Ancient civilizations-2

Andean civilization

For several thousand years before the Spanish invasion of Peru in 1532, a wide variety of high mountain and desert coastal kingdoms developed in western South America. The extraordinary artistic and technological achievements of these people, along with their historical continuity across centuries, have encouraged modern observers to refer to them as a single Andean civilization.

Principal sites of Andean civilization.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

A look at a modern map reveals that no single South American state encompasses all of the territories controlled by the Inca (Inka) before the coming of the Spanish; rather these territories were spread over parts of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and in 1532 they were all part of a single Inca state called Tawantinsuyu, the “Realm of the Four Parts.” Earlier, local hegemonies—some coastal, others centred in the mountains, and still others bridging these geographic barriers—had risen, expanded, and eventually collapsed.

The Inca of Cuzco (Cusco) were themselves newcomers to most of the regions that they came to dominate. Such rapid expansion did not allow for complete consolidation; and the Spanish were able to take advantage of what had been a recent incorporation of numerous regional ethnic groups and the resentments that the Inca victory had created among the ethnic lords. Some of these, like Don Francisco Cusichaq, lord of Xauxa, the earliest colonial capital, lived long enough after 1532 to testify before a Spanish court of inquiry that he regretted having opened the country to the Europeans. For 30 years his bookkeepers had recorded on their knotted quipu (khipu) accounts not only everything the Spanish had received from Xauxa warehouses but also, on separate knot-strings, everything that had been considered stolen.

The outsider visiting the Andes perceives two overwhelming geographic realities: the Pacific coastal desert stretching for thousands of miles and the high Andes rising parallel to the coast. These contrasting regions—utter desert on the coast and high, looming mountains to the east (where the bulk of the pre-Columbian population lived above 10,000 feet [3,000 metres])—could, and at several times in Andean history did, coalesce into a single political entity. Thus, it is possible to speak of a single Andean civilization, even if at times, early and late, there was no political integration. One indicator of this social unity is extant even now: Quechua, one of the Andean languages, is still spoken by some 10,000,000 people from northern Ecuador to northern Argentina, a distance of thousands of miles.