INCA, or YNCA, the name of a tribe of Peruvian Indians — not exclusively that of a royal family or caste, as has been commonly asserted. The members of this tribe sometimes called their war-chief °Cuzco,° meaning chief or lord of Cuzco, but probably more often °the royal Inca,° or simply (the Inca.° (Consult 'Royal Commentaries of the Yncas,> by Gar cilasso de la Vega, Lisbon, 1699, Part I, chapters 8 and 15). The latter usage was in the end adopted by Spanish chroniclers; and Garcilasso, half Spaniard, half Indian, in the 15th chapter of his commentaries, which were written, he tells us, 71 years after the conquest, uses both the longer and the abbreviated forms —°Yncas Kings° and °Yncasp— though feeling that he must explain that he means by the latter the °native kings of Peru.° Throughout the tribe mother-right prevailed, and marriages were contracted between members of different clans; therefore offices could not descend from father to son; and especially the office of war chief, or Inca par excellence, must usually have been filled by selection. The tribal dialect was called Quichua. See also Prim INCA the state of advancement in arts and learning reached by the most progressive tribe of South Amer ican Indians, occupying a portion of the Andean Sierra, and exercising control, in the regions now known as Peru, Ecuador and northwestern Bolivia, over many other tribes of the highlands and lowlands before the Spanish conquest.
In the articles INCA, Cuzco and PERU, ref erence has been made to certain popular mis conceptions touching Inca government, chro nology and the tribal name. It is necessary to add that the evidence at present available is entirely insufficient to warrant such assertions as the following, which occurs in one of the leading works of reference: °The Inca was the absolute but, iu most cases, kindly ruler. . . . In many respects the Inca government will compare favorably with any which at that time existed in Europe"; or this, from a popu lar account published in December 1903: The Inca race had developed in pre-Columbian times an astonishing and marvelous civiliza tion." Far from lending itself to such con clusions, the evidence furnished by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, when their works are tested and corrected by a com parison with the results of modern archaeolog ical research, points to social conditions which cannot be ranked above semi-civilization. Moreover the objects collected by archeologists to illustrate or represent industrial and artistic activity in ancient Peru in point of fact illus trate and represent the activities of a race very slightly elevated above semi-barbarism. In the customary treatment of their dead a lack of higher symbolism made itself felt oppressively; the crouched position of the body, bound in a tawdry pack, and the commonplace offerings buried with it suggested nothing better than the petty comforts, or ignoble miseries, of a life forever limited to alternating phases of servile toil, crouching rest, sensual indulgence and childish diversions. The various tribes of the Sierra, from Quito to Lake Titicaca, were bound together by roads which ran from one highland village to another; the lowland Indians were held in subjection through fear alone, the Inca supremacy signifying to them a prolonged reign of terror.
Some of the war-chiefs may have been °kindly rulers)); we shall, in all probability, never know whether they were or not. Cris toval de Molina, who described the °Fables and Rites of the Yncas,' and who, in order to gain the knowledge of those rites which he imparts, °assembled a number of aged persons who had seen and participated in them in the days of Huayne Ccapac,' believed that some definite, if scanty, records existed. He says: aIt is so that these people had no knowledge of writing, but in a house of the sun called Poquen Cancha, which is near Cuzco, they had the life of each one of the Yncas, with the lands they con quered, painted with figures on certain boards."
Another chronicler, Juan de Santa Cruz, who wrote about 1620, says: °I affirm that I have heard, from a child, the most ancient traditions and histories, the fables and barbarism of the heathen times." Such as these are the sources of our knowledge of the story of the Inca rulers. Some of the events in the lives of the war-chiefs were depicted, as valuable records or as parts of an ornamental design, in a °house of the sun)); otherwise all rests upon the prattle of Indian dotards and of Indian nurses. Ac counts written by the conquerors themselves (for example, Xeres) leave almost everything to the imagination. We may be certain, at least, that tradition retained most accurately the traits of the last two or three native chiefs, whom the raged persons had seen"; and though we may not condemn the unknown by reason of the credibly reported misconduct of the known, we shall be obliged to suspend judgment, instead of accepting the easy platitudes now current with respect to the succession of war-chiefs from Manco down to Huayna. The shameless pri vate life of Huayna Ccapac is set forth in the of Peru) by Juan de Santa Cruz. As for that great war-chief's still more famous son, we read in Garcilasso de la Vega's (Royal Commentaries of the Yncas' (Book IX, Chapters 35-37) that Atahualpa summoned all Incas of the blood royal to assemble at Cuzco, and put them to death. `The cruelty of Atahualpa," says this historian, himself half Inca, °was greater than that of the Turks, for, not content with the blood of his own 200 brothers, the sons of the great Huayna Ccapac, he passed on to drink that of his nephews, uncles and other relations . . . so that none of the blood royal might escape, whether legitimate or bastard. They were all murdered in different ways.' The same fate was meted out to all the loyal captains of his rival Huascar: furthermore The ordered all the women and children [of royal blood) to be assembled, of whatever age and condition, reserving only those who were dedicated to the sun in the convent of Cuzco. He ordered that they should be killed outside the city, by little and little, and by various cruel tortures, so that they might be long in dying.' The varieties of ingenious tortures mentioned by Garcilasso are similar to those inflicted by North American aborigines upon captive women and children and °though the work could have been done in a shorter time, they prolonged it in order to enjoy the cruelties more fully." It appears to be altogether improbable that the Inca semi-civilization, if it had not been interrupted by the coming of the Spaniards, would have reached the height of 16th or 17th century European civilization, or by native merit have kept abreast of the advancing nations of the Old World. That the tribe had neglected to provide itself with a written language, and failed to develop high ideals in art, we have already noticed. A third essential for progress was equally wanting: the Incas had no money, or any medium of exchange corresponding to the wampum of the Indians who lived near the North Atlantic coast. But it is impossible for any people deprived of trustworthy records of human experience to construct a convincing system of morality; and without some con venient medium of exchange an extensive and pacific commerce is equally impossible. Both deductive and inductive methods of reasoning must, therefore, lead an unbiased student of old Peruvian institutions to the conclusions that, at home, inveterate and fully sanctioned practices made for degeneration; while steady blackmail, varied by occasional slave-raids, took the place of mutually beneficial dealings with neighboring, subject or ihdependent tribes.