi Inca Yupanqui, successfully defended Cusco. His military campaigns extended the kingdom to the southern end of the Titicaca Basin, and hundreds of miles north to subject the Cajamarca and Chimu kingdoms.
The expanding reach of the Inca state, Tawantinsuyu, prompted strategic logistical considerations. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui is believed to have been the first Inca emperor to order forced resettlement to squash the possibility of an uprising from one ethnic group. In addition, he established the practice in which rulers were prevented from inheriting the possessions of their predecessors, thereby ensuring that successive leaders would conquer new lands and accumulate new wealth. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui also focused his efforts on strengthening Cusco, the center of the empire.
He expanded Sacsahuaman, the massive fortress that guarded the city, and embarked on an expansive irrigation project by channeling rivers and creating intricate agricultural terraces. Although Tawantinsuyu was comprised of more than distinct ethnic groups among its 12 million inhabitants, a well-developed societal structure kept the empire running smoothly.
There was no written language, but a form of Quechua became the primary dialect, and knotted cords known as quipu were used to keep track of historical and accounting records. Most subjects were self-sufficient farmers who tended to corn, potatoes, squash, llamas, alpacas and dogs, and paid taxes through public labor. A system of roadways adding up to approximately 15, miles crisscrossed the kingdom, with relay runners capable of advancing messages at the rate of miles per day. The Inca religion centered on a pantheon of gods that included Inti; a creator god named Viracocha; and Apu Illapu, the rain god. Impressive shrines were built throughout the kingdom, including a massive Sun Temple in Cusco that measured more than 1, feet in circumference. By Daniel Cossins. The Inca system of writing in khipus, or knotted cords.
THE Incas left no doubt that theirs was a sophisticated, technologically savvy civilisation. At its height in the 15th century, it was the largest empire in the Americas, extending almost kilometres from modern-day Ecuador to Chile. These were the people who built Machu Picchu, a royal estate perched in the clouds, and an extensive network of paved roads complete with suspension bridges crafted from woven grass. But the paradox of the Incas is that despite all this sophistication they never learned to write. Or did they? The Incas may not have bequeathed any written records, but they did have colourful knotted cords. Each of these devices was called a khipu pronounced key-poo. We know these intricate cords to be an abacus-like system for recording numbers. However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too.
In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands. Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it. The Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, first encountered the Incas at the start of the s. They were awestruck by the magnificent stone cities, the gold and treasure. But as the Spanish began to take over the Inca empire and impose their own customs, they became equally enthralled by the way the society was organised. The Inca royal palace of Machu Picchu. The Incas governed the 10 million people in their realm with what amounted to a federal system. Power was centred in Cusco, in the south of what is now Peru, but spread through several levels of hierarchy across a series of partially self-governing provinces.
There was no money and no market economy. The production and distribution of food and other commodities was centrally controlled. People had their own land to farm, but every subject was also issued with necessities from state storehouses in exchange for labour, administered through an impressive tribute system.
Historians have argued variously that the Inca empire was a socialist utopia or an authoritarian monarchy. But no one disputes its efficiency. Key to that success was the flow of reliable data, in the form of censuses, tribute accounts and storehouse inventories. For that, the Incas relied on the khipumayuq , or the keepers of the khipus, a specially trained caste who could tie and read the cords. The Spanish described how they were used
to record all manner of information. There are reasons to think khipus may record other things, including stories and myths — the sort of narrative information that many cultures write down. True, he was prone to ambiguity and contradictions. But about a third of the khipus in collections seem to have a more elaborate construction than the others, as if they contain a different sort of information. For decades the point was moot, however, because no one could read any of them. The first hints of revelations from khipus came in the s, when anthropologist Leland Locke analysed a bunch of them housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
He noticed that the knots are organised in rows almost like beads on an abacus see diagram. He demonstrated that each row of knots at a certain height denoted units, tens, hundreds and so on. That made sense, fitting with the decimal system the Inca used to divide up groups for tribute purposes. The Inca crafted magnificent objects from gold and silver, but perhaps their most striking examples of art were in the form of textiles.
The Inca grew cotton, sheared wool and used looms to create their elaborate textiles. The finest grade of cloth was called cumpi, and was reserved for the emperor and nobility. Inca stone-working abilities were also formidable. The empire reached its peak after the conquests of Emperor Huayna Capac, who reigned from until around At its peak, the empire included up to 12 million people and extended from the border of Ecuador and Colombia to about 50 miles [80 kilometers] south of modern Santiago, Chile.
