Pachacuti
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, also called Pachacútec, was the ninth Sapa Inca of the Chiefdom of Cusco, which he transformed into the Inca Empire. Most archaeologists now believe that the famous Inca site of Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Pachacuti.
In Quechua, the cosmogonical concept of Pachakutic means "the turn of the world" and yupanki could mean "honorable lord". During his reign, Cusco grew from a small town into an empire that could compete with, and eventually overtake, the Chimú empire on the northern coast. He began an era of conquest that, within three generations, expanded the Inca dominion from the valley of Cusco to a sizeable part of western South America. According to the Inca chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, Pachacuti created the Inti Raymi to celebrate the new year in the Andes of the southern hemisphere. Pachacuti is often linked to the origin and expansion of the cult of Inti.
Following his death, Pachacuti's deeds were transmitted through various means, including genealogical histories, life histories, and quipus, kept near his royal mummy.
Accessing power following the Chanka–Inca War, Pachacuti conquered territories around Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopó in the south, parts of the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains near the Amazon rainforest in the east, lands up to the Quito basin in the north, and lands from Tumbes to possibly the coastal regions from Nasca and Camaná to Tarapacá. These conquests were achieved with the help of many military commanders, and they initiated Inca imperial expansion in the Andes.
Pachacuti is considered by some anthropologists to be one of the first historical emperors of the Incas, and by others to be a mythological and cosmological representation of the beginning of the era of Inca imperial expansion.
Name
The compound Pachakutic refers to an ancient Andean cosmological concept, representing cataclysmic change of era-worlds. The anthroponym appeared written as ⟨Pachacuti⟩ or ⟨Pachacute⟩ in the early colonial chronicles and documents of the 16th century. This written form can be reconstructed into Quechua as pacha kutiy "the turn of the world". The form ⟨Pachacútec⟩ was introduced by the writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in his Comentarios Reales de los Incas published in 1609. Before the coronation, Pachacuti was referred to as Inga Yupangui, with the Spanish navigator Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa additionally claiming Pachcuti's first name was Cusi.The compound is not influenced by other languages such as Aymara or Puquina, and is considered purely Quechua. It is composed of the noun Pacha, which today means "world, Earth, universe; " and represents an Andean concept associating time with the physical world, and the verb kuti – "to return, to come back". The apparent absence of a nominalization mark is attributed to the Spanish colonial scribes' failure to recognize the presence of an – y action nominaliser. Consequently, kuti-y means "turn, return". The colonial chronicler Juan de Betanzos translated the anthroponym Pacha Kutiy as "turn of time" and the Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino translated the compound as "the turn of the world". The form Pachacútec used in Garcilaso de la Vega's writing likely was caused by the Inca's storing of the agent nominalizer – q instead of the action nominalizer – y. In Quechua, the presence of a uvular consonant such as /q/ causes the vowel /ɪ/ to be pronounced as an /e/|, thus being transcribed as – ec in Spanish. However, Garcilaso's restitution contradicted early colonial documentation and was grammatically implausible, since the verb kuti – is an intransitive verb, and the chronicler's intended meaning for the word of " who turns the world" required an additional morpheme altering the verbal valence. The form ⟨Pachacutec⟩ reconstructed by Garcilaso was ungrammatical in Quechua, and the meaning of "he who turns the world" would have instead required an expression similar to pacha kuti-chi-q.
According to the oral tradition of Pachacuti's imperial lineage, the name was acquired following the war against the Chancas, according to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos' version together with the names or epithets Cápac and Indichuri.
Historicity
Pachacuti is often considered the first historical Incan emperor, despite various mythological elements of his reign. Various historians associate Pachacuti with the rewriting of the previous Inca rulers' reigns to justify Incan imperial expansion. The nature of Pachacuti's reign, the cosmological concepts associated with it, the lack of physical representations and of archeological evidence made some scholars come to the conclusion that Pachacuti was an Incan ideological and cosmological concept.The linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, ethnologists and historians Martti Pärssinen, Catherine Julien, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, Alfred Métraux, Brian S. Bauer, John Howland Rowe, Franck Salomon, Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu, and María Rostworowski, and Carmen Bernand consider Pachacuti to be historical, while others, such as Pierre Duviols, Juan Ossio Acuña, Reiner Tom Zuidema, Gary Urton, and Franck Garcia consider Pachacuti to be mythological or mytho-historical. According to the archeologist Franck Garcia, the story of Pachacuti's reign was mainly symbolical and served to set philosophical principles, Inca history having the structural elements of a myth. John Howland Rowe analyzed and compared various colonial sources and came to the conclusion that there existed a state-sanctioned "standard history", believing Pachacuti's victory over the Chanka people to be the cause of imperial expansion. In 1953, María Rostworowski published her biography of Pachacuti and supported Rowe's conclusion of late imperial expansion under Pachacuti. The Dutch structuralist anthropologist Reiner Tom Zuidema criticised Rowe and Rostworowski for methodological practices, and studied the symbolical territorial organization of Cusco and its surroundings. Based on the dualist philosophy of the Andes, Reiner Tom Zuidema and Pierre Duviols came to the conclusion that the Inca Empire was a diarchy, and that Pachacuti had co-reigned with the warrior chieftain Mayta Capac, while Martti Pärssinen, examining Andean tripartite traditions, wrote that the Inca capital, Cusco, had three rulers, the co-rulers of Pachacuti being Capac Yupanqui and Mayta Capac, while the state-wide imperial administration had only one. In 1945, Rowe devised an imperial chronology, stating Pachacuti reigned from 1438 to 1471, however archeological data suggests the early 15th century to be the beginning of Pachacuti's reign. The former minister of culture Juan Ossio Acuña supported the position of Zuidema, who wrote that the Inca rulers before Topa Inca Yupanqui, including Pachacuti, weren't historical rulers but rather social groups or factions. In 2009, Catherine Julien found that, while Zuidema's structuralist anthropology "does serve to reorient our search for a meaningful Inca history", it " does not take theory of change into account" and describes pre-Hispanic Incas "in the same terms as groups that have survived a long history of colonial domination".
Chronology
The Incas of Cusco did not systematically count years, and dates of Inca mytho-history are only approximations based on comparisons between colonial documents or archeological data. An exact date for the Chanka–Inca War, which marked the beginning of Pachacuti's reign, is not known, since it happened several generations before the arrival of Europeans, maybe in the beginning of the 15th century. However, the dates recorded by colonial chroniclers, though unrealistic, were potentially based on Inca mytho-historical knowledge put on quipu records.According to the north-American anthropologist Philip Ainsworth Means, Pachacuti reigned from 1400 to 1448. John Howland Rowe, basing himself on the Spanish chronicler Miguel Cabello de Balboa, theorised a standard chronology, in which Pachacuti reigned from 1438 to 1471, however, radiocarbon dates suggest an earlier date, in the beginning of the 15th century. According to Domingos Jaguaribe, Pachacuti's reign lasted from 1410 to 1450. The historian José A. Mendoza del Solar stated in 1920 that Pachacuti's reign took place between 1420 and 1472. The Peruvian historian José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu wrote Pachacuti was born in 1403, defended Cusco from the Chankas in 1424, and reigned from 1425 to 1471. Rowe wrote that Tupac Yupanqui took military command in 1463, while Antonio del Busto Duthurburu thought Tupac Yupanqui, born in 1440, led his first military campaign around 1461. According to del Busto, Amaru Inca Yupanqui's, one of Pachacuti's sons, co-reign happened around 1450. The Peruvian ethno-historian María Rostworowski suggested Pachacuti reigned, from the beginning of the 15th century onward, for around 60 years, 40 years alone, 5 to 6 years with [|Amaru Yupanqui] and 14 to 15 years with Tupac Yupanqui. According to Elías Martinengui Suárez, Amaru Yupanqui's co-reign lasted 10 years. The Bolivian historian Mariano Baptista Gumucio and Santos García Ortiz found Amaru Yupanqui to have reigned independently in 1478, following Pachacuti's death, before quickly being overthrown.