The Inca Empire - Out of Thin Air - Extra History - #1

Lima 1615 the old man clutches a parcel fat and square that he's dragged from one end of a fallen Empire to the other He is a mixed-race Christian the son of an Inca aristocrat and a former translator for priests seeking to study and suppress native Andean beliefs Fifteen years before he'd had his property confiscated after suing to get his ancestral lands back since then He's wandered the country observing the disappearing Inca life compiling a chronicle complete with illustrations It's a history of the Inca but also a catalogue of abuses by the colonial Spanish his conclusion Spain must reform the government in a way that protects native people and values their culture. He's carried this book all 1,000 loose pages of it through harsh terrain and bandit country that it survived to this point is a minor miracle and now he's finally sending it to its intended recipient the king of Spain so Guaman Poma de Ayala takes the only copy of his life's work and hands it to a man aboard a ship No one will see it again for 300 years When you get off the plane the first Thing you notice is how thin the air is and as you exit the airport a man in a poncho offers you a Styrofoam cup full of coca leaf tea to help you deal with the Andean altitude and your hotel has oxygen tanks in the lobby Cusco sits at nearly three thousand four hundred meters or eleven thousand two hundred feet in altitude when you walk the cobblestone streets you feel dizzy and have to stop for a breath after a few blocks and Then you start to notice something strange Every large Spanish building in the city has been built on a foundation of Incan stone That's because the Spanish didn't build Cusco they merely built on top of it it was in fact the Inca who despite the altitude built a city here and Not just any city mind you a city that ruled the largest indigenous Empire to ever exist in the Americas the Inca Empire spanned 2500 miles along the Pacific coast of South America Stretching from present-day Colombia to Chile and it ruled as many as 12 million people but sheer numbers can't really convey What an impressive feat that was because the Inca also controlled some of the most varied and harsh terrain on the planet Ranging from snow-capped mountains to the humid Amazonian jungle to the Atacama Desert parts of which haven't seen rain in nearly 400 years Walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu a fairly short route You can still follow today and he'll pass dusty valleys lush agricultural terraces alpine tundra and Jungle, the massive andes themselves create these micro environments forcing the moisture out of passing cloud formations So part of the inca heartland remain wet while earth in the other areas. Stay powder dry in fact many settlements stand at altitudes that are difficult to breathe in for anyone but the Andeans whose lungs have adapted to absorb more oxygen actually After building all of these celebratory churches on the foundations of the Incan capital of Cusco the Spanish moved the capital to Lima partially because they couldn't handle the altitude but Despite the complexity of ruling over and building in such varied environments The masonry of the Inca highway cuts through all of them at times tunneling through solid rock winding its way through ruins of settlements, fortresses, Terraces and temples and the Inca built this sophisticated state without iron tools the wheel riding or draught animals money or a written language However, they did have quipu, a series of knotted ropes that help them calculate complex equations and remember numbers and dates but the rest of their culture their folklore their religion and their history was all Oral, which becomes a bit of a problem when it comes to telling the history of the Inca Empire Because while the conquest is well documented We have no sources from before the period of the Spanish conquest Like the buildings of Cusco where Spanish constructions stand on inca foundations all of our stories of the Empire Come to us to one extent or another via their colonizers following the Spanish conquest dozens of priests Administrators and former conquistadors set to work interviewing native people in order to capture the Empire's oral history and while these accounts are better than nothing their usefulness is mixed at best See after the fall of the Inca Empire a struggle began over the Empire's cultural legacy Spanish authorities stripped the valuables from shrines leveled temples suppressed native religious practices and Confiscated the Imperial mummies and the part of that campaign Involved collecting and telling the Incas oral histories some of the priests collected these stories in hopes It would assist in conversion but many considered the Inca devil worshipers or wrote specifically to make their rule appear illegitimate justifying the Spanish conquest conversely more sympathetic accounts came from Conquistadors who married into the inca elite and had a closer relationship with the culture but these two can display a major gap in understanding even after living in Peru for decades the Spanish didn't really Understand the Inca or any of the other people who lived under the Empire's banner Their ideas about religion society and politics were just too different for these chroniclers to capture accurately For example, the Inca didn't perceive history in a linear fashion to tell the history of their four province Empire They wouldn't start at the beginning They'd tell the history of the most important province beginning to end before moving on to the neck Most important and so on and it's from one of these Spanish accounts that we get the date of the Empire's founding But even that is controversial and maybe entirely wrong the closest we have to a native perspective comes mostly from a generation of mixed-race authors the sons of marriages between Inca noble women and their Spanish conquerors all Christians who were born after the Empire's destruction among them was blas fira a mixed-race jesuit whose pro inca views especially those about native languages being suitable for discussing church doctrine may have led his order to Imprison then exile him to Spain eventually He was murdered and his work burned during an English pirate raid Only a few excerpts remain from his history mostly in the work of another half Inca chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega who wrote extensively on the Empire's history but while vega's book Royal commentaries of the Incas is considered the first literary masterpiece by a Native American It has problems as a work of history because you see Vega left Peru as a teenager and published his chronicles forty-nine years later Meaning his memory of the oral history had likely degraded not to mention He was writing with a specific objective in mind while Guam and Poma rallied against Spanish abuses and Valera pushed for indigenous language and culture to be seen as equal Vega portrayed the Inca Empire as a Perfect society one without poverty where aristocrats like his family provided everything a person would need in Fact it appears that this mode of argumentative history was a hallmark of Andean culture to the Incas It seems history was not necessarily about capturing reality in a fully accurate picture But rather in molding the past to make a specific point, for example the Spanish found multiple Incan families in Cusco told elaborate but conflicting versions of the same history each using it to Justify their claim to a piece of land and as a result of these conflicting testimonies modern historians have come to vastly different conclusions about the Empire depending how they read the sources and because of this Incan society has been portrayed as everything from a communist utopia to a Totalitarian nightmare and details of the Empire's founding continue to be debated But the history's paired with archeology do tell us this in the early 13th century a line of kings began Coalescing around what would become the city of Cuzco? Manco capac the semi-mythical founder and as the legends say one of the first people to walk the earth Established the kingdom of cuzco before turning to stone Then came his successors each taking the ruling title of Sapa Inca each named for their greatness in Construction and war and they each took names that matched their glory and were also pretty baller if I do say so myself Such as the valorous generous Inca the left-handed the splendid accountant the Magnanimous and my personal favorite he who weeps blood they built the city and expanded their territory creating the Inca ways of life and bringing order to a chaotic world or Perhaps not because archaeological evidence indicates that many of the things we consider Incan accomplishments their farming terraces building style Agricultural products statecraft roads and knotted quipu were actually inherited from previous Andean societies But regardless of their source the Inca were about to use these tools on a scale No one had ever seen because in Cusco the Sapa Inca had a son He was not the oldest nor the favorite of his father, but he was intelligent brave and with a ruthless vision He had a birth name but that is not how he would be known. He would be known as the earth shaker Pachacuti first emperor of the Inca and a man who would remake the world in Cataclysm Special thanks to educational tier patrons Ovid Xia Turk Joseph blame and Gerald Spencer diamond

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Views: 835,852

Rating: 4.9351258 out of 5

Keywords: documentary, extra credits, extra credits history, extra history, history, history lesson, james portnow, learn history, matt krol, pop history, rob rath, study history, world history, inca empire, out of thin air, cusco peru, peruvian history, quipu, Manco Capac, sapa inca, andean history, jordan martin

Id: I-9z_Jc81fw

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019