To support this empire, a system of roads stretched for almost 25, miles roughly 40, km , about three times the diameter of the Earth. As the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire, they were impressed by what they saw. In fact, the road and aqueduct systems in the Andes were superior to those in Europe at the time. Across the waters, the Spanish brought one of their strongest and invisible weapons with them — diseases that the Inca populations had never been exposed to. Smallpox wiped out much of the Inca population, including Capac and the successor he had chosen.
After Capac's death, his kin battled for the power and his son, Atahualpa eventually succeeded.
But the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro successfully lured and captured Atahualpa — eventually killing him and easily taking over Cusco with their more advanced weapons. The Spanish, wanting to keep peace with the locals installed a "puppet king," Manco Inca Yupanqui, according to History. But him and his men were later forced to retreat to a village in the jungle called Vilcabamba, the last remaining bite of the Inca empire, until it disappeared in Today, many of the traditions the Inca carried out live on in the Andes. Textile making is still popular, the foods they ate are consumed around the world and archaeological sites like Machu Picchu are popular tourist attractions.
Inca Empire - Wikipedia
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui is believed to have been the first Inca emperor to order forced resettlement to squash the possibility of an uprising from one ethnic group. In addition, he established the practice in which rulers were prevented from inheriting the possessions of their predecessors, thereby ensuring that successive leaders would conquer new lands and accumulate new wealth. Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui also focused his efforts on strengthening Cusco, the center of the empire.
He expanded Sacsahuaman, the massive fortress that guarded the city, and embarked on an expansive irrigation project by channeling rivers and creating intricate agricultural terraces. Although Tawantinsuyu was comprised of more than distinct ethnic groups among its 12 million inhabitants, a well-developed societal structure kept the empire running smoothly. There was no written language, but a form of Quechua became the primary dialect, and knotted cords known as quipu were used to keep track of historical and accounting records. Most subjects were self-sufficient farmers who tended to corn, potatoes, squash, llamas, alpacas and dogs, and paid taxes through public labor. A system of roadways adding up to approximately 15, miles crisscrossed the kingdom, with relay runners capable of advancing messages at the rate of miles per day.
The Inca religion centered on a pantheon of gods that included Inti; a creator god named Viracocha; and Apu Illapu, the rain god. Impressive shrines were built throughout the kingdom, including a massive Sun Temple in Cusco that measured more than 1, feet in circumference. Powerful priests depended on divination to diagnose illness, solve crimes and predict the outcomes of warfare, in many cases requiring animal sacrifice. The mummified remains of previous emperors were also treated as sacred figures and paraded around at ceremonies with their stores of gold and silver. Upon ascending to the throne in , Topa Inca Yupanqui pushed the southern border of the empire to the Maule River in modern-day Chile, and instituted a tribute system in which each province provided women to serve as temple maidens or brides for celebrated soldiers.
His successor, Huayna Capac, embarked on successful northern campaigns that carried to the Ancasmayo River, the current boundary between Ecuador and Colombia. Meanwhile, the arrival of Spanish explorers had already triggered the collapse of the state. The Spanish carried such alien diseases as smallpox, which wiped out a huge chunk of the population before killing Huayna Capac and his chosen successor around That sparked a civil war as would-be emperors battled for power, with Atahualpa eventually outlasting his half-brother, Huascar, to grab the throne. Enamored by the stories of Inca wealth, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro lured Atahualpa to meeting for a supposed dinner in his honor and kidnapped the emperor in November Atahualpa was executed the following summer, and although the Spanish were far outnumbered by the locals, they easily sacked Cusco in late with their superior weaponry.
Attempting to keep the peace, the Spanish installed a young prince named Manco Inca Yupanqui as a puppet king, a move that backfired during a spirited rebellion in However, Manco Inca Yupanqui and his men were eventually forced to retreat to the jungle village of Vilcabamba, which remained the last stronghold of the empire until As the only written accounts of the Inca were composed by outsiders, its mythology and culture passed to successive generations by trained storytellers. Traces of its existence were mainly found in the ruins of cities and temples, but in archaeologist Hiram Bingham discovered the intact 15th century mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu , its magnificent stone structures reflecting the power and capabilities of this massive Pre-Colombian state.
