Recommended Sources on Inca History
Primary School Level
The Art and Architecture of the Incas, and The World of the Ancient Incas, both by David M. Jones (Southwater 2012)
Secondary School Level
The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire, eds. Ramiro Matos Mendieta & Jose Barreiro (Smithsonian Books 2015)
The Incas, by Terence N. D’Altroy (Wiley-Blackwell 2014)
The Incas: New Perspectives, by Gorden F. McEwan (W.W. Norton 2006)
Our favorite summary text on Inca history is Empire of the Inca, by Burr Cartwright Brundage (University of Oklahoma Press, 1963). Though it uses dated framing to tell Inca history (lots of comparisons to ancient Greece and Rome), it is based on the author's comprehensive review of all available primary sources (many of which were not yet translated to English at the time) and we find it to still be the most readable and thorough Inca history available in English.
Primary Sources
Several books were written or informed in the 16th century by Native historians who had direct knowledge about Inca history from within one or two generations of Huayna Capac, the last Sapa Inca of an independent Tawantinsuyu. We recommend the following:
- Suma y Narración de los Incas (Narrative of the Incas), by Juan de Betanzos, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan, University of Texas Press, 1996
This book was written in the 1550s by Juan de Betanzos, a Spanish administrator who was then married to Angelina Yupanki (birth name Cuximiray Ocllo), a great-granddaughter of Pachakuti, widow of Atahuallpa, and mother of two children with Francisco Pizarro. Juan was likely not highly educated in Spain, but he became one of the most respected Quechua-Spanish translators in the Spanish colony of Peru, and worked for many years to write a complete Quechua-Spanish dictionary, which is now lost. In 1551, the viceroy (governor) of the Spanish colony in Peru instructed Juan to write a history of the Incas, which he finished in 1557 and based on information provided by Angelina and various of her relatives.
Though the manuscript was sent to the king of Spain, it was never published in Betanzos’s lifetime. For the next 400 years, only a small handful of scholars ever read it, and the version in the king’s library contained less than a quarter of the book’s chapters anyway. Then, in the 1980s, a copy of the complete manuscript was discovered in a library in Mallorca, Spain.
The book was published for the very first time, in Spanish, in 1987, four hundred and thirty years after Betanzos finished writing it. The first and only English translation was published in 1996. Yet this work is perhaps the closest version available to a firsthand Inca history from a person who witnessed events of both the Inca Civil War and the Spanish-Inca War: Angelina Yupanki. While it is likely biased by her loyalty to the panaca of Atahuallpa, and criticism of the panaca of Huayna Capac, which had been allied with Huascar during the civil war, it is a uniquely authentic source of Inca history due to the knowledge provided to Juan Betanzos by Angelina Yupanki.
- Comentarios Reales de los Incas (The Royal Commentaries of Peru, in Two Parts), by Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. A 1688 English translation by Sir Paul Rycaut, published by Miles Flesher in London, is available for free from the HathiTrust Digital Library.
Garcilaso de la Vega, called “El Inca”, whose birth name was Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, was a great-grandson of Huayna Capac, and son of Isabel Suárez Yupanki (birth name Chimpu Ocllo) and a Spaniard named Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega y Vargas. He was raised in Cuzco by his mother and other members of Huayna Capac’s panaca, and was childhood friends with Francisco Pizarro the junior, a son of Angelina Yupanki and Francisco Pizarro. When Garcilaso was 21 years old, his father died in Spain, and he moved there to claim his inheritance, staying in Spain for the rest of his life. Later in life, we wrote this history of the Incas. It was first published in 1609, when Garcilaso was 70 years old.
Though based on his childhood lessons about Inca history, it was also not written until decades after he left Cuzco, and was influenced by European writings about the Incas that he had read. Despite this, Garcilaso’s book is an important source, as it was written by an Inca with firsthand cultural knowledge of Inca history. As Garcilaso himself wrote in the introduction to his book:
I must acquaint the Reader, that having considered with myself of the ways and methods whereby I might most clearly make known the beginning and origin of the Incas, who were the Natural Kings of Peru, I have determined with myself, that there is no more expedite course, nor means hereunto, than to repeat those stories which in my youth I received from the relation of my Mother, and my Uncles, her Brothers, and others of my Kindred, touching this subject, which certainly will be more authentic and satisfactory than any account we can receive from other authors…
As a direct descendent and member of Huayna Capac’s panaca, Garcilaso’s bias was for the opposite side of the Inca Civil War as Angelina Yupanki’s, as can be seen in his negative comments about Atahuallpa:
My mother, residing at Cuzco, which was her own Country, those few Kindred and relations of hers which survived, and escaped from the cruelties and tyrannies of Atahualpa (as shall be related in the History of his life) came almost every week to make her a visit.
- El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton, University of Texas Press, 2009
This remarkable work of Inca and early colonial history by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala also includes hundreds illustrations, which today are used in virtually every teaching tool about Inca history, including this one. Guaman Poma de Ayala was descended through his father from an elite family from the city of Ayachucho, who had served the Incas in a curaca-like role. Through his mother, he was a member of Topa Inca Yupanki’s panaca. He was a native Quechua speaker, and learned Spanish well enough to work as a translator and clerk for Spanish judges and priests.
Guaman Poma de Ayala wrote his book as an elderly man, after nearly all of his property had been confiscated by a Spanish court. He finished creating it in 1615. It was addressed to the King of Spain, Phillip III, whom Guaman Poma de Ayala regarded as the legitimate Sapa Inca of Tawantinsuyu—at one point in the book, addressing him as “Viracocha King Phillip III Inca”—to explain to him that Spanish priests and bureaucrats were conducting many illegal and un-Christian abuses and exploitations of Native people in the name of the king.
He wrote that he included a history of the Incas and of Tawantinsuyu in his book—as well as explanations of Spanish abuses—in order to help Spanish priests understand Inca culture, “to help the priests know how to take the confessions of the Indians.” In his introduction, Guaman de Poma de Ayala wrote to the king (translation by Hamilton):
Your Holy Catholic Royal Majesty, I have hesitated for many months before beginning this undertaking, and after I had started, I felt like abandoning it. I thought my plan was rash, and I did not find myself capable of carrying it out properly, since it must be based on unwritten accounts, taken from quipos, or memorials and reports from ancient times remembered by wise old Indian men and women, eyewitnesses, for reliable information that can withstand critical judgment. Thus, suspended in my thoughts, I spent many days and years undecided until I started to write this history. Overcoming my fears, I begin with this kingdom, fulfilling my desire to always search in spite of my many failings, poverty of intellect, blindness, lack of knowledge, not being a man of letters, nor a doctor, nor a Latin scholar; yet as the first chronicler of this kingdom, with an opportunity to serve your Majesty, I decided to write of the origins, famous acts of the first kings, lords, captains, or grandparents and the nobles and their generations and descendents…
The sheer amount of work that he invested in writing and illustrating his 39-chapter book indicates that Guaman Poma de Ayala must have had some expectation that King Phillip III would respond to his deeply documented request for reform. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that the king ever saw the book. In fact, no one knows what happened to the book for almost three hundred years.
Then in 1908, it was noticed in the royal library of Denmark in Copenhagen, where it remains today. Copies of the handwritten manuscript were printed in Paris in 1936, but the book was not actually printed, in the original Spanish, until 1980. In 2009, the first English translation was published, but it covers only of the first section of the book, about Inca history. The second section of the book, about Spanish colonial abuses, has still never been translated into English.
A complete digital version of the manuscript, with basic transcriptions of the Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara text, was published by the Danish Royal Library in 2001, and is available online.
- The History of the Incas, by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, translated and edited by Brian Bauer and Vania Smith, University of Texas Press, 2007
As well as books directly informed or written by Native authors, there are at least two important books that were written by Spanish colonizers who spent time reviewing Inca history texts and discussing their research with Inca historians. At the time of its writing in 1572 CE, the first of these was intended to be the official Spanish version of Inca history. The newly-arrived, second Spanish viceroy (governor) of the colony of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, gave this important assignment to Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, a Spanish soldier and colonizer who was very personally committed to the success of Spanish colonization in the Americas.
The intent of the project was both to create an official version of Inca history to use for Spanish legal and political purposes, and also to promote the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the Americas. This was necessary to do in order to counter the ideas of Spanish writers and priests like Bartolomé de las Casas, who had been arguing to the Spanish king since 1515 that Spanish colonizers were behaving immorally, illegally, and in un-Christian ways by robbing, murdering, enslaving, and otherwise oppressing Native peoples throughout the Americas. In response to these concerns, in 1542, Charles V, who was the Holy Roman Emporer of central Europe as well as King of Spain, implemented a set of reforms called the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws), which outlawed enslavement and theft of lands from Native peoples in Spanish colonies in the Americas. These laws were in response to the writings of many, most prominently Las Casas, criticizing Spanish colonizers for actions like enslaving and stealing land. In the colony of Peru, many colonizers, led by Francisco Pizarro’s younger brother Gonzalo, rebelled against the king, going so far as to kill the Spanish colonial governor, because they did not want to follow the new laws. By 1545, the king revoked the strongest parts of the laws.
Sarmiento wrote that the reports of slavery and theft was “not the truth” and that it was the Christian devil who had inspired Las Casas and other Spanish preachers to question Spanish abuses, and to question whether the king had a right to rule in the Americas, as below (translation by Bauer and Smith):
The devil...plotted to wage war using the very soldiers who were fighting against him, the preachers themselves, who now began to question the right and title that the kings of Castile had over these lands...for these reasons, the Emporor Don Carlos [Charles V] was on the verge of abandoning the colonies. This was exactly what the enemy of Christ’s faith sought in order to regain possession of the souls that the devil had kept blind for so many centuries. All this occurred because of the lack of attention on the part of the governors of these lands...and because of the writings of the bishop of Chiapas [Las Casas]...although his zeal seems holy and understandable, he said things...that are not supported by the evidence.
To argue against the idea that the Spanish did not have the right to violently colonize the Americas, Sarmiento tried to write a history showing that in fact, it was the Incas who were illegitimate and cruel rulers. Sarmiento claimed that Spanish rule in Tawantinsuyu was therefore more justified than Inca rule, because the Spanish king was favored by the Christian God, who Sarmineto said had guided Europeans to find the Americas for the purpose of spreading Christianity.
Because of the importance of this project for the Spanish, Sarmiento was able to spend many months traveling and interviewing members of all of the Inca panacas in order to compile information for his book. In addition, after creating a first draft, he held a gathering of all panaca representatives in Cuzco on February 29 and March 1, 1572, where he read aloud the entire draft and asked for their corrections and final approval. After finalizing the book, he sent it to the king in Spain, along with four large paintings illustrating Inca history and family trees, which were based on Inca paintings that had originally hung in the Coricancha temple in Cuzco. These paintings, of which no other versions are known to exist, were later destroyed by a fire in the royal palace in Madrid in 1734.
In later years, Spanish speakers would sometimes say that someone had “the luck of Sarmiento de Gamboa” to refer to bad luck. One of the many unlucky coincidences in Pedro’s life was the timing of his book, which he hoped would impress the king enough to earn him a lucrative colonial job. Instead, his book reached Spain just after the surprising and unpleasant news that Viceroy Toledo had decided to execute the Inca leader, Tupac Amaru, in the main plaza of Cuzco on September 24, 1572. King Phillip II, whose legitimacy as a leader himself rested on the European idea of the “divine right of kings”, was furious that Toledo would do something so outrageous. He viewed the Incas as Peruvian kings who should submit to his greater authority, as did lesser kings in Europe. When the king next saw Toledo in person in Spain, he angrily told him that “you were not sent to Peru to kill kings, but to serve them.” Toledo was eventually fired and died in a Spanish jail, but his ten years leading the Spanish colonization of Tawantinsuyu had immense historical implications.
Due to Toledo’s unpopularity in Madrid, Sarmiento de Gamboa’s book was not published or read widely, and sat forgotten in the king’s library. In 1785, it was sold to a German university as part of a private book collection, and it was published for the first time ever in 1906, with the first English translation published in 1907. Despite Sarmiento’s political agenda and other biases, his book remains an important source of Inca history because of the unique process that he underwent in gathering input from members of all panacas and holding a formal endorsement process with them before publication.
- History of the Inca Empire: an account of the Indians’ customs and their origin together with a treatise on Inca legends, history, and social institutions, by Bernabé Cobo, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton, University of Texas Press, 1979
The second important source written by a Spaniard was by Bernabé Cobo, a Spanish priest and writer who spent most of his life in the Americas. Cobo completed this book in 1653, at age 73. His book is useful because it was based on many years of research from Inca and Spanish sources that are now lost. For example, Cobo describes viewing the Inca history paintings sent to Spain with Sarmiento de Gamboa’s book, which were collected (along with all of the royal Inca mummies) by colonizer Polo de Ondegardo, and are now lost, as follows (translation by Hamilton):
Polo de Ondegardo brought together all of the old Indians who had survived from the pagan era, including the Inca rulers as well as the priests and quipo camayos, or Inca historians. They could not be ignorant of matters pertaining to the government, rites, and customs of their own people, owing to the fact that they actually lived at the time of the Inca kings, held office then, and were questioned about their own experiences; the validity of their testimony is born out by the record of their quipus and their paintings which were still intact...Of particular importance is the painting that they had in a temple of the sun, next to the city of Cuzco, where portraits were painted showing the lives of each one of their kings with the lands that he conquered. This history in my opinion, must have been taken from one that I saw in that city outlined on the tapestry of cumbe [cumbi cloth], no less detailed and carefully represented than if it were on fine royal fabric.
Cobo’s manuscript was never published during his lifetime, and it is unclear what happened to it until it was noticed in a library in Seville, Spain, in 1790. This 1979 publication was the first time the book became available in English.
The two books by Sarmiento de Gamboa and Cobo are based on large compilations of authentic Inca knowledge about Inca history. However, many other books were written in the 16th century by Spanish colonizers, describing various aspects of Inca history and culture that they had learned about during their time in Tawantinsuyu. These books are often called “chronicles” in English. Spanish chronicles provide useful information about Spanish viewpoints on the Inca, and about the Spanish-Inca War, but most of them are generally biased and less accurate than other sources. As Juan Betanzos wrote:
Moreover, I realized how differently the conquistadors speak about it [Inca history] and how far they were from what the Indians did. This I believe because at that time the conquistadors paid less attention to fact finding than to subduing and acquiring the land and also because they were unaccustomed to dealing with the Indians; they did not know how to make inquiries and ask questions because they lacked an understanding of the language. Moreover, the Indians were afraid to give them a full account.
Museums to Visit
The Inca art and objects pictured in the book are in the collections of the following museums:
In Peru
Museo Larco, Lima
Museo Pedro de Osma, Lima
Museo Oro de Peru, Lima
In Europe
Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen (Guaman Poma de Ayala manuscript)
Berlin Ethnological Museum, Berlin
In the United States
Brooklyn Museum, New York City
Fowler Museum, Los Angeles
Getty Museum, Los Angeles (Getty Murua manuscript)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
American Museum of Natural History, New York City
Metropolitan Museum, New York City
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.
Websites
These sites for museum exhibits offer historical background about Inca history, art, and architecture:
The Smithsonian's Great Inka Road exhibit (launched 2015) describes the history and landscape of the four major districts of Tawantinsuyu, focusing on its monumental road system.
The Quipu: Counting with Knots in the Inca Empire exhibit (launched 2003) at the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino in Santiago, Chile, provides information about Inca qhipu writing, in both Spanish and English.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City publishes informative art history timelines about Inca, Chimu, and Andean art history in its Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History series, including:
Central and Southern Andes, 1000-1400 CE,
Central and Southern Andes, 1400-1600 CE, and
The Google Arts & Culture feature on Chan Chan, the capital of the Chimor kingdom conquered and incorporated into Tawantinsuyu in 1470 CE, makes it possible to visit the incredible remains of the great Chimu city without traveling to Peru.
Social Media
We are always looking for social media accounts that frequently post useful and beautiful historical information about Inca and Andean history and culture. Our current favorites are: