Cusco

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Begin at a wall. On a lane in the lower town the fitted stone runs shoulder-high and unbroken, each block cut to answer the hollow of the next, no mortar in the seam, the whole face ground until a knife will not enter it — the outer skin of the enclosure the Inca called the Coricancha, the golden court, sheathed in its day with plates of hammered gold. Stand where the gold once was and the eye does not stop at the wall. It runs outward. From this one point some forty-one invisible lines were held to radiate across the basin and out over the passes, each line a ceque, and along each ceque were strung its shrines — a spring here, a worked stone there, a ridge, an ancestor’s seat, a place where the sacred could be addressed — some three hundred and twenty-eight of them in all, each in the keeping of an assigned kin-group who tended it in its turn. Before it was a city of streets, Qosqo was a wheel of sight-lines, and this court was its hub.

The city sits in a bowl of the southern Peruvian Andes, in the valley of the small river the Inca called the Huatanay, at about thirty-four hundred meters, where the air is thin and the light is hard. Its Quechua name is Qosqo. The mestizo chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, born in the city a generation after the conquest and writing his Comentarios reales de los Incas in Lisbon in 1609, glossed the word as the navel — the umbilicus of the world, the knot at which the four quarters of the empire were tied together. That reading has held for four centuries, and it fits the thing the city was made to be. Whether it is the word’s true root is another matter, and here the record forks.

The navel and the names

