Hey, welcome back to Anti-Social Studies. Today we're going to talk about the Inca. Oh, I love the Inca so much.
I did an entire podcast episode about them. You can find it in my YouTube playlist podcasts or anywhere you listen to podcasts, Anti-Social Studies. Oh, it's so good.
I've been to Peru twice. I'm just like, I'm a big fan, real into them. So today I want to do a deep dive on the Mita system because the Mita system is something that's really unique.
It's like an amazing piece of kind of specific evidence that you can use in a lot of ways when you're talking about the late post-classical era, because really it's one of those rare examples where like really the rest of the world had figured out kind of one way to gain money and labor and the resources that you need to run a massive empire. And the Inca came up with something totally different and unique, and in my opinion, way better. So first, let's just really quickly look at the Inca empire.
I'm going to go on a few tangents because I just like love them so much. They're so interesting. But the Inca did have this sort of bureaucratic kind of breakdown of their empire, just like we see in others, right? Where you break it down into provinces and then you have local rulers, that sort of thing.
They broke those down into Suyu, which were the four kind of main provinces. They mimicked the Southern Cross in the sky. The Southern Cross is like the Southern Hemisphere's version of the North Star. I'm going to talk more about astronomy in a second. And then within that, though, they really left a lot up to local rulers.
So they maintained what are called the Ailu or the local communities. And then basically when they would conquer those places and incorporate them in, they typically allowed them to keep practicing their religion. They just said, as long as you worship the sun god, too, we're good.
They kept local leaders in charge. They kept these like kinship groups all intact and just said, you just got to be like loyal to us. You got to do some work for us. And so this is how they organized the Mita system.
So when I say the Inca are really unique, I say they're unique because they had no currency. They didn't have any money in the Incan empire. All they had was they used bartering.
And then instead of a sort of like tribute system like the Aztec had, where you had to pay tribute with people or crops or goods or anything else, or like currency, like we see developing in kind of Afro-Eurasia, they just used labor. They basically just said, you have to serve your state three times in your life. So the Mita system is a lot more complicated than this, actually.
But essentially, you had to kind of anyone who was willing or not willing, anyone who was physically able to had to serve the Inca state three times in their life for these kind of chunks of around 90 days. And so there were three things you had to do. You had to serve your state.
So for around 90 days, you would serve your state by it kind of was whatever the state needed or whatever your kind of local. region or province needed. You might be farming some lands that were owned by the emperor, you might be working on building noble palaces, you might be serving in the military. The craftspeople were exempt from that because craftsmen were highly valued in the Incan empire.
One of their most notable contributions is their architecture. You can see in this picture down here with kind of the Incan foundations, this is a photo I took in in Cuzco. These stones are all still the original Incan stones. And it's kind of hard to tell here, but there's no mortar. What that means is there's nothing keeping these stones together, except that they fit perfectly together like a puzzle.
And so if you ever travel around kind of the former Incan empire, you'll see kind of more modern buildings on top, but they're still being built on these Inca foundations because they're so solid. They built their homes and structures to be earthquake proof using trapezoids. So all of the entryways and stuff are this sort of trapezoidal shape that makes them earthquake proof.
In fact, in one of their kind of temple to the sun in Cuzco, which was kind of their main place of worship, when the Spanish took over, they build like a church and kind of monastery on top and actually around it. They like keep the Incan walls there, but then they plaster over it and they build their own things to build this church. And in the 20th century, Peru had a massive earthquake and all of the Spanish building fell apart and fell down, but the Inca foundations and the Inca walls stayed up, which is really, really amazing.
So again, you might be serving your state by building some of these things, right? So you can also, you'll notice if you see an architecture, the smoother the stones and the less gaps there are, the more important that building would be. So if you go to like a holy site, right, for their religion, you would see the best of the architecture. When you go to just kind of the regular homes of the regular people, you might see some gaps. You'll see some plants growing in between.
But in general, Incan architecture is like pristine. They actually had architectural schools. They had training.
When the Spanish arrive in Cusco, they're amazed at how organized the city is. Okay, so service to your state, you also had to pay service to your gods as one part of your mita. Again, that could be farming lands that belong to priests, that could be building temples or just serving in temples and attending to shrines, keeping them up and running, right? So this might be the people who were building Machu Picchu would have been kind of serving their gods.
Machu Picchu, as far as we know, was really just a religious center. Really, the only people living there full time would have been the priests, like honoring the gods. and the people working there and serving the priests, doing their mita. This down here in the bottom left corner is the Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu.
And so this would have been one of the things that people might have built. One of the really cool things about this building is you can see these trapezoidal little, like, they're not windows, little kind of pockets within the temple. So when this would have been full and covered, it would have been incredibly dark inside. But they understood the movement of the sun.
And... and like the the longest and shortest days of the year so that on the um on the longest day of the year the solstice basically um there would be a parade of the former Incan emperors who were all mummified so if you were an Incan emperor and you died you were mummified and you still lived in your palace and were served by your people in your palace in death The Inca and mummy's clothes are changed still every day. The Inca was never supposed to wear the same clothes twice. And by Inca, I mean the leader. That was the name for their leader.
And so on this massive festival to the sun, they would kind of march down to Machu Picchu, all of the former mummified Incan emperors, and they would place them in these like trapezoidal little pockets. And when the sun... like rose on the longest day of the year. It would shine up through the mountains, through this gate they had built perfectly.
It would shine into the windows and it would shine light directly onto the Incan mummies. And in fact, when the Incan emperors were mummified, they were mummified with their mouths wide open exactly for the ceremony so that the sun would like go into their mouth and give them sort of life in death. The Inca are really badass. You should just like read a ton about them.
The last way that you would serve your Mita is to serve your community. And this is one thing that the Inca, they're not unique, right? People had to build roads in other places, but seeing your community as really on the same level as your state, your leadership and your God is really, your gods are really important.
And so this is one of the reasons why the Inca had some of the best infrastructure in the world is because they had this dedicated source of labor that wasn't I mean, it's coerced labor, but it's not slavery. You're serving your community, right? It's essentially in lieu of taxes.
So if the Inca were running the United States today, instead of paying taxes every year, I might spend a few weeks out of every year going and working on bridges and making sure that they're all up to date, right? So they built amazing road systems, as good as or better than the Roman roads. They also built incredible bridges across these huge up. parts of the Andes Mountains. They maintained these agricultural storehouses and kind of maintained the terrace farming that they used.
If you were a farmer or a fisherman, that was your mita. You were like kind of giving some of your crops or your fish to your community, right? And so that's the mita system, right? They do this without any sort of taxation. They, for the most part, have to do this with very little force because of that bureaucracy where the local leadership just says, all right, cool.
You're up. It's your turn to go do mita. You're gonna go work on the bridges. You're gonna go serve the priest over here.
And then they come back and like keep existing and they kind of love being a part of the Incan Empire. Now I want to go on two quick side notes just while I have you here. They're gonna be really quick.
The first side note is about the Incan trilogy, which is like one of my favorite facts of all time. So according to the Incan belief system, there were three worlds. There was the land of men and power.
That was the earth. It was represented by the Puma. Then there was the land of the afterlife and the underworld. This is not hell.
The Spanish are going to like make it into hell. It's not hell. It's the world where you go when you die. And it's the underworld and it's purifying. Basically, you purify yourself of what we would now call maybe sins.
And it's represented by the snake or the serpent. And then once you go through that purification, you ascend to the land of the gods and freedom, which is epitomized by the condor, the bird. Now, if you were to look above, like the Sacred Valley, which is this beautiful part of Peru, which is like the heart of the Incan Empire, you would see that they constructed their capital city, Cuzco, let me get on my pen, to be the original shape of the ancient city of Cuzco is in the shape of a puma, because that's the land of power and men.
That's where like the emperors live. Then if you were to look at a map of Cuzco, It's right along a massive, beautiful river that's right here called the Urubamba River. And so you would travel through the sacred valley. I've never seen a more beautiful place in my life. Traveling along this massive river with these huge mountains surrounded by clouds.
So you travel through the world of the serpent. And you eventually, if you follow the Urubamba River, you end up at Machu Picchu, which from the sky looks like a condor. I just think this is amazing, right?
They're doing all of this. They're building these massive structures with huge boulders that weigh multiple tons. In Machu Picchu, they're carrying them up a mountain. They don't have any domesticated animals.
Llamas can't do that, right? Alpaca can't do that. They really are an amazing late post-classical civilization that I really encourage you to look into.
So I'm going to take issue with John Green. Hey, John Green, I'm sure you're watching my YouTube channel. You always say the Mongols are the exception, and I respectfully disagree. I think the Inca are the exception to all the rules.
The Mongols, I'll talk about later, they actually do all the same things that other post-classical states do. They just do them in a more badass way. The Inca are the exception. The Inca developed this massive civilization.
They rule over more people than the Roman Empire did, more land, and they do it with no writing, no currency, no slavery, and no wheels. They knew a wheel existed. They have it for children's toys, but they're like, we're in the middle of the Andes Mountains.
We're not going to use a wheel. It's all like human labor. With the no writing, this is an example of khipu, which is what they had for record keeping instead of a written system, where you tie knots in rope to kind of keep records.
And we're still not sure exactly how it worked, but there are still students today that are studying this and are finding that like the different colors of the rope symbolize different things. And they have this really intricate way of like running their empire that's just super unique. And as we look throughout unit one, and we see a lot of similarities across civilizations, we see a lot of civilizations doing similar things under different names. The Inca are really fascinating to study because they came up with really their own way of doing things and they're going to do it very successfully until the Spanish come and conquer.
And even then they're going to resist Spanish conquest for like 40 years. So good on you Inca, nicely done. As always there are more resources at antisocialstudies.org including you should check out that podcast episode. It's in season two.
It's called Dang I Wish I Was an Inca if you're more interested in this. check it out on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, or here on my YouTube channel. Thanks. Bye.