At the same time noun and adjective, the word INCA indicates all today that refers to the history and the civilization of the various people on which a dynasty of thirteen sovereigns reigned which, from its semi-legendary founder, the INCA Manco Cápac, in Atahualpa, overcoming in 1532 by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, extended his power on a vast area of Andean America.

One of the great singularities of this Empire, born in the area of Cuzco, the south of Peru, was to have integrated, in an original official organization, the sociocultural multiplicity of the heterogeneous populations which composed it.    

Constituted in a little less than one century, this to it Tahuantinsuyu Worsens, or worsens of the Four Districts - extended at the time of its apogee, XVe century, from the shores of the Pacific to the Amazon forest via the high valleys of the Andes, and included not only Peru, the major part of Ecuador, the west of Bolivia, but also the North-West of Argentina and the northern half of Chile.  

The valley of Cuzco
Incas were in the beginning only one of the many tribes which populated Peru. Around the year 1000 after J. - C., after the fall of the empires of Huari and Tiahuanaco, these tribes gathered in confederations, sometimes structured in kingdoms, and developed like as many small regional powers, which clashed in local wars and maintained a state quasi permanent conflict in the central Andes. Incas joined to three close people to form the confederation of Cuzco, of which they took control to become one of the principal powers of the south of Peru.  

Incas legendary
The time which precedes the expansion by the Empire is reported in the myths of origin, which content peregrination with the four Ayar brothers, since the “cave of becoming”, Pacari-tampu (Paqarina), until Cuzco. Resulting from the Sun, Inti, which will occupy a dominating place in the official religion of the future Empire, the four brothers, each one in charge of his clan, would have moved in the valley of Cuzco, melting a village with each one of their halts until the day when Ayar Manco, after being itself removed from his/her brothers, remained only chief of the migration. At the end of this voyage, it is established in the valley of Cuzco, where it founded the State INCA, of which he became the first sovereign under the name of Manco Cápac. Regarded as the first of the twelve or thirteen sovereigns of the INCA dynasty, Manco Cápac, whose power was limited to the basin of Cuzco and the close areas, would have reigned to the XII E century after J. - C. After him followed one another seven Incas also legendary - Sinchi Roca, Lloque Yupanqui, Mayta Cápac, Cápac Yupanqui, Inca Roca, Yáhuar Huácac and Viracocha - of which the first were satisfied, to affirm their domination, of plundering resulting from skirmishes with the close people; none of them appears to be animated spirit of conquest which appeared, to the XIV E century, under the reign of the seventh INCA, Yáhuar Huácac: at that time, Incas imposed by the weapons their power all to the other people of the valley of Cuzco.

The expansionist policy INCA
This situation was still reinforced as of the accession with the power, at the beginning of XVe century, of Viracocha, successor of Yáhuar Huácac, and the last of the legendary sovereigns. However, over its old days, Viracocha did not manage to contain the expansion of another people of the central Cordillera of Peru, Chancas; in 1438, the latter, after having established their domination on Quechuas, groups established between the territories chanca and INCA, tried to invade the area of Cuzco. In front of this threat, Viracocha had to give up Cuzco and to flee with his/her Urco son.  

Incas histories
But another of his/her sons, Cusi Yupanqui, gathered the troops incas and managed to demolish the invaders under the same walls of the capital. Cusi Yupanqui seized the power then, was made proclaim INCA under the name of Pachacútec (“the Reformer of the world”), invades the territory of Chancas with the assistance of his/her son, Túpac Yupanqui, then, after having crushed to them Collas basin of Titicaca, transformed the State INCA into one of the more Andean great powers. Consequently, from 1438 to 1471, the Empire did not go to cease extending by developing a policy often presented like the achievement from the civilizing destiny from Incas. Certain conquests were carried out at the cost of bloody wars, others were done by the alliances obtained under the threat or by the seduction. The chiefs of the other people preferred to enter of their full liking the Empire before being defeated, captured, killed or dispossessed of the power by the troops incas, considered quasi invincible.  

Around 1471, after having organized the State, frame its capital and having carried out Great Wars, Pachacútec yielded the power to his/her son Túpac Yupanqui. The new INCA remained faithful to the will of expansion which had characterized the reign of his/her father. In north, it subjected Cañars to extend its domination on almost the totality of current Ecuador; the kingdom of Chimus fell between its hands and, with him, all the coast to Lima; in the south, in spite of the valiant resistance of the warriors Araucans, Túpac Yupanqui moved back the borders of the Empire until the río Maule, in full Chilean territory.  

