Social Life in the Inca Civilization

The ancient American civilization with the most tightly knit society and the greatest territorial extent, was developed by the Incas of South America. The Inca Empire began with the one small kingdom of Cusco in the mountains of Peru. It started expanding territory in 1438 to cover much in South America’s west coast. The Inca Empire did not last so long, from 1438, when the Inca ruler Pachacuti and his army began conquering land, until the Spaniards came in 1532. The Inca civilization was different from other civilizations by being socialistic. This point refers to existence of socialist minds far before than our century. It was working system that people lived under control of that system for a long time. The Inca Empire had highways which connected all empire. Thus, they achieved to connect cities, and this fact show that they had enough well-organized management methods, however, the Inca society did not have writing system. Another drawback of the Inca society was less development of trade and it is result of socialistic government. Despite the fact that they had a communalistic society, it does not mean that there were not social classes. In this paper, you will get information about social classes, communalism, method of keeping recordings.

As other civilizations, the Inca society also was divided into four classes social classes. They were prohibited to wear gorgeous clothes, to drink alcohols, or decorate their clothes with gold or silver decorations. At the top of the class was the Sapa Inca, the most powerful person in the empire. People considered him as the god on the earth, or the son of the Sun. He wore the gorgeous clothes which were decorated with gold and silver, and he did not wear the same clothes or decoration twice. The king was belonged to the first class of the Inca society. He had many concubines, but only one of them was allowed to be the real wife. The eldest son of the king was considered as the next ruler of the reign. The second class was royalty, the family of ruler or the sons of Sapa Inca. The third social class was nobility, which included royal relatives and were known to be educated. At the end of social class was the ayllu, which included the rest of population. The ayllu are seen to be exceptionally vital to the society and are seen as significant to the well-being of the society. In spite of existence of social classes, there was primary version of communalism, and this communalism mostly revealed in the ayllu class.

Ayllus were mostly spreaded class among the Inca society. They were busy with cultivating, farming; furthermore, they were also following religious rituals. The Incas had domesticated many animals, such as llamas, dogs, alpacas, birds, guinea-pigs. Among those animals, llama and alpaca was the most important, so these animals create the basements of cattle-breeding. Locals got wool from these two animals, then women combine the wool with cotton which grown in coastline in current Peru and crochet in their oven fabrics. The wool which had gotten from animals was distributed equally among worker who had contributed in that field. Each family had their own house and little garden next to their house; whereas, they were dealing with farming, or cultivating collectively. Beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers were just few of the vegetables which were grown by the Incas. In the ayllu class, member of this class had equal rights. They had rights to play games together, to graze their domestic animals in the same meadows. Moreover, they had equal portion of lands to be busy with cultivating, but hunting wild animals in large areas could be possible only with the permission of the state, so once in a year government organized activity of hunting, and males of society surrounded large forests and began hunting animals. One part of the hunted animals was given to the hunters, the rests were entity of the state.

The Incas had divided men according to their ages. The males whose age were between twenty-five and fifty were called purics. Purics were married and capable to work. One hundred purics created a century, and a century was also divided into ten decuries. Ten centuries created phratry, and ten phratry created one tribe, therefore, it is estimated that in one tribe there were roughly 10 000 purics. At last, combining of four tribes were called province.

Periodically, reports were announced by government, and preserved at archive in capital of empire-Cuzco. The crop, wool, and meat which was received from hunting and other products were distributed among people equally. Due to primary socialist society, trade had not developed in the Inca society, and they did not use money. There was limited local trade, so three times in a month families could barter their products in local stores. Although most of farming was done collectively, purics had right to own two llamas, and also to use their wool and meat.

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The Inca society did not have writing system, and it raises the question how they kept records. They had their own decimal counting system. They counted all annual record with this system, it was called quipu. Quipu consisted of cords and threads. There were knots in each thread, and those threads were colorful. Knots in each threads represented decimals, and colors represented social classes. As a logical result of it, they were divided people to decimal numbers. Quipu was kept capital of the Inca Empire – Cuzco.

Annually decurions should give information to the officials who authorized with keeping quipu about birth and death rate of the death in those decuries. In the over populated decuries, people were transported under populated areas. Males could also be taken into the army, or other fortune, which can expect them they could be part of two different classes which was not included usual four classes.

Differ from four main classes, there were also two unusual classes. They were called yanacuna and acclacuna. They could be part of one of these two classes. Yanacuna were chosen from males to work for rulers, or royal families. They did not have clan rights as other commoners, but in the overall their welfare was better than other common peoples. They sometimes could get some very expensive prizes and rewarded some official position which other purics could never get. The next unusual class was acllacuna. They were chosen among girls whose age was eight or nine. They were chosen from centuries which number of them was more than one hundred. Some of them had been priestesses at the age of fourteen. They were living in the convents under the control of matrons. They were not only interested in religious rituals, but they worked and knitted clothes for higher officials or priests; however, most of them were allocated for being concubine of the emperor.

Social obligations were also existed in this society. Purics were used in the social obligations, so they were considered the workforce of the empire. They were used construction of ways, or building of castles.

The Inca Empire had highways, which shows that how developed civilization they were. One was along coastline, another one was in highlands, but there were also many secondary roads, which connected capital of empire, Cuzco, with other parts of empires. Cuzco was also education center of the empire. The Incas also had founded the solution to deliver information inside of the empire, so on the ways they had built post houses in every two or three miles, and in each post house at least two people attended there. When it was needed to deliver any information, one courier who attended in that post house ran and gave information to the next post houses, and in the next post houses one of the runners deliver information to the next one, and it continuous until the news reached to its place. There were also inns on the roads for travelers, and they could be located from twelve miles to eighteen miles. In those inns were basics needs, such as foods, clothing. Common people could not use those roads, they could be only used by officials, couriers, or soldiers. As a result of it, those ways had never been crowded.

As a conclusion, the Inca society had one of the most amazing societies. In this paper, I analyzed lifestyle, working methods of governmental organizations, social classes of the Inca society.