The Inca Mummies

Join Kelli as she discusses the Inca Empire and their religious practices - including capacocha, the practice of sacrificing children and leaving them to mummify on mountain peaks.

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The Inca Mummies
Intro
Welcome to A Popular History of Unpopular Things, a mostly scripted podcast that makes history more fun and accessible. My kind of history is the unpopular stuff - disease, death, and destruction. I like learning about all things bloody, gross, mysterious, and weird. 

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Throughout history, humans have sacrificed each other for a lot of reasons.Sometimes, humans will sacrifice themselves or kill another for food - survival cannibalism, right? I’ve talked about that a whole lot. But human sacrifice isn’t always for sustenance - it’s also happened for religious reasons. And today, I want to go over one of the more fascinating civilizations in history and how they engaged in regular human sacrifices - the Inca Empire with their sacrificial mummies.

From 1438 to 1533, the Inca Empire, known as Tawantinsuyu, held power over a significant portion of the Andes Mountains in South America. Their empire stretched over 2,500 miles from the southern borders of today’s Colombia to about halfway down modern Chile. Anywhere between 6 to 14 million people lived within its borders, and it was by far the largest civilization in the world at its peak.

The Inca are famous for a lot of things - their unique style of architecture and stone walls that didn’t use mortar, their engineering (despite not having the wheel or even iron), Machu Picchu, the Quechua language… so much South American/Andean culture today comes from the Inca. 

But there was one aspect of their civilization which seems pretty out there for us in the modern world, and luckily for me, it’s prime APHOUT material.

The Inca, as part of their religious beliefs, used to sacrifice children to their gods and leave their bodies to mummify on the tops of mountains.

And it wasn’t just children who were mummified - important figures in the Inca world were mummified as a way of showing honor and respect, keeping them around as mummies to help bridge the gap between the living and the dead.

So today, I want to talk about the Inca. First, we’ll review the basics of the Inca Empire and talk about all the things that make them awesome. Then, we’ll get into their religious beliefs and why they sacrificed their own to honor the gods. Finally, we’ll take a look at the Inca mummies - those of sacrificed children and of the honorable dead - to get a good sense of how the Inca carried on the traditions of those who came before - because the oldest mummies in the world, that we’ve found, come from the Andes Mountains.

So let’s get started!

Historical Context
Though the Inca Empire’s years are from 1438 - 1533, the Quechua-speaking people who eventually became the Inca have been around in the Andes since the late-12th, early-13th centuries, that’s the late 1100s, early 1200s.

Now because I’ve mentioned it, let’s talk about quechua for a minute.

Quechua is a language that still exists in South America today - its an indigenous language spoken by over 13 million people in the Andes Mountains, ranging from Colombia to Chile - so basically, where the Inca Empire was. There are a ton of dialects, but regardless, “quechua” as a language family is the most widely spoken indigenous language in the Americas - both North and South. 

The original Quechua, the one spoken by the Inca, was only a spoken language - not a written language. This means there are no Inca Quechua texts, right? The only records we have about the Inca are oral records, Spanish records from conquest, archaeological evidence, and then the quipu.

Though the Inca may not have had a written language, that didn’t mean they had no way of keeping records. Enter - the quipu. It was a system of knotted strings that was used to count numbers, and have been found primarily in Inca storehouses. Based on archaeological evidence and oral testimony, we have a pretty good idea of how the quipu worked. And quipu, by the way, is the Quechua word for “knot.” As in knotted strings. Knot with a K.

The number of strings, the number of knots on each string, their placement, their color, their spacing - it all conveyed different pieces of information. We have a basic idea about what the numbers represent, and we believe it was used to keep track of storehouse numbers, population, and even the calendar days, but again, our written evidence of it is pretty much non-existent.

It’s also worth noting that the Inca didn’t invent the quipu - it had been used by Andean societies for generations before the Inca took power. This is common for pre-Columbian American societies, in both South and Central America - they adapted and took things from each other as one society invaded and replaced another. I went over this briefly as it applies to the Aztecs taking Mayan stuff, like their deities, but it’s a Patreon-only video for my explorer and cannibal tier members. Join today to get cool exclusive content!

Anyways, back to the Inca - they were a Quechua-speaking people who built their capital city, Cuzco, in modern-day Peru, sometime around the year 1200. From there, they engaged in territorial expansion - growing stronger, challenging and defeating their enemies, and taking their lands. It’s what most civilizations do as a way to establish power and legitimacy.

