Quotes About Inka

Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar's mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father's mummy.

The Inka empire, the greatest state ever seen in the Andes, was also the shortest lived. It began in the fifteenth century and lasted barely a hundred years before being smashed by Spain.

To Dobyns, the moral of this story was clear. The Inka, he wrote in his 1963 article, were not defeated by steel and horses but by disease and factionalism

More than a century later, when Dobyns went to Lima, Prescott's was still the only complete account. (A fine history, John Hemming's Conquest of the Incas, appeared in 1970. But it, too, has had no successor, despite a wealth of new information.) "The Inka were largely ignored because the entire continent of South America was largely ignored," Patricia Lyon, an anthropologist at the Institute for Andean Studies, in Berkeley, California, explained to me.

the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between.

The Inka goal was to knit the scores of different groups in western South America—some as rich as the Inka themselves, some poor and disorganized, all speaking different languages—into a single bureaucratic framework under the direct rule of the emperor.

As with the Inka, the kings' mummified bodies continued to live opulently in their own homes and could not be displaced; indeed, the mummies were necessary presences at important state occasions. As a result, each new ruler had to build his own palace and acquire the riches necessary to maintain it till the end of time. The system almost guaranteed imperial ambitions and exuberant construction plans.

Much of Wayna Qhapaq's time was devoted to organizing the empire's public works projects. Often these were more political than practical. Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades "to move a mountain from one spot to another" for no practical purpose

the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)