The Inca Were Latecomers

The Inca have been given all the credit for the marvelous works found in the Andean area of South America that archeaologists date back as early as 1500 B.C.. But that is like giving George Washington credit for the discovery of America. Actually, the Incas were relative newcomers themselves when the Spanish arrived.
The Inca Empire had only begun expanding after 1400 A.D., so had been around for a mere century before being so brutally cut short by the Spanish. The Incas were only the last in a whole series of cultures predating the Spanish conquest, but it has taken a while for the world to appreciate the achievements of these earlier Peruvian civilizations, not least because the Incas liked to pretend that it was all their own work and when the Spanish arrived and asked about what the found in Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador, the Inca claimed it had been built by their Incas, and it was part of the Inca Empire.

In fact, there is much evidence that the Incas substantially retold the history of preceding civilizations to downplay their achievements, and in some cases to ignore those achievements completely. In “Crónica del Perú,” one of the best of the early Spanish chroniclers, Pedro de Cieza de León, quoted his Inca sources as saying that before them there were only “naked savages” and that “these natives were stupid and brutish beyond belief.” They say “they were like animals, and that many ate human flesh, and others took their daughters and mothers to wife and committed other even graver sins.”

This manipulative distortion of history was so successful—the same myth was repeated by other chroniclers like Garcilaso de la Vega in the early 17th century—that the truth has only recently emerged. Far from imposing order on an unruly bunch of savages, the Incas were merely the latest dominant tribe (and a short-lived one at that) in a series of Andean civilizations that had flourished over the preceding 4000 years, including the Moche in the north of Peru, the Wari of the central states and the Tiahuanaco culture near Lake Titicaca.

It was a German archaeologist, Max Uhle, who first began to reveal how literally deep the roots of Andean culture were. In dig after dig in southern and central Peru in the early 20th century, he showed conclusively that the Inca had been preceded by earlier cultures, and that some of these cultures had built up similar, or even greater, empires. In the north, the doyen of Peruvian archaeologists, Julio C. Tello, started in 1919 to excavate the extraordinary Chavín de Huántar, with its jungle iconography of snakes and jaguars dating from as early as 1200 B.C., which is over two and a half millennia before the arrival of the Incas.

So where did the Incas come from? The prosaic response is that up until around 1400 A.D., they were just one of a number of competing tribes in the area around Cuzco, before they built up their enormous empire under a series of dynamic and capable emperors. By the time the Inca arrived, the God-name Pachacamac and Viracocha, were well established in the Andean mind. However, the Inca, ever wanting to build up a history to warrant their rising claim to power, evolved their own religious explanations and called Inca Yupanqui by the name of Pachacutec, and claimed him to be a younger son of an emperor they renamed Viracocha, during whose rein the Inca were little more than one of the many small tribes in the area.

Then, some time around 1438, the Chanka, a rival tribe to the north of Cuzco, attacked the Incas with such ferocity that Viracocha and his designated heir, Inca Urcon, fled the capital. Only a small band of captains, led by Inca Yupanqui, remained to provide a last-ditch defense. Although facing seemingly hopeless odds, they managed to defeat the enemy with the help, so it was claimed, of the very stones of Cuzco, which rose up from the ground to fight alongside them. Not only were the Chanka defeated, but Inca Yupanqui supposedly adopted the soubriquet Pachacutec, “Transformer of the Earth,” and took the throne from his disgraced father and brother. He then embarked on an ambitious program of conquest that initiated the imperial phase of Inca culture. Within a generation the Incas had grown from an anonymous small tribe of the Cuzco valley to become the dominant force of the Andes.

The Inca then expanded under an organized army over much of the Andean area, from Chile to Colombia, in just a generation or two. This empire covered a distance of some 3000 miles and an area the size of continental Europe. Indeed, a remarkable achievement, somewhat akin to Alexander the Great, Ghengis Kahn and others. However, like all empires, it did not last long. The Inca fell under the attack of a small band of better armed and better equipped Conquistadores. Soon, the Inca, little more than a century old, were gone—but the Spaniards amazed by what they saw, and what they heard, gave the Inca credit for all that existed—many areas thousands of years old, dating back into B.C. times, 1500 years before the term Inca was ever heard.

(Much of the foregoing is from Hugh Thomson, “White Rock,” Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publisher, 2003. He also wrote a sequel “A Sacred Landscape,” Overlook Press, 2007)