Huayna Cápac, which succeeded to him in 1493, did nothing but consolidate this vast empire by repressing the revolts which burst that and there. He died in 1527, the year even where Francisco Pizarro, unloading for the first time at Tumbes, discovered the kingdom of Incas. With its third forwarding, four years afterwards, Pizarro found Peru in the grip of an interior serious attack: with the death of Huayna Cápac, a fight of succession had opened between two of his/her sons, Huáscar and Atahualpa. This last, after having overcoming the troops of Huáscar, came to seize the power. On November 15th, 1532, Pizarro and the handle of men whom it had under its orders arrived without encumbers in Cajamarca; as of the following day, they prepared the capture of Atahualpa. The INCA was taken in an ambush and captive fact. The defeat of its armies, its setting at dead less than one year later, on on August 29th, 1533, in spite of the payment of an immense ransom, marked the final collapse of the INCA Empire. Peru became the viceroyalty of News-Castille, and Lima the new capital in 1535. In spite of several attempts despaired to shake the Spanish domination, the INCA power will not be raised any more: in 1572, the viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, ordered the capture and the execution of Túpac Amaru, son of the last INCA sovereign.  

Working classes
The working classes represented the main wealth of the Empire; indeed, all the valid adult subjects were held to provide to the State of the services of work. Thus, various agricultural, domestic or artisanal work, like weaving, was accomplished for the benefit of the State, which perceived, on the other hand, neither taxes nor tributes in the form of goods. They formed the main part of the subjects, the hatun-runas, which continued to belong to their ethnicities and cultural according to well drawn up bonds and social reports. These classes understood the peasants, the farmers and the pastors of the coast and the mountains. Along the coast, there were other classes, in particular that of the craftsmen, that of the fishermen and that of the sailors.  

The mitmaj consisted of displacements of populations. The people were moved of their place of origin, but preserved bonds with the group from which they resulted. Certain groups were it to go to colonize and to emphasize little inhabited grounds, others were reimplanted in the middle of hostile populations with the imperial supervision. Others still were sent “by punishment”, for example to break a too strong resistance to the INCA: the rebels were then reinstalled in the middle of populations faithful to the sovereign.

Servants and prisoners
The yanas belonged to a servile caste and did not have a situation determined in the Andean tradition: by losing their statute of membership of their group of origin, even if their occupations were neither servile nor subordinates (they were with the service of the nobility), they were found in margin of the Empire. Despite everything, the emperor authorized them to preserve some goods.  

Fucked, which does not appear in the official organization hierarchical of the INCA company, are with the bottom of the social scale: they are the prisoners of war, with the functions and the vague statute.  

Female categories
There existed also strictly female categories, which corresponded to the mamaconas and the aqllas, often called “selected women”. The women of the nobility were designated for various functions of the worship, the women of an exceptional beauty were selected to become the secondary wives of the INCA or the military main leaders, whereas the others were offered like wives by the sovereign to chiefs of lower row. Lastly, certain women fulfilled the role of maidservants for the imperial court, the dignitaries, the clergy and the worship.  

A complex social organization
The INCA domination rested on the division of the empire in small communities, the ayllu, made up of a group of families which claimed themselves of a common ancestor. The members of the various families of a ayllu generally married between them. These unions perpetuated less one clan that a vast patrilineal chalk-lining, whose coherence was still ensured by the common cultivable ground possession. Being opposed to the levelling and democratic aspect of these communities, of the hereditary chiefs, the curacas, established in their function by the INCA, exerted on its behalf, within the ayllu, an authority which extended sometimes on several of them.

Lastly, the gathered ayllu were subdivided in two halves called hanan-saya (half of in top) and hurin-saya (half of in bottom). This bipartite division, at the same time social and religious, remained until our days without one being able to clearly elucidate the reasons which carried out its formation.  

The prosperity of the ayllu was due to an intense activity in the fields of the breeding and agriculture. The agricultural work was supported by a large variety of microclimates distributed between the sunny valleys of the coast and the terraces built in altitude with mountainside. They developed on grounds made fertile thanks to a massive contribution of guano from the coasts and thanks to the installation of an immense canal system of irrigation.  

The extension of the agricultural surface in a country as Peru implied, on the part of Incas, of enormous work. However, it is known that they were unaware of as well the wheel as the iron tools. One wonders about disproportion between the considerable number of broad roads, firmly gravelled, and their use, the LAMA being the single beast of burden. If the potato were basic indigenous food, the corn constituted noble food par excellence. “INCA buckwheat” (the quinua), very resistant to the frosts, also nourished most of the population which, on the level of the hot grounds, found its subsistence in the manioc, beans, sweet potatoes, marrows, tomatos and peppers. On the high plateaus, where agriculture appeared very difficult, the inhabitants carried out an exclusively pastoral existence, raising herds of spangled and alpacas for the meat and wool.  

The INCA made exert a rigorous control on the breeding and the products of the ground; those were distributed after the taking away of the shares which returned to the sovereign, with the lords, the god-Sun and the attics of the State, or tampu, which constituted at the same time stocks of a military intendance and reserves in the event of famine.

