2.4—The Inca (8 min video)

Transcript

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Well, today we’re going to look at our final Mesoamerican culture, and that’s the culture of the Inca. Now, if you look at a map of South America, as you can see now, you can find the country of Peru. Peru is where the Incan culture was centralized. And from Peru, they ruled all the way up through Ecuador and Colombia. They ruled through the area of Brazil, all the way down Argentina and Chile, down to the very southern tip of South America. In fact, the Incan built quite an empire that was 3,000 miles long and ruled over 12 million subjects from their capital of Cusco, which is in Peru. Now to actually rule over this massive empire, they built a road system of 12,500 miles of roads, many of which are still in existence and still in use to this very day. And if you’ve ever studied the geography of South America, you know there’s lots of mountains down there. There are lots of deep ravines. There are lots of rivers that exist hundreds or thousands of feet below where you’re walking. And if you have to cross from one section to another, you actually have to find your way either around the hills or you need a bridge.

And the Incans were master builders. The Incans were able to take fibrous roots or fibrous leaves from things like bushes and trees and they wove them together into a very strong rope and then they weave that rope together into bridges that were essentially suspension bridges over these deep ravines that lasted and served them well for centuries.

So they were incredible builders. They built such projects as their great retreat at Machu Picchu, which still has technology we don’t know how to duplicate. That’s where they put together stones so well without using any mortar in between the stones that if you take a credit card or if you take a pocket knife, you can’t even slide the blade or slide that credit card into the cracks. That’s how well together they fit these stones, even though some of these stones are the size of a Volkswagen. They’re just incredible technology they were able to use. Not only that, but Machu Picchu was built so high up above in the altitude and it was built so far away from the rest of civilization that it wasn’t even discovered until 1906. So even though the Spanish lived in that area and ruled over the Incan Empire, which they conquered for so many years, the Spanish never even found it.

The other interesting thing about the Incans is the Incan government, something we need to take a look at. The Incans ruled everyone from their capital at Cusco and the term Incan is kind of misleading because if you were Incan that did not necessarily mean that you were a common person or a slave.

In fact you might be in the Incan Empire but you might not be an Incan. That’s because the Incans were those who ruled. They had their own language. They had their own system of reading. If you were underneath them, you were somebody who had been conquered, you were a middle-class person or a lower-class person or you were a slave, then you were typically called a Chachua or a Chachuin and you spoke the language of Chachuin.

What’s interesting about this is the language of Chachuin is still spoken in Peru. In fact, there are thousands of people who still communicate daily with their families and in their businesses with this language. But the Incan language, it’s gone. Because the Incan rulers are themselves gone. And here’s why. The Incans set up their government to rule selfishly. They set up their government so that when they conquered someone, they always brought them into the capital so they could keep a close eye on them.

So they could always make certain that they weren’t going to rebel. That they weren’t going to run away or serve someone else. Not only that, but the Incans developed a pyramidal style of government. We already talked about that with a chain of being. The Egyptians had a term for it, they called it Maat government, which you can see how it’s spelled here right now. And Maat government was a system where at the very top in the Incan Empire they had their emperor. He had the most power. He was the one who gave all of the orders and when he gave an order it was considered to be like a command from God himself.

And then below him he had four trusted men who were each called prefects. Now, they were his right-hand men. They were the go-to guys for him. When he gave an order, he made certain that his four prefects knew the order precisely. And then those four prefects had provincial governors below them in the next phase of the pyramid, and they would give orders to them. And then those guys would give orders to the district officers for the next layer. And then those district officers would give orders to the local chiefs. And the local chiefs would then give orders to the foremen, who each gave orders to a a series of ten families. In other words, the whole Incan Empire was a gigantic structure designed to give the emperor the most power and to keep those who were in the common families at the very bottom and they had no power.

It was also designed so that if you were at the bottom and you didn’t like something or you wanted to change something, tough. You had no way to appeal or to say to the guy above you, “Hey, can you change this?” If If you did say something like that, you would be imprisoned or beaten or worse. And so most Incans or most Chetua who were at the bottom learned to just keep their mouth shut. Because all orders came from the very top and they work their way down, just kind of like the rain falls on a pyramid. It doesn’t go up, it only goes down. As a result, the Incans ruled very harshly and with quite a fist. we’ll see that this whole structure actually defeated them. What’s also interesting about the Incans, the last thing I want you to pay attention to today, is that the Incans believed in a legend very similar to Quetzalcoatl.

In fact, instead of calling this person Quetzalcoatl, they called him Viracocha. You can see the spelling up here on the screen right now. And they considered Viracocha to be a god of healing. Like Quetzalcoatl, they said that he came from the east, that he wore mysterious robes and had this mysterious command to stop human sacrifice and to practice things like confession of sin.

And like Quetzalcoatl, they attributed certain attributes to him over time. In fact, I’ll read to you what one of the Incan emperors actually wrote about Quetzalcoatl. We’ve translated it into English here. Here’s what one of the emperors of the Incans wrote about Viracoca. He said, “Viracocha is ancient, remote, supreme.” He’s uncreated. “Nor does he need the gross satisfaction of a wife. He manifests himself as a trinity when he wishes. Otherwise, only heavenly warriors and archangels surround him. He created all peoples by his word. He is man’s fortune. He ordains his years, and he nourishes man. He is indeed the very principle of life itself. For he warms the folk through his created Son. He is a bringer of peace, and he is an orderer. He is in his own being blessed, and he has pity on man’s wretchedness and sin. He alone judges, and he absolves them, he forgives them, and he enables them to combat their own sin. In other words, the Incans understood very well that there was someone out there who had a solution for death. They just weren’t quite certain how to find him. But we’ll talk about how they think they found him in the next lesson.