Who Were The Incas And Where Did They Come From?

The Incas were an ancient people who lived in South America. The Inca empire stretched over 300 miles along the Andes mountains, from the present day Ecuador to Chile and Argentina. Originally, Inca was the name given to its chief by a small tribe that settled near Cuzco in Peru in AD 1000.

By the time of the Spanish conquest in 1532, the empire of the Incas had 16 million people in it. It had fine roads and bridges and magnificent cities. The regime of government was a dictatorship but it was very caring for the weak and the poor.

Sadly, the Spanish invasion spelled the end of the Inca empire, which was founded on the belief that the Inca was a god. The Spanish murdered the Inca of the time, and then easily subdued the whole empire because the Inca people were so overwhelmed that they could have killed a god.

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The Inca civilization was at least 400 years old at the time Columbus discovered America.
The land of the Incas included what is now Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador,the capital, the Sacred City of the Sun. It was the center of the only world these people knew, and to this city came caravans from every part of the empire with grain, gold and silver, fine cloth, and fresh, green coca leaves.

The Incas were stern but just rulers. They allowed the people they conquered to follow their own customs. The family was the center of government. Each group of ten families had a leader. He reported to a captain who had 50 families under him, and so on up to the Inca, who ruled the empire.

Everyone in the Inca Empire worked, except the very young and the old. Each family had a certain amount of land to farm. The people wove their own clothing, made their own shoes or sandals, their own dishes of pottery, and objects of gold and silver.

The people had no personal freedom: the Inca decided what clothes. they wore, what food they ate, what work they did. The sick, poor, and old were cared for. The Incas were wonderful farmers and grew excellent crops. They built great aqueducts to bring mountain streams down to water their fields.

Many of the buildings which the Incas erected still stand. And they built unusual bridges made of vines and willow branches braided into huge ropes. The people were very skilful at weaving and pottery. They made cotton cloth so fine that the Spaniards thought it was silk, and they made fine clothing of wool. After many centuries of prosperity, the Inca Empire was divided between two half-brothers who began to fight each other. When the Spaniards came, they found it easy to conquer them and destroy the empire.

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