What was inca government

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The invasion had driven his father to a military outpost. Subsequently, Pachacuti worked to expand the territory the Inca controlled, extending their influence beyond the Cuzco region. The Incas worked hard at diplomacy, and tried to get their rivals to surrender peacefully before resorting to military conquest, said Terence D'Altroy, an anthropologist at Columbia University, in a PBS Nova interview. Pachacuti ordered that the Inca capital, Cuzco, be rebuilt and strengthened.

And, he allegedly had the city completely raised so that it could be rebuilt in the shape of a puma. McEwan added that commoners were not allowed to live in the city and had to reside in the outlying settlements. The Spanish would later plunder this gold and build a new city in the place of Cuzco. While the Inca did not develop what we would consider a formal system of writing, they did use recording devices, such as the quipu, a cord with knotted strings suspended from it.

Most written accounts of Incas come from outsiders as the Incas primarily shared their knowledge with one another through oral storytelling. According to McEwan, the Inca pantheon had an array of gods that included the creator god Viracocha, sun god Inti, thunder god Illapa and earth-mother goddess Pachamama, among others. There were also regional deities worshipped by people whom the Inca conquered. The Inca gods were honored in many ways, including prayers, fasting and animal sacrifice, but the most powerful form of honor was human sacrifice, typically of children and teenagers.

In , archaeologists discovered the mummies of three children who had been left as sacrifices at a shrine near the summit of a volcano in Argentina. Research has revealed that, in the year before their sacrifice, the three consumed a special diet rich in maize and dried llama meat and were drugged with coca leaves and alcohol.

In addition to these elite food products, other goods consumed in the Inca diet included sweet potatoes, quinoa , beans and chili peppers. In exchange for labor, the Inca government was expected to provide feasts for the people at certain times of the year.

These complex recording devices allowed officials to keep track of taxes, labor, and goods in a precise fashion. The Spanish burned the vast majority of existing quipus when they arrived in South America. However, there is some evidence to suggest that these tools were also used to record stories and language for posterity, and were not only numerical recording devices. Trade and the movement of goods fed into what is called the vertical archipelago.

This system meant that all goods produced within the empire were immediately property of the ruling elites. These elites, such as the emperor and governors, then redistributed resources across the empire as they saw fit. Taxes and goods were collected from four distinct suyus , or districts, and sent directly to the ruling emperor in Cusco. This highly organized system was most likely perfected under the emperor Pachacuti around The Four suyus of the Inca Empire.

The economic system linked together four large suyus, or districts, that all reported back to the capital of Cusco. This system also required a minimum quota of manual labor from the general population.

This form of labor taxation was called mita. The populations of each district were expected to contribute to the wealth of the empire by mining, farming, or doing other manual labor that would benefit the entire empire.

Precious metals, textiles, and crops were collected and redistributed using the the road system that snaked across the land, from the ocean to the Andes.

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