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Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Peru, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a royal estate or sacred religious site for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century. For hundreds of years, until the A career army officer, he led the military coup overthrowing the Allende government in , establishing himself at the head of the ensuing military regime. In he enacted a constitution giving Che Guevara was a prominent communist figure in the Cuban Revolution who went on to become a guerrilla leader in
South America. Executed by the Bolivian army in , he has since been regarded as a martyred hero by generations of leftists worldwide. The Nazca Lines are a collection of giant geoglyphs—designs or motifs etched into the ground—located in the Peruvian coastal plain about miles kilometers south of Lima, Peru.
However, there have also been teasing hints that they might encode long-lost stories, myths and songs too. In a century of study, no one has managed to make these knots talk. But recent breakthroughs have begun to unpick this tangled mystery of the Andes, revealing the first signs of phonetic symbolism within the strands.
Now two anthropologists are closing in on the Inca equivalent of the Rosetta stone. That could finally crack the code and transform our
understanding of a civilisation whose history has so far been told only through the eyes of the Europeans who sought to eviscerate it. The Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, first encountered the Incas at the start of the s. They were awestruck by the magnificent stone cities, the gold and treasure. But as the Spanish began to take over the Inca empire and impose their own customs, they became equally enthralled by the way the society was organised. The Inca royal palace of Machu Picchu. The Incas governed the 10 million people in their realm with what amounted to a federal system. Power was centred in Cusco, in the south of what is now Peru, but spread through several levels of hierarchy across a series of partially self-governing provinces. There was no money and no market economy. The production and distribution of food and other commodities was centrally controlled.
People had their own land to farm, but every subject was also issued with necessities from state storehouses in exchange for labour, administered through an impressive tribute system. Historians have argued variously that the Inca empire was a socialist utopia or an authoritarian monarchy. But no one disputes its efficiency. Key to that success was the flow of reliable data, in the form of censuses, tribute accounts and storehouse
inventories. For that, the Incas relied on the khipumayuq , or the keepers of the khipus, a specially trained caste who could tie and read the cords.
The Spanish described how they were used to record all manner of information. There are reasons to think khipus may record other things, including stories and myths — the sort of narrative information that many cultures write down.
True, he was prone to ambiguity and contradictions. But about a third of the khipus in collections seem to have a more elaborate construction than the others, as if they contain a different sort of information. For decades the point was moot, however, because no one could read any of them.
The first hints of revelations from khipus came in the s, when anthropologist Leland Locke analysed a bunch of them housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He noticed that the knots are organised in rows almost like beads on an abacus see diagram. He demonstrated that each row of knots at a certain height denoted units, tens, hundreds and so on.
That made sense, fitting with the decimal system the Inca used to divide up groups for tribute purposes. The discovery sparked a wave of interest in khipus. By the s, though, we still had no idea what the numbers meant. To answer that, you would ideally have a translation of a khipu into a familiar language. It would be an equivalent of the Rosetta stone , which contained a translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics into ancient Greek and unlocked that picture language. In the absence of that, Urton has spent the last 25 years tracking down and carefully digitising the details of every khipu he could find in museums and private collections across the world.
Today, his Khipu Database Project contains details of more than of them. There are all sorts of varying factors in khipus: the colour of the strings, the structure of the knots and the direction in which they were hitched. Having spent countless hours poring over them, Urton began to think that binary differences in these features might be encoding information. Without a khipu translation, however, the idea looked destined to remain untested. Then in , Urton was browsing his personal library when he picked out a book that contained a Spanish census document from the s. It was what the colonists referred to as a revisita , a reassessment of six clans living around the village of Recuay in the Santa valley region of western Peru. The document was made in the same region and at the same time as a set of six khipus in his database, so in theory it and the khipus were recording the same things.
Checking it out, Urton found that there were tribute payers listed in the text and cords on the khipus. The fine details fitted too, with the numbers on the cords matching the charges the Spanish document said had been levelled. It seemed to be the match he had been looking for. Even so, Urton was struggling to pick apart the detail of the connections between the Santa valley khipus and the Spanish documents. He ended up letting a Harvard undergraduate student named Manny Medrano take a look. He turned out to have the perfect complement of skills for the job. He was a native Spanish speaker and, majoring in economics, he was a whizz with spreadsheets.
Medrano painstakingly generated tables of the khipu data and combed through them in search of matching patterns. This year, he and Urton showed for the first time that the way pendant cords are tied onto the primary cord indicates which clan an individual belonged to. Gary has made things a lot more tractable. Urton was not the only one trying to find meaning beyond numbers and names in khipus. Sabine Hyland , an
ethnographer at St Andrews University in the UK, has spent the past decade searching in the central Andes for communities with enduring khipu traditions. She starts by looking for mentions of khipus in archives, before travelling to remote villages in the hope they might have survived.
Having seen a documentary about her work, a woman in Lima, Peru, got in touch about the khipus in the remote village of San Juan de Collata, where she grew up. After months of negotiations with the community, Hyland was invited to see two khipus. Villagers believe them to be narrative epistles created by local chiefs during a rebellion against the Spanish in the late 18th century. By that time, the people spoke Spanish too, so there are corresponding written records.
We thought the Incas couldn't write. These knots change everything | New Scientist
Subsequently, Pachacuti worked to expand the territory the Inca controlled, extending their influence beyond the Cuzco region. The Incas worked hard at diplomacy, and tried to get their rivals to surrender peacefully before resorting to military conquest, said Terence D'Altroy, an
anthropologist at Columbia University, in a PBS Nova interview. Pachacuti ordered that the Inca capital, Cuzco, be rebuilt and strengthened. And, he allegedly had the city completely raised so that it could be rebuilt in the shape of a puma.
McEwan added that commoners were not allowed to live in the city and had to reside in the outlying settlements. The Spanish would later plunder this gold and build a new city in the place of Cuzco. While the Inca did not develop what we would consider a formal system of writing, they did use recording devices, such as the quipu, a cord with knotted strings suspended from it. Most written accounts of Incas come from outsiders as the Incas primarily shared their knowledge with one another through oral storytelling.
According to McEwan, the Inca pantheon had an array of gods that included the creator god Viracocha, sun god Inti, thunder god Illapa and earth-mother goddess Pachamama, among others. There were also regional deities worshipped by people whom the Inca conquered. The Inca gods were honored in many ways, including prayers, fasting and animal sacrifice, but the most powerful form of honor was human sacrifice, typically of children and teenagers. In , archaeologists discovered the mummies of three children who had been left as sacrifices at a shrine near the summit of a volcano in Argentina. Research has revealed that, in the year before their sacrifice, the three consumed a special diet rich in maize and dried llama meat and were drugged with coca leaves and alcohol. In addition to these elite food products, other goods consumed in the Inca diet included sweet potatoes, quinoa , beans and chili peppers. In exchange for labor, the Inca government was expected to provide feasts for the people at certain times of the year.
With only a few exceptions, there were no traders in the Inca Empire. The Inca crafted magnificent objects from gold and silver, but perhaps their most striking examples of art were in the form of textiles. The Inca grew cotton, sheared wool and used looms to create their elaborate textiles.
The finest grade of cloth was called cumpi, and was reserved for the emperor and nobility. Inca stone-working abilities were also formidable. The empire reached its peak after the conquests of Emperor Huayna Capac, who reigned from until around At its peak, the empire included up to 12 million people and extended from the border of Ecuador and Colombia to about 50 miles [80 kilometers] south of modern Santiago, Chile. To support this empire, a system of roads stretched for almost 25, miles roughly 40, km , about three times the diameter of the Earth.
As the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire, they were impressed by what they saw. In fact, the road and aqueduct systems in the Andes were superior to those in Europe at the time. Across the waters, the Spanish brought one of their strongest and invisible weapons with them — diseases that the Inca populations had never been exposed to. Named for the ethnic group that dominated one of the New World's greatest indigenous empires, the Inca Empire ruled over a domain that implemented massive public work projects and imposed a system of government, the power of which was unrivaled in South America.
History of the Conquest of Peru The most brilliant passages in the history of Spanish adventure in the New World are undoubtedly afforded by the conquests of Mexico and Peru—the two states which combined with the largest extent of empire a refined social polity, and considerable progress in the arts of civilization. Indeed, so prominently do they stand out on the great canvas of history, that the name of the one, notwithstanding the contrast they exhibit in their respective institutions, most naturally suggests that of the other; and when I sent to Spain to collect materials for an account of the Conquest of Mexico, I included in my researches those relating to the Conquest of Peru.
Its empire eventually extended across western South America, making it the largest ever seen in the Americas and the largest in the world at that time. Food News Quinoa: Gold of the Incas This staple of Incan culture their army swore by it and considered it as valuable as gold is a nutritional powerhouse which is finally sharing shelf space with rice, cous cous, and pasta at general supermarkets after years of taking a backseat in specialty health food stores. Mann ISBN: Book Resources in Espanol Los Incas. Inca god Viracocha In Inca mythology, the god Viracocha was the creator of all things, and the father of the sun god Inti.
The Inka Empire rose rapidly and burned bright.
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