The Inca imperial army on the march (Source unknown – please inform me if you know the copyright owner of this artwork)
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The Inca Empire was the most extensive pre-Columbian state of America, including the western 2/3rds of the area of modern Peru, western (mountainous) Bolivia, most of Ecuador, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina. It comprised an area of 1,000,000 sq. km. and a population of around 6,000,000-20,000,000 around AD 1520, according to various modern estimates. At the same time, the plateau of Mexico had 25,000,000 inhabitants, of whom the 2/3rds (about 16,000,000) were subjects of the Aztecs. The Incan army numbered 100,000-200,000 warriors in normal conditions but in an a state of emergency many more could be mobilized. The Inca state is known in western sources and in modern historiography as the “Empire of the Incas”, but its inhabitants called it “Tawantinsuyu”, meaning the “Land of Four quarters’. This term meant the administrative division of the state into four districts/regions: the “Chinchasuyu” (North), the “Collasuyu” (South), the “Cuntisuyu” (West) and the “Antisuyu” (East). The Inca capital Cuzco, in modern Peru, was the “imperial” metropolis of South America. The Inca empire included over 150 subjugated tribes who spoke at least twenty different languages, which belonged to four major ethno-linguistic families and some lesser. The central region of the state was inhabited by the Quechua peoples (ethno-linguistic group) while the Aymara peoples lived in the south of them. The Peruvian coast was inhabited by the tribes of the Chimu Group. In the territories north of the Quechua lived the almost primitive tribes Uru. During the rule of the Incas, they tried to impose their own Quechua language as the universal language of their empire in order to achieve greater consistency, resulting in “quechuanizing” many subjugated peoples. This is the reason of the striking modern distribution of 10,000,000 Quechua-speaking Indians from northern Ecuador to northwestern Argentina. The dispersion of the Aymara is also great. The chronology of the reign of the Inca emperors before Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui (1438-1471) is highly questionable and practically impossible to restore. Continue reading