The INCA also imposed its law on the trade, which remained however little developed. Gold and the money had value only as materials reserved for the manufacture of the ornaments and the ritual objects. As soon as it was a question of counting, Incas, which was unaware of the writing and the currency, used the quipu, kind of cord with nodes of which the use was based on decimal classification. The quipu was used moreover for a certain category of civils servant, the quipu kamayoc, charged by the governors with counting the population.  

The craft industry did not play a great part in the economic life. The craftsmen represented however a social group considered better than the farmers, dedicated to the despotism of the leading caste.  
 

The worship returned Inti, to god of the Sun and to founder of the dynasty, tended soon to merge with that of the INCA itself. The construction of temples set up in honor of Inti was of a political character as religious at the same time. Beyond the naturist practices, fetishistic, animists of the people under INCA domination, it made it possible to reinforce the unit of the kingdom. There the divinities of the subjected people, far from being in hillock with the hostility of Incas, were integrated their Pantheon.  

Within the clerical hierarchy, the prestige which stuck to the priests of the worship of Inti was incomparable. The increasing influence of these monks on the business of the State is not perhaps foreign with the decision of the INCA Pachacutec to found, parallel to the another worship, sun-worship, that of Viracocha (the Creator); the solar divinity is relegated to the row of simple creature generated by the supreme Being. The origins of this “new” god merge with the very many Amerindian myths of a higher divinity (“the Old one”, the “Old man of the sky”, etc), generator of the world where it founds the first civilizing order.  

Viracocha created initially the sky, and the populated ground of a humanity which lived in darkness. For the atonement of a mysterious fault, it metamorphosed the first men in stone statues. In one second demonstration, the god, left the lake Titicaca, invented the Sun, the Light, the Moon and Stars, carved in the rock the ancestors of mankind, assigning with each one a portion of territory where it was to go. Its completed work, the supreme Being, having thrown its coat at sea surface, moved away in the direction of the setting sun. The most serious defects of nature are explained by the presence of an evil character at the sides of the god: Taguapica, malicious son and perpetual contradictor of his father, endeavoured to deteriorate the world as Viracocha created it.  

The supreme Being concerned a theology which concerned before all the clergy, the lords and the immediate entourage of the INCA. In addition, a particular worship was returned to the Moon (Killa), considered as sister and wife of the Sun, and with constellations like the Pleiads, and of the phenomena such as the thunder, the flash (Illapa), or the lightning were also honoured divinities.  

Earth and natural elements
The Earth, Pasha Mama, took part of the religious world, as the drinkings and the offerings with the nourishing earth testify some. In many sites incas, there remain still the distribution systems of water cut in the rock, whose complexity shows the degree of evolution of the INCA company. Lastly, there was a particular veneration for the natural, strange or remarkable elements. Rocks or caves, regarded as crowned and indicated under the general term of huacas, were the subject of a religious worship, just as certain mountains, the apus. Nowadays, these traditional beliefs, frays with the Christian religion, are still long-lived at the Andean populations.  

Human sacrifices
The piety of the INCA people was exerted especially towards a bunch of objects or of places (huacacs) which could become crowned as soon as a bond appeared between them and the supreme leader of the empire (the fact for example, that such house sheltered several days the person of the INCA). The conopas, fetishes individual of small size, were seen allotting a protective power.  

In the course of the INCA daily life, a great place was reserved for religious holidays. Most important celebrated the return of a capital event: solstice, harvest, harvest, etc Some, by which that which accompanied establishment by a new INCA, implied human sacrifices. If they do not cover the atrocious extent of the Aztec sacrifices, they did not consist in about it less immolating infants and young girls. One took a certain number of between them among the aclla-cuna (selected women), in other words the “Virgins of the sun”, who, removed as of childhood with their family, lived locked up in convents; most famous, that of Cuzco, sheltered nearly fifteen hundred women. There, under the authority of oldest (mama-aclla), those who did not become the concubines of the INCA were occupied with the weaving of the formal garments or the mixing of a kind of beer containing corn, the chicha.  

Lastly, the power and the religion were closely dependant. If the ethnos group were attached to the god-Sun by its myth of origin, the last sovereigns incas ended up being perceived like its incarnation on the Earth, thus associating the official religion with the political project of the Empire. The respect of deaths as well as the rites returned to the late sovereigns were very important. The mummies of the emperors were placed in Coricancha, near the image of the Sun. The chalk-lining of each late sovereign was held to ensure the rites, and, the every years in November, the day of ayarmaca, day of the worship of deaths, the mummies had left in procession on litters carried to arm in the streets the capital.  

However, Incas could spare the religious beliefs specific to the cultural groups integrated into the Empire. They thus largely let survive of the religions and the worships the sides of the imperial official religion.