By 1438, they had conquered their enemies and established an empire; an empire differs from other forms of government in that an empire controls various peoples, states, and countries within its borders. Not everyone in the Inca Empire was an Inca - they ruled over various peoples and communities. Think of it like an umbrella - The Inca Empire was the umbrella, and it covered a whole bunch of different peoples and communities.

As such, not everyone in the empire spoke the same language - Quechua. This is true and common of different empires throughout history - if we think about Rome, right, not everyone who was incorporated into the Roman Empire was a Roman or spoke Latin. The Romans would conquer their enemies, take their lands, incorporate them into the Roman Empire (or Republic depending on the year we’re talking about here), and then make their new people pay taxes for things like the impressive Roman aqueducts or concrete roads that connected everything together.

And that’s what the Inca did too - they used their massive empire to source labor, goods, and taxes, and with all that, did some pretty serious civil engineering. I read one article that called the Inca the, quote, “Romans of the New World.”

Now the Inca Road System was intense. It ended up being over 25,000 miles long - some of it was paved, other parts were left as dirt paths. But the thing stretched over the entirety of their empire, keeping all their conquered peoples connected to the central hub, the capital city at Cuzco. They built really impressive rope bridges, simple suspension bridges that spanned canyons, river, you name it. Remember, their empire was on a mountain. And because they were on a mountain, they did all this without the technology of the wheel - not because they weren’t smart enough to develop that technology, but because it wouldn’t be super useful to have a wheel on the side of a mountain.

To harp on how great Inca engineering is, let’s talk about more of their feats - their walls were made with perfectly-fitting rocks. They didn’t use mortar, so their walls were like jigsaw puzzles - each stone was carved to fit perfectly in its space. And it’s not because they were crap builders - their walls, in this way, were perfectly adapted to the earthquakes that accompany mountain civilizations. Because each rock had just a little bit of wiggle room between them - not enough for a knife blade, but just a tiny gap, when an earthquake hit, they could just vibrate in place without falling over.

For agriculture, because again their on a mountain, they would build up flat plots of land called terraces and plant their root crops on there - the potato was first cultivated in the Andes. So we can thank the Andean people for french fries! Thanks!

Now having good infrastructure like this helped them maintain their empire, because they could A) keep tabs on their people to help prevent rebellion, B) make sure their people were happy with access to goods and services, and C) maintain proper transportation and communication routes.

And that last part - having good transportation - was essential for some of their religious beliefs, particularly when it came time to sacrifice young girls and leave their mummified corpses at the tops of mountains.

So let’s get a little deeper into Inca mythology and religion.

Inca Religion
The Inca, like many post-classical civilizations, were polytheistic - they believed in multiple gods. And also like other post-classical civs, their gods were centered around things like the sun, the moon, water, the earth, weather, agriculture things like fertility… the elements that allow for people to exist and for civilizations to prosper. This is true of most polytheistic faiths. One of their more important deities was Inti, the sun God. And I really appreciate how easy it is to say and spell Inti - I-N-T-I - considering his Central American Aztec counterpart was Huitzilopochtli. I talked a bit about Aztec deities and their human sacrifices in that Patreon subscriber-only episode, so if you’re interested, so support me for extra content.

The Inca practiced a lot of rites and rituals in conjunction with their faith. And almost every one of these rituals was accompanied by some form of sacrifice to honor, respect, and in some cases nourish their gods. Sacrifices could be a rudimentary style of beer made with fermented maize, or corn, sometimes it could be food, or llamas… nothing too out of the ordinary right? But in some special ceremonies, the sacrifice would be virgins or children.

Child sacrifice was known as capacocha, and unfortunately for the children, it was a major part of the Inca religion. It would be done for big stuff - to honor the death of the Sapa Inca, or Emperor. To appeal to the gods in times of famine. To ask for divine protection against enemies. Or protection against environmental hazards. Remember, they’re on top of a mountain, right? Most of these earlier societies (INCLUDING ones in Western Europe and Asia, by the way) would have assumed that natural disasters were a result of angry gods. And this mountain civilization would have dealt with earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides… all kinds of things. Sacrifices would have been made to appease the gods.

But why children? The Aztec would sacrifice prisoners of war, captive enemies… why didn’t the Inca do that? They had to conquer a lot of rival tribes to become a powerful Empire, so why not just knock out their enemies that way?

Well, it wasn’t just about providing blood, like it was for the Aztecs. And in fact, it wasn’t bloody at all - the sacrifices weren’t torn apart, weren’t gutted - they essentially would succumb to hypothermia and be “sacrificed” that way. Sometimes they’d be hit in the back of the head. But it wasn’t a bloody spectacle.

No. For the Inca, it was about offering the purest beings to their gods in reverence. And who are the “purest?” Well, typically, most societies see virgins and children as the purest. Whether you agree with that or not.

It was also a huge honor to be chosen as the sacrifice. Children would be specially chosen from across the empire and brought to Cuzco, to be raised as a future sacrifice. They were given the good life - fancy clothes, rich diets that included meat, which was not super common in Andean cuisine, gold trinkets… we know this, by the way, because we’ve found child sacrificial mummies buried with these trinkets and fine clothes.

Once a child was chosen to be sacrificed, they would walk to their designated site and prepare to die. So which sites were chosen, and why?

Well, if we consider that the children were being sacrificed to the gods, they would go to the places closest to the gods - the tops of mountains.

I’m going to use one particular girl in particular to illustrate this whole process. She was sacrificed some time between 1440 and 1480, and we call her la doncella, or the maiden. Or sometimes she’s known as the Llullaillaco Maiden - named for the volcano she was found on. And fun fact - Llullaillaco, though currently dormant, is the second-highest active volcano in the world. It’s about halfway down Chile in the Andes, on the border with Argentina.

So the Llullaillaco maiden - you know what? I’m just going to call her the maiden. That’s easier. The Maiden, was probably around 15 years old. She is incredibly well-preserved - her clothing, made from fine alpaca wool, was still intact. She was buried with the insignia of Inca royalty - given to her while she was housed at Cuzco in a special, isolated cloister. Her dark hair? Still in perfect condition. In fact, her hair was so well-braided that it left imprints on her skin after more than 550 years smooshed against her cheek. Her teeth and fingernails were perfectly preserved. She was wearing a feathered headdress - something only worn by the most elite in society. She was also found buried with little golden llamas and other trinkets. 

Based on all of that archaeological evidence, researchers and historians believe she was one of the Sun Virgins - girls chosen to live a cloistered life that would either become sacrifices, priestesses, or royal wives.

She was found in 1999 by an expedition led by American anthropologist and archaeologist Johan Reinhard. He and his team were on the look out for Inca ritual sacrifice sites, and they discovered the Maiden after only three days of searching. But the Maiden wasn’t alone - buried alongside her were a younger boy and girl - the boy was just named el nino, and the girl was coined la nina del rayo, or the lightning girl, because she had a brown stripe across her face that looked like the result of a lightening strike post-mortem. Which means after death.

Of the three, the Maiden was the best preserved.

Now to investigate this discovery even more, scientists did hair analysis - doing this, they could find out all kinds of things, like what was in their systems, what they had been eating and drinking, etc. And they discovered that all three children had coca leaves and maize beer in their systems.

Coca leaves, you might be able to guess, is one of the primary ingredients in cocaine. But the leaves themselves, when chewed, serve as a mild stimulant and are a part of indigenous medicine. The corn beer, in combination with the presence of coca leaves, suggests that hte children were drugged before their deaths - in fact, a wad of coca leaves was still nestled in the Maiden’s cheeks when they did a scan of her body. This suggests that the children had to be calmed down.

But that makes sense, right? I mean even if I knew I was meant to be a sacrifice, even if I was honored by that prospect, and even if I willingly walked all the way frm Cuzco to bloody Llullaillaco, a trip over Inca roads that would be around 800 miles, or 1300 kilometers… yeah, I’d probably need to be drugged as well in my final hours.

The children didn’t have any injuries - they weren’t beaten, they weren’t stabbed, they didn’t have their skulls bashed open… they died peacefully in their sleep, likely of hypothermia. Their bodies were then covered up, post-mortem, with blankets. Respectfully. 

So that tells us that some people followed the children to their final destination - which makes sense. A 15-year-old and two pre-teens would probably get lost on an 800-mile journey over the Andes mountains.

Their bodies today, by the way, are on exhibition at the Museum of High Altitude Archaeology in Salta, Argentina. So, you know, if you ever find yourself down in Argentina, go say hi to the Maiden. She’s so well-preserved she looks like she only died last week.

And she stays so well-preserved because she’s kept more or less on ice in an oxygen-deprived environment. It’s why there are so many Inca mummies found, in varying states of decomposition. I went over this in my episode on the Mount Everest Rainbow Valley; the cold, low-oxygen environments high up in the mountains helps preserve bodies for a lot longer than at sea level. That’s why Inca mummies are so incredibly important to archaeology; since there aren’t too many Inca records, as their language was spoken and not written, finding evidence like this gives us so much information about who they were and how they operated as an empire.

Now for those of you who are good at math and caught this in the beginning of the podcast, you might remember that I said the Inca Empire only lasted from 1438 to 1533. That’s not even 100 years, right? So if the Inca were such incredible engineers and administrators, what happened? Why was their reign over the Andes so short?

Three words: Spaniards, gunpowder, and smallpox.

Let’s talk about the fall of the Inca, because it’s cool and I want to talk about it.

Fall of the Inca Empire
After Christopher Columbus sailed for the New World, on behalf of the Spanish, the floodgates were open. Explorers from Spain and Portugal, and later England, Netherlands, and France, started to explore what was later deemed to be a new continent - the Americas. And I have to say this because it bothers me immensely - and I’ve said it before, I’ll say it now, and I’ll probably bring it up again in a future episode: Columbus never set foot in what later became the United States. He landed in the Caribbean and explored there, set foot in modern-day Panama, but not the US. He didn’t discover “America,” okay? Why we all believe that goes back to Italian immigration and the Knights of Columbus Italian-American club, and I just don’t want to go down that rabbit hole right now.

Anyways. 

Two explorers who encountered our largest empires in Central and South America, the Aztecs and Inca respectively, were Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro. Cortes ended up conquering the Aztecs, and Pizarro conquered the Inca. But we’re focusing on the Inca, so let’s just focus on them. And how a handful of Spaniards in unfamiliar territory were able to take down the mighty, several-million-strong, well-organized Inca Empire.

Now at the time, the Inca were in the midst of a Civil War. Baaaaad timing. There were two brothers who were fighting over the throne, because their father, Huayna Capac, died from smallpox, an old world virus that peoples in the Americas had never encountered, so they didn’t have the immunity to fight it off. It killed anywhere from 50-90 percent of all indigenous American populations, by the way. It’s the main reason why the Aztecs and Inca fell.

But back to the Civil War.

The Inca had something called split inheritance. When the ruler died, succession was clearly laid out - the older son got all the political power and rights, and the younger son or sons would get the money and property. Naturally, it led to a lot of conflict.

In this case, upon Huayna Capac’s death, the older son Huascar, like Oscar but fancy, got the title. The younger brother, Atahualpa, got the stuff. But you see, Atahualpa wanted the stuff and the title, so he went to war against his brother.

Long story short - Atahualpa won. But the cost was a bitterly divided empire, a spent treasury, tired soldeirs, and lots of destruction.

And literally right after the civil war ended is when the Spanish rolled in. Like I said, timing.

Pizarro only had 180 men and 30 horses, but because disease was wiping out the Inca for him, he was able to take over. He took advantage of the fact that the Inca were weakened by civil war, he had gunpowder technology (which wasn’t available in the Americas as it was originally a Chinese invention), and he managed to weasel his way into Cuzco before jumping on Atahualpa and conquering the capital city.

And with Pizarro’s attack, the Inca Empire was toppled by the Spanish. And unfortunately, it wasn’t the only one. The Aztecs, and second iteration of the Mayans, North American indigenous groups, Caribbean indigneous groups… most died from the spread of “Old World” diseases, and others were slaughtered by the Spanish, the Portuguese, and other Europeans who wanted to take American land. Those who survived disease and conquest were enslaved, primarily in Central and South America, and set to work on plantations alongside imported enslaved Africans, and hte fate of the contiennt was sealed.

What would ahve happened had the Inca had more tolerance to smallpox? If they had gunpowder technology? I would wager a bet that they could have whooped the Spaniards - after all, they had home-field advantage on a mountain range. But that will sadly just have to be a classic “what-if,” one of histories mysteries.

Regardless, still to this day, Inca mummies are being unearthed - children, women, powerful elites who wanted to be preserved for eternity… we learn more about the Inca all the time, a powerful civilization with a spoken language, who in 100 years built a massive empire over 2,500 miles long, ruling over millions of people. And while their version of human sacrifice wasn’t as bloody or violent as the Aztecs, or other examples of human sacrifice throughout history, it’s still spooky to thing of children, like Llullaillaco maiden, cowering on top of a mountain, waiting to die in service to her Emperor.

Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of A Popular History of Unpopular Things. My name is Kelli Beard, and I hope you’ve enjoyed the story of The Inca Mummies. Thank you for supporting my podcast, and if you haven’t already checked out my other episodes, go have a listen!

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