Inca (aymara)

During those days a young man could not choose her girl himself. If he liked a young girl, he showed his interest to the girl. But he could not meet the girl openly. So he would meet her when she was getting her water from spring, or at some other place. If she also showed her interest, then usually that young man asked his parents to speak to the parents of the lady. Once a year the village governors lined up the young men and girls set by the parents for him. Sometime it could happen, same lady could be chosen by more than one person. In that case the governor would take the final decision. He would listen to the parents of the boys and the parents of the lady. After that he would decide which boy will marry the lady

After this program each pair of the family started to arrange their wedding ceremonies. It could begin with the parents of the young man visiting the young ladies house. After reaching the house of the bride, first groom knelt down before the bride and out a shoe on her right foot. This act would make everybody understand that the young man was ready to serve the lady for the rest of his life. Then both the families went to the groom's house. Someone old and knowledgeable of the village was invited to the groom’s house. He would speak on the marital behavior. But before he started, the bride would give some presents to the groom, which would include a metal pin for the cape, a headband and a woolen shirt. Once the groom put on the clothes, they sat together to listen to the old person. Sometime this man could be the relative of this family, or he could be just from the village. During the speech all the women present prepared the feast. So when the talk finished bride, groom and the guests joined the feast.

The Incas lived in large family units known as ayllu, which consisted of about 10-20 members. Each unit had a leader and he was called Mallcu. In a village every single person had to help in farming the land. Each ayllu lived on a plot of land because they spent their entire life outside. The homes of the common people had no windows and only one door. They would hang leather or cloth over the entrance to provide privacy. Many of the homes were small, made of mud, stone, and sun-baked brick. The homes of the royals and nobles were large, contained many rooms, windows, doorways, and sometimes even had wooden doors.

Marriage was important in the Inca society, because a man was not considered an adult until he was married. Just like many other societies monogamy was the norm for the lower classes, but concubine was allowed for the upper class. Women were only allowed to marry when they could reproduce. When a young woman was between the age of sixteen and twenty and a young man between twenty and twenty-five, they would be called together by an Inca official who would match them up. Marriage was considered a duty owed to the empire and remaining single was not an option. There were times when someone would have a disability and they then were paired with someone who also had a disability. Each couple knew each other because it was customary to be paired with someone from one’s own ayllu. The young man and his parents would walk to the bride’s home where her family would give their approval and then everyone would then travel to the groom’s home. The bride would hand her soon to be husband a wool tunic and a lluato, which is a headband. Then the marriage ceremony was celebrated by feasting, dancing, and drinking chicha. The government also provides all newlyweds with a plot of land and they were expected to reproduce. Rarely, would a commoner take more than one wife if he did only the first one would be considered the principle wife. If a man’s wife died, he would wear a black cloak and would not remarry for a year.

The birth of a child was a very welcome event in the Inca empire. There were rituals for both parents to perform to ensure the safe delivery of an infant. But pregnant mothers were expected to keep working right up to the day they gave birth, and they often gave birth without help. After giving birth, the mother either carried the baby around with her while she worked, tied in a pack across her chest, or she placed the baby in a cradle. The parents did not immediately name the baby; the naming occurred later, during a ceremony called rutichikoy, which accompanied the baby's weaning from breast-feeding. At the rutichikoy ceremony, the child received a haircut, a fingernail trim, and a name. A ceremony called huarachicoy marked a boy's puberty and passage into adulthood. In this ceremony the boy received a loincloth woven by his mother. For girls, small, family ceremonies called quichicoy marked the beginning of menstruation. At these puberty ceremonies, the boys and girls received new, adult names.

The Lost Inca Empire

"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuyu is the name the Inca gave to their empire. It stretched north to south some 2,500 miles along the high mountainous Andean range from Colombia to Chile and reached west to east from the dry coastal desert called Atacama to the steamy Amazonian rain forest. At the height of its existence the Inca Empire was the largest nation on Earth and remains the largest native state to have existed in the western hemisphere.

10 million subjects. Cuzco, which emerged as the richest city in the New World, was the center of Inca life, the home of its leaders

The essence of Inka architecture cannot be distilled into a single word. Three themes demand recognition: precision, functionality, and austerity. The Inka stonefitters worked stone with a precision unparalleled in human history; their architects clearly esteemed functionality above decoration; yet their constructions achieved breathtaking beauty through austerity of line and juxtaposition of masses. The Inka seem to have presaged Mies Van der Rohe's philosophy of "less is more".

The dominant stylistic form in Inka architecture is a simple, but elegantly proportioned trapezoid, which serves the dual ends of functionality and severely restrained decoration. Trapezoidal doorways, windows, and wall niches are found in Inka constructions of all types,

They built with locally available rock, from limestone to granite.

war, foreign invaders had landed in the north. Metal-clad and bearing lethal new weapons, the Spaniards had journeyed to the northern Inca town of Cajamarca, where they took prisoner the Inca king, Atahuallpa. Eight months later, they executed their royal captive, and in 1533 their leader, Francisco Pizarro, picked a young prince, Manco Inca Yupanqui, to rule as a puppet king

For purposes of administration the empire was divided into four parts, the lines of which met at Cuzco; the quarters were divided into provinces, usually on the basis of former independent divisions. These in turn were customarily split into an upper and a lower moiety; the moieties were subdivided into ayllus, or local communities. Much as it exists today as the basic unit of communal indigenous society, so the ancient ayllu was the political and social foundation of Inca government. When a territory was conquered, surveys, consisting of relief models of topographical and population features, and a census of the population were made. With these reports, recorded on quipus, of the material and human resources in each province, populations were reshuffled as needed. Thus transplanted, and dominated by Quechua colonists, the subject peoples had less chance to revolt, and the separate languages and cultures were molded to the Inca pattern.

The Inca ruled an empire in the Andes and Pacific coast of South America, with a capital in Cuzco (Peru) in the 12th century, at which time their population was about 12,000,000. They left no written record of their civilization before the Spanish conquest. The Inca had an oral tradition, however, claiming the founder of the Inca dynasty to be Manco Capac. Mayta Capac was their 4th emperor under whom the Inca began to expand. To manage the new areas, the Incas employed forced resettlement of many of the conquered people and set up local governors responsible for gathering taxes. When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, the leadership of the Inca was in turmoil, and so within three years, the invaders conquered the Inca.

The Inca were agricultural, using canals and irrigation, with a large network of roads and bridges, as well as a message delivery system. The Inca were tolerant of the religion of their conquered people. Their own religion had among other elements, a sun god, Inti, a creator god, Viracocha, and human sacrifice.

Page: 181Search Result: Among the many wives a man could have, only one was the chief one and was called a legitimate wife, the one to whom he married by mutual consent and with some solemnity; and she was obeyed by the others and as a proper and legitimate wife had great preëminence and a name different from the rest of them, who were regarded as concubines.

Inca kinship groups were the basis for the social hierarchy that eventually formed the political structure of the Empire. At the top of the hierarchy was the Sapa Inca, which meant “Unique Inca”

The kin group or ayullu, which an Andean person belonged to, determined the social position of the person in the Empire. The ayllus were separated into tow interdependent halves known as moieties. A moiety was the kinship term that told what ranking you belonged to. There were two main in Cuzco:Hurin (Lower Cuzco) and Hanan (Upper Cuzco) (Bauer and Covey 2002: 850-852). Stephen Wernke (2006:180) defined ayullu it as being "a central to the political, social and economic articulation of territorially discontinous communities in the Andes." Common ancestral deities were at the top of the hierarchy of the ayllus. A member traced his relation to an ayullu an ancestor by myth. The ayullu member performed labor and worship towards their ancestors in the form of feasting and other rituals in order to receive land and resources (Wernke 2006:180).

One of the major kinship traditions practiced was intermarriage. Oral history gives account of elite Inca officials marrying women from different ayullus in order to create alliances (Bauer and Covey 2002: 854). This also helped the pan-ethnic strategy the Inca emperors used. Ethnic groups provided secondary wives for the Inca nobles (Bauer and Covey 2002: 854). Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to find archaeological evidence to support this ethno-history.