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Gold figurine, from Peru
AD 1400–1550
Around 500 years ago the empire of the Incas was bigger than Ottoman Turkey, bigger than Ming China – in fact, it was the largest empire in the world. At its height, around 1500, it ran for more than 3,000 miles down the Andes and ruled over 12 million people from Columbia to Chile and from the Pacific Coast to the Amazonian jungle. In the 1520s the Spanish would come and everything would collapse; but until then, the Inca Empire flourished. It didn’t have writing, but it was an efficient military society, an ordered, productive and wealthy civilization centred on Cusco, in Peru. Its economy was driven by manpower and, just as important, llama power – a vast human labour force and hundreds of thousands of llamas. And though it was the biggest empire of the time, it is represented by the smallest object in this section of our history – a tiny, gold messenger from a mountain-topped world.
Although this empire was highly organized militarily, socially and politically, the Incas had no script, so we are heavily dependent on the accounts of their Spanish conquerors. We know from these and the objects left behind that the making of the Inca Empire is one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of the world. As the Ming Dynasty was starting in China and the Ottomans were conquering Constantinople, the Inca were constructing their vast empire. Inca control had spread from their heartland in southern Peru to a territory ten times bigger by 1500.
Andean territory is forbiddingly mountainous – this was a vertical empire that made terraced fields on mountainsides and roads that ran over the peaks. Irrigation projects and canals changed the courses of rivers and turned mountainsides into lush, terraced fields. Well-stocked storehouses and extensive highways showed detailed concern with planning and provisioning. The Incas made the impassable passable, and the key to their success was the llama. But a state’s dependency on animals was nothing new, as the scientist and writer Jared Diamond can tell us:
The availability and type of domestic animals has had a huge effect on human history and on human culture. For example, in the Old World, in Europe and Asia, the big domestic animals of Eurasia – the horse, cow, goat, sheep and pig – provided meat and protein and milk. Some of them were big enough to provide transport. Some of them – the horse, camels and donkeys – were big enough to ride, and some of them, particularly cattle and horses, were able to pull carts. The horses and camels that could be ridden became war animals and provided an enormous advantage for Eurasian people over peoples of other continents. One can say that domestic animals became not only a big spur to the development of settled living and provided us with our food, but they also provided a weapon of conquest.
The zoological lottery that Jared Diamond describes – the pure chance of whether your local animals can be domesticated – enormously favoured Europe and Asia. Australia, by contrast, drew a very short straw. It is hard to domesticate an emu, and no one ever rode a kangaroo into battle. The Americas were almost as badly off, but they did have the llama. Llamas cannot compete with horses for speed, or donkeys for pack power; they also have an infuriating habit, when tired, of just stopping and refusing to move. But they are extraordinarily well adapted to high altitude; they cope well with the cold and can forage for their own food; they can provide wool, meat and manure; and, although they cannot carry people, a healthy llama can comfortably transport about 30 kilograms (60 lbs) of goods – more than today’s average baggage allowance for air travel – so they can be very useful indeed for carrying the kind of supplies required for military campaigns. As they expanded down the great spine of the Andes, the Incas bred huge numbers of llamas as army pack animals. Not surprisingly, they also made models of this hardy creature that was so fundamental to the lives of the people and the running of the empire.
Our little gold llama is so small that it can stand comfortably in my hand – it is only a little over 6 cm (2½ inches) high. It’s hollow, made up of hammered-out thin leaves of gold, and therefore very light. It’s an engagingly sprightly figure – straight neck, ears upright and alert, large eyes and a mouth that’s clearly smiling, making an unusually cheerful-looking example of a creature from a species which usually seems to veer between amused condescension and a spitting sneer. Many little figures like this have been found, in gold and silver, all over Inca territory, frequently buried as offerings on mountain peaks.
That territory was on three distinct levels: there was the flat coastal strip; then the mountainsides, with the famous Andean terraced fields producing crops on very difficult terrain; and then the mountain plateaus with high grasslands, 3,500 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The llama unified these three disparate Inca worlds and held this vast empire together. It was a world of different peoples, languages and gods, whose communities had often been at war with each other, and the full range of imperial techniques was deployed to control this swiftly created state. Some local elites were ruthlessly eliminated; others were co-opted, given private land and excused taxation. Late-conquered territories, in northern Ecuador for example, could operate more as client states instead of being fully incorporated into the Inca system. This cultural mosaic was welded together into a powerful empire by the Inca military machine, which depended on thousands upon thousands of llamas to provide portage and food. We know that after an early battle against the Spanish, the defeated Incas abandoned 15,000 of the animals.