The INCA culture

Oral tradition
The quechua, or runa-simi, was the most current language in the Empire and was widely diffused. There were three other principal languages: the puquina, the yunga and will aymara it, not counting a large number of languages and of regional dialects. None of these vernacular languages was written, but posterior transcriptions with the Spanish conquest made it possible to collect the oral, rich literatures partly several modes of expression artistic: poems, songs, elegies, as well as legends and myths. The music and the dance supplemented this unit: they accompanied religious holidays and official, the popular rejoicings, just as certain moments of the daily life.  

Rare vestiges
The rigidity of the political structures, economic and social of the INCA Empire is undoubtedly at the origin of a relatively poor artistic production. The imposing ruins of the cities testify to an exceptional direction of town planning; but Incas seem to be prohibited any overflow of creative imagination.  

There remain only vestiges of certain arts, such goldsmithery: the conquistadores plundered the made treasures of idols, jewels, ornaments and sumptuary objects, which they melted to recover the noble metals. The ceramics and the weaving, which present a geometrical decoration, were saved. INCA ceramics shows a certain formal and decorative diversity (vases with decoration geometrical or modelled in the shape of animals). The sculpture on stone is characterized especially by small votive objects, the conopas, often representing spangled and of the alpacas. Large stone containers, which were used as ritual basins, comprise also carved animals. Some representations of snakes are carved, in light relief, on certain walls incas. Sculpture in round bump, exceptional, it remains only of very rare human effigies, undoubtedly of the emperors, and some animal sculptures. The woodcarving relates to especially ceremonial objects: engraved or painted vases (qeros), specific containers employees for the drinkings (paqchas).  

The influence of the controlled people
The origin of the happiest decorative effects to which arrived Incas in the minor arts (pottery, weaving, goldsmithery) is to be sought side of the skill and taste of the people which they controlled. The transplantation of the potters of the old kingdom chimu by the INCA Tupac Yupanqui allowed the renewal of the art of ceramics through the empire. These potters used very fine pastes, worked without the assistance of the turn (the moulding was the technique generally employed). They carried out remarkable specimens of anthropomorphic vases, modelled in a spirit which stuck to the representation of realistic scenes, fantastic, even erotic. Before profiting from this influence, Incas had manufactured only one coarse ceramics, lower than the very beautiful pottery of Tiahuanaco. Chimus knew a quasi industrial production of the textile which Incas did not improve. The Peruvian craftsmen post-Tiahuanaco excelled in the manufacture of a long white cotton fabric tunic, narrow, without handles and adit in top to let pass the head. The two faces of this tunic (the cushma) were covered with red, blue or yellow feathers, according to a technique which consisted in attaching those the ones beside the others to a cord, by means of a wire passing around their folded up nozzle. The lines of feathers thus obtained were then fixed in lines parallel by points with the needle. One used for the clothes industry of this tunic of the feathers of birds like the macaw domesticates, the parrot, the hummingbird. The cushma became a traditional clothing for Incas which more particularly lived the forest areas of Peru.  

The unku (stone mortars, carved animal figures), some posts summarily cut in tree trunks and encrusted with shells, a small number of effigies monolithic are the only objects representing the INCA sculpture. The Spanish conquistadores being delivered to a systematic plundering which been able country, it is difficult to appreciate with its right value the talent of the goldsmiths incas, who worked gold, copper, the money. They usually practiced the technique of the casting, of hammering, the welding and work in pushed back.  

Architecture
One finds in all the incas cities most essential characteristics of town planning chimu; Chan-Chan, the largest city of the New World before its discovery by Christophe Colomb, offers the best example of it.  

The most remarkable vestiges of INCA masonry itself are in Cuzco. The constructions built out of colossal stones present analogies with Mycenaean architecture - count with the number of the most remarkable achievements of Incas. Almost deprived of armaments, composed of various apparatuses, comprising generally tilted walls towards the interior, this architecture is with the image of these vigorous and disciplined people.  

The sobriety of constructions and the buildings is combined with the technical virtuosity of the size of the stone and the installation of blocks, generally polygonal, perfectly adjusted the ones with the others. The fortress of Sacsahuaman constitutes more the good example of the control of the builders incas. A considerable number of “cyclopean” blocks, weighing several tons each one, was used for construction of its triple enclosure. The unit, where several styles are neighborly, comprised not only turns, but also, inside the fortress, a temple of the Sun, a residence for the INCA surrounded by houses forming a true small town. The buildings of Cuzco, as well as those of the cities built on the high plateaus like Machu Picchu (discovery in 1912) or Ollantaytambo, have doors and windows of which the trapezoidal form is very characteristic. All these imperial sites which were useful, by their width and their solidity, the power and the stability of the power, were built by a semi-skilled labor helped by innumerable temporary workmen.