Inca Empire
A brief history....
By Desmond Kendl Published on March 13, 2014 at 1:42 PM
The Inca Empire was the largest and most powerful empire ever seen in the Americas. Southern Peru was the capital of the Incas and from there the incas spread out in all different directions, quickly expanding the Empire of the Incas.
The Incas based there empire off of very old traditional cultural foundations, much like the Aztecs. This empire got the word Inca from the name of a ruling family of a small town up on a high plateau of the Andes. The Incas believed in not one god but many. There were 11 families in the incan empire who were believed to be descendants of the sun god, these families were called orejones which means big ears, this name was given to them because of the large plugs they wore in their earlobes. Another belief that the incas followed was worshiping dead rulers. Dead rulers were always preserved as a “mummy” and placed in a tomb. These dead rulers were brought along to all important events and placed in there own special chambers. Royal “mummies” and descendants still had all rights to wealth and property that they obtained. Succeeding rulers had to work to earn all of their wealth and property on there own without help of others, this led them to conquer much new territories. The Incan Empire did not alway increase in growth very fast, it actually started off really slow. It had a very rocky start up until an ambitious and powerful ruler named Pachacuti took over the throne. This new ruler led the empire to grow much more quickly and obtain more power than ever. By 1500 the Incan empire stretched 2,500 miles along the western coast of South America, it stretched from Ecuador to northern Chile and southern Argentina. |
Information Retrieved from: Beck, Roger, Linda Black, Larry Krieger, Phillip Naylor, and Dahia Ibo Shabaka. World History: Patterns of Interaction. 1st ed. Evanston, Boston, Dallas: McDougal Littell, 2003. Print.