An Essay On The Inca Empire

Like the Athenians and Spartans of ancient Greece, the Inca and the Aztec bear resemblance to the two other ancient cultures. The Athenians and Incas were both more interested in developing their Arts as well as their military, but both the Spartans and the Aztecs were highly interested more so in warfare than religion. Although the Aztec and Inca never had to face each other, it is interesting to compare them because of their dominant positions of extremely large and powerful tribes. I am going to compare and contrast religion and the social system along with their system of government, which can be put together.

Each Maya City governed the area surrounding it; some large cities each controlled one or more of the smaller cities. If the leader died his younger brother or son would succeed the ruler. This led generations of a single family to rule for hundreds of years. In the Andes, the Incas, kept their power by providing entertainments and giving luxurious gifts to the people. The people paid taxes in return for these gifts. The Inca emperor married his sister and his generals were normally related to him. This ensured a certain loyalty from them to the emperor. The Aztecs held power through land ownership.

lands and sometimes on building projects or in mining.” (World of the Inca). Thus the Inca expected

The Inca Empire, the massive nation that extended 2,500 miles along the western coast of South America and had a population of over 7 million at its peak. It included all of what is now Ecuador and Peru and most of Chile. Known as “The Children of the Sun”, they excelled at craftsmanship, weaving, and culture (“Children of the Sun”). A very religious people, they worshiped the Sun as their supreme god and held religious festivals monthly to appease these gods. Although they did not value it aside from its beautiful appearance, the Inca Empire was home to millions of pounds of solid gold and silver. The Inca had no use for it except to use it to craft decorations and statues. In fact, an Inca citizen valued cloth more than they valued gold

The Incas and the Aztecs Before the Spanish and Portuguese "discovered" the New World, there

During the 15th century, there were two leading empires of Mesoamerica. The Inca Empire, which was located in what is now Peru and the Aztecs, whose area was located in what is now Mexico. Both the Aztec and Inca empires were advanced civilizations with a good economy, agricultural developments, and religious practices that spread across the region of Mesoamerica.

There were several ancient civilizations that built their cultures around their geography. The Incas were among one of those ancient civilizations. They had amazing ingenuity to make use of their environment. The Incas built agriculture terraces and they had a complex irrigation system. And some crops that we use today. The physical environment of the Incas affected and shaped their civilization.

The most significant physical geographical factor that contributed to the development of the ancient South American society of the Incas was the Andes Mountains. The Inca Empire had villages and cities throughout the Andes Mountains. Some of these settlements were as low as sea level and their capital, Cusco, was at an altitude of 11,200 feet. The Andes are considered some of the longest and highest mountain ranges. In fact it’s tallest peak, Mount Aconcaqua, in Argentina, tops out at 22,841 feet (Zimmermann, 2013). Despite the fact that people were traversing mountains the people flourished creating trails, aqueducts and agricultural practices that still exist today.

1. Before Francisco Pizarro began the Spanish conquest in 1532, the Incan empire dominated the Andes Mountain region. An emperor who demanded strict obedience ruled the land. All business was run by the state, which could draft citizens for its projects. The Inca, terracing the landscape and irrigating the crops, farmed the mountainsides. The Inca were brilliant engineers, whose roadways included bridges. The city of Machu Picchu is an example of their skill with tools like the plumb bob and wooden roller, which they used for in heavy construction. Hundreds of years after their civilization was subdued by the Spanish, the descendants of the once-dominate Incas make up about 50 percent of Peru’s population.

DBQ 5- Inca and Aztec Comparison Throughout the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries C.E., empires such as the Chinese and Byzantine thrived and prospered. South and Mesoamerican cultures such as the Aztec and Inca arose at this time. These cultures grew to become very advanced, each inventing a wide selection of technologies to suit their social and economic needs. The economic characteristics of the Aztec and Inca Empires were similar in agricultural focus and an importance of trade; however, they differed in their governmental organization.

Inca Empire, which contributed languages, as well as promoted irrigated farms, and buildings and roads composed of stones

The Incan Empire was the largest indigenous empire in the world before the conquest of South America by the Spaniards. "At its height, the Inca Empire controlled all of the western part of the South American continent between Ecuador and Chile. The Inca capital was at Cusco, Peru, and the Inca legends claimed they were descended from the great Tiwanaku civilization at Lake Titicaca" (Hirst 2012). The Incan rulers, at their Empire's height, were able to exercise control over such a massive territory in part because of their extensive system of roads. Incan roads spanned all over the empire, enabling a great deal of centralized control by the leadership hierarchy despite the territorial sprawl (Hirst 2012). "The Inca state's domain was unprecedented, its rule resulting in a universal language a form of Quechua, a religion worshipping the sun, and a 14,000 mile-long road system crisscrossing high Andean mountain passes and linking the rulers with the ruled" (Clark 2012). The roads were constructed so they could be traversed in all weathers.

One way the Inca emperors did this was through effectively gaining and organizing a state labor force. The Roman and Inca empire had many similarities. Additionally to their comparable road systems, the empires also shared an alike system of acquiring labor and handling their people. Similar to the Roman bread and circuses, Inca rulers provided their people with “gifts of luxury goods and elaborate entertainment. The people returned the favors by furnishing their leaders with labor” (Morris). This helped the leaders gain and maintain legitimacy because it not only earned them respect for their moral handling, but also gained them state labor. Possibly the greatest achievement of the Incas were their ability to organise this labor, through the use of curacas. Curacas were often rulers of conquered ethnic groups whose “chief responsibility was to make sure the proper number of people showed up to work for the Incas and to distribute the workload among the households for which each was responsible” (Malpass). This effective distribution of workloads made the empire stronger and more powerful. For example, Pachacuti’s use “of the mitmae (labor tax) allowed for one of the most rapid developments of an empire infrastructure in world history” ("Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui”). The procuring and organisation of state labor helped emperors gain legitimacy because they were effectively strengthening their

The title "Inca Empire" was given by the Spanish to a Quechuan-speaking Native American population that established a vast empire in the Andes Mountains of South America shortly before its conquest by Europeans. The ancestral roots of this empire began in the Cuzco valley of highland Peru around 1100 AD. The empire was relatively small until the imperialistic rule of emperor Pachacuti around 1438. Pachacuti began a systematic conquest of the surrounding cultures, eventually engulfing over a hundred different Indian nations within a 30-year period. This conquest gave rise to an empire that, at its zenith in the early 16th century; consisted of an estimated 10 million subjects living

I would have chosen to live in the Incan Empire during there tenure as dominant empire. I would have liked to live there because of their outstanding engineering advances at the time. Such as, the suspension bridges and there excellent systems of roads that messengers used to deliver quipu. They also forced every citizen to pay “tax” by either working on those building projects or agricultural work. Also, their religious system was simple and not complex, they were polytheistic, which means they believed in a single god.