Our little llama is made of gold, a key substance in Inca myth. Gold was the attribute of the great Inca sun god and represented his generative powers – gold was described as the ‘sweat of the Sun’, while silver was the ‘tears of the Moon’. Gold was therefore related to masculine power, above all to the power of the Inca himself, the emperor, child of the Sun. Today, Inca objects in gold and silver are rare survivals: tiny scraps of the dizzying opulence that was described by the Spanish when they arrived in the 1520s. They wrote of palaces walled with sheets of gold, of gold and silver statues of humans and animals, and of miniature golden gardens inhabited by glittering birds, reptiles and insects. All of these would be surrendered to or seized by the Spanish. Nearly all were melted down for bullion and sent to Spain.
As in all societies, planting and harvesting were accompanied by rituals and offerings to the gods, and with the Inca this often involved sacrifice of living beings, from guinea pigs to children of the elite. And as the Peruvian Inca expert Gabriel Ramon explains, llamas were sacrificed by the thousand:
There were two calendars during the Incan period. One was the official imperial calendar, and at the same time they have lots of small calendars from the provinces or territories that they conquered. But in the official calendar they tried to match the agricultural calendar, the main times for harvesting and planting, with the main ceremonies, and it’s in this official calendar that you have several ceremonies with the llama. There is one mentioned by Guaman Poma, a colonial writer, in October, and for that ceremony, to bring the rain, you need to kill white llamas.
The greatest Inca religious rite was the Festival of the Sun. A Spanish chronicler has left us a full description:
Then came the Inca priests with a great number of young, female and male llamas of all colours, for the Peruvian llama is found in all colours, like horses in Spain. All the llamas belonged to the Sun. The first sacrifice of a young black llama was intended to observe the auguries and omens of the festival. They took the llama and placed it with its head facing the east. While still alive, its left side was opened, and by inserting the hand they drew forth the heart, lungs and entrails; the whole must come out together from the throat downwards. They regarded it as a most happy omen if the lungs came out still quivering. After they had sacrificed the llama lamb, a great quantity of other young, female and male llamas was brought for the common sacrifice. Their throats were cut and they were flayed. Their blood and hearts were all kept and offered to the Sun. Everything was burned to ashes.
The same Spanish writer tells us that while real llamas were being slaughtered, the rulers of the provinces also brought to the Incas models of llamas made of gold and silver as tokens of the great animal wealth of the region. Our llama may have been one of these tokens. Alternatively, and less comfortably, it may have been part of one of the other Inca religious rituals. Selected children of the elite were ritually exposed and left on the mountain peaks as living sacrifices to the mountain spirits, and little gold llamas like ours have been found beside their dead bodies.
The wealth of the Inca Empire depended not only on the vast herds of llamas but also on the Incas’ ability to force their conquered subjects to work for them. The subjects, however, weren’t by any means as docile as the llamas, and many Andeans – dispossessed and exploited – resented the Incas as alien aggressors:
Inca tyranny is at our gate … If we yield to the Inca, we shall be obliged to give up our former freedom, our best land, our most beautiful women and girls, our customs, our laws … We shall become for all time this tyrant’s vassals and servitors.
The Inca hold on many of its provinces was fragile. Continuous rebellions tell of potential weakness, which turned out to be crucial when Pizarro returned to conquer Peru in 1532. Some of the local elites immediately seized the opportunity to ally with the incomers and throw off the Inca yoke.
As well as being joined by a growing number of rebels, the Spanish had swords, armour and guns, none of which the Incas possessed – and crucially they also had horses. The Inca had never before seen men on the backs of animals, nor had they seen the speed and agility with which this combination of man and beast could move. The Inca llamas must have suddenly looked hopelessly delicate and slow. It was all over fairly quickly – a mere couple of hundred Spaniards massacred the Inca army, captured their emperor, installed a puppet ruler and seized and melted down their gold treasures. Our little llama is one of the rare survivors.
The Spanish had come to Peru lured by tales of enormous quantities of gold. But they discovered instead the richest silver mines in the world and began to mint the coins that would power the world’s first global currency. The Inca measured the wealth of their empire in llamas. The Spanish would measure theirs, as we shall see in Chapter 80, in silver pieces of eight.