The Inca Revolution Essay

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 fifteenth century, two major state-based agrarian civilization, Aztec and Inca empires, played a huge role by making up the population of the Americas. With this being said, a lot of the Americas history lies within the boundaries of the empires. This history includes literary tradition, records about the civilizations culture, and observations of the Spanish who conquered them in the early sixteenth century. Document 12.1 concentrates on giving evidence through the eyes of two Spanish observers, both of whom at least tried to connect with the civilizations and record first hand records.

     The Aztecs were an American Indian people who ruled a mighty empire in Mexico from the 1400's to the 1500's. The Aztecs had one of the most advanced civilizations in the Americas and built cities as large as any in Europe at that time. They also practiced a remarkable religion that affected every part of their lives and featured human sacrifice. The Aztecs built towering temples, created huge sculptures, and held impressive ceremonies all for the purpose of worshipping their gods. The Spaniards destroyed their magnificent empire in the year 1521, but the Aztecs left a lasting mark on Mexican life and culture .

Peru is located in western South America and it shares borders with Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador and the South Pacific Ocean. Peru is about 1.28 million square kilometers. There are three major regions in Peru: a narrow coastal belt, the wide Andean mountains and the Amazon Basin. The coast is mostly a desert, but contains Peru's major cities. The Andes has two main ranges - Cordillera Occidental and Oriental. Oriental includes Peru's highest mountain called Huascaran, it a peaks out at 22,200ft. On the east side is the Amazon Basin, a region of tropical lowland, the water there is carried out by the Maranon and Ucayali rivers.

The Great Incan Rebellion is a documentary written and produced by Graham Townsley in June of 2007. This film displaces an argument against the traditional historical narrative of the “great” Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire in Peru. The traditional historical narrative consists of the Spanish conquistadors going to Peru and absolutely annihilating this huge army of Incans. This theory was put to the test in this documentary. The film starts out with the discovery of an Incan cemetery, where the bottom layer of bodies were buried in the tradition Incan manner, while the top layer of bodies were not. The bottom layer had the bodies in a crouched

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 American Revolution did much more than any of our founding fathers had ever imagined, it started a movement that would threaten the very roots of colonialism across the globe. Setting an example of how a David could overcome a Goliath, the United States inspired regions such as Latin America to fight for their rights and liberties as well. One such region that embraced the message was Upper Peru, which would later be known as Bolivia. With some key tipping points that caused the war, the leaders of the soon to be formed nation rallied its troops and won several major battles, but even they couldn’t prevent the tough times that lay in the early years of the nation. From the year 1809, Upper Peru was engaged in a

Both the Aztec empire and the Inca empire thought of the god that represented the sun

     The Aztec and Inca peoples lived in militaristic and expansionist societies whose ideals were fueled by their religious convictions. Expansionism was necessary for both societies to support their religious beliefs. The religious zeal of these two civilizations became something that the leaders of the empires could not control. These empires were built through ideologically driven conquests, which became the cornerstones of their societies and something beyond the control of the rulers.

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

How is it possible that the small amount of Spanish conquistadors were able to defeat the strong and powerful Inca empire? The successful conquer was due to the death of the Inca king, Wayna Capac, and the spread of smallpox brought over from Europe and carried by Pizarro and his people. This caused the Inca’s to break into a civil war on who should be the next king, dividing the people making it easier for the Spaniards to conquer. Although Jared Diamond identified guns and steal and some of the most important things in the spanish conquest, the ultimate fall of the Inca empire was because of the germs from the Europeans and the civil war that broke loose after the fall of the Inca king. The colonization of the Incan empire was made successful

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.

Because the Indians and Spanish lived in different areas in Latin America, the Indian culture and society did not change significantly. Or did there society change?

Most Empires have lasted more than a 100 years. The Roman Empire for example, lasted for 1500 years, however, this was not the case for the Inca Empire. The Incas started in a small area in Peru and prospered to become one of the most influential agrarian civilizations (Mahiout, Khan, Karim - Inca Empire). However, the Inca Empire was pushed to its fall by external forces such as disease brought by outsiders like the Spanish conquistadors. Disease weakened the Empire and the conquistadors took advantage of the already crumbling Inca Empire and fully destroyed it.