Home > Inca Empire
: For other meanings of Inca, see Inca (disambiguation).
The Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu in Quechua) reigned in South America from about 1200 until the death of its last emperor Atahualpa at the hands of Spanish Conquistadores in 1533. The empire stretched as far north as southern Colombia and Ecuador, included all of Peru and Bolivia as well as northwestern Argentina and northern Chile. Its capital was the modern-day city of Cuzco (Quechua for "Navel of the World"), in what is today Peru. This great empire encompassed many nations and over 700 different languages.
1 Religion
The Incas built many temples to their deities. The best-known Incan temples include the Sun Temple in Cuzco, the temple at Vilcashuaman , the temple at Aconcagua (the highest mountain in South America) and the Temple of the Sun at Titicaca Island . The Incas built the Sun Temple in Cuzco from exquisitely matched and joined stones. It had a circumference of over 1200 feet, and housed a great image of the sun. One part of the temple, the Coricancha ("Golden Enclosure"), held models of cornstalks, llamas and lumps of earth. Portions of the Incas' land were allotted to the sun and administered for the priests.
1.1 Sacred Sites
Huacas, or sacred sites, were widespread around Incan empire. Huacas were deific entities that resided in natural objects such as mountains, boulders or streams. Spiritual leaders in a community would use prayer and offerings to communicate with a huaca for advice or assistance.
1.2 Priests and Chosen Women
PriestA priest or priestess is a holy man or woman who takes an officiating role in worship of any religion, with the distinguishing characteristic of offering sacrifices. Priests have been known since the earliest times and in the simplest societies (see shamas lived at all of the important shrines and temples. They functioned as diviners of the lungs and as sorcerers, confessors and healers. The chief priest in Cuzco held the titile Villac umu , and wielded power over all shrines and temples and could appoint and remove priests.
Only the most skilled could be Chosen Women. They were picked at an early age, and spent their time weaving textiles used by the Inca and its priests.
1.3 DivinationDivination is the occultic practice of ascertaining information by supernatural means. If a distinction is to be made with fortune-telling, divination has a formal or ritual and often social character, usually in a religious context; while fortune-telling
The Incas relied on divinationDivination is the occultic practice of ascertaining information by supernatural means. If a distinction is to be made with fortune-telling, divination has a formal or ritual and often social character, usually in a religious context; while fortune-telling to inform all important events in society. The Incas used divination to diagnose illnesses, predict battle outcomes, and to drive out demons. Divination would also determine what sacrifices should be made and to which god. The Incas believed that unseen powers controlled life, and they appealed to these powers in their rites of divination.
Incan priests practiced divination by watching spiders move, by looking at the arrangement that coca leaves took in a shallow dish, and by examining the lungs of sacrificed white llamaThe Llama Lama glama is a large camelid native to South America. The term llama is sometimes used more broadly, to indicate any of the four closely related animals that make up the South American branch of the family Camelidae: the llama itself, the vicuns. The lungs of the llama were inflated by blowing into the dissected tracheaThe trachea ( IPA tr'eik-i-a), or windpipe is a tube extending from the larynx to the bronchi in mammals, and from the pharynx to the syrinx in birds, carrying air to the lungs. It is lined with ciliated cells which push particles out and reinforced with, and then were removed by priests, who minutely studied the veins. They also drank ayahuascaAyahuasca is an entheogenic drink prepared from segments of the vine Banisteriopsis caapi''. Sections of vine are boiled with leaves from any of a large number of other plants (such as Psychotria viridis or Diplopterys cabrerana yielding a brew containing, a hallucinatory drug that affects the central nervous system. The Inca believed this practice put the imbiber in touch with supernatural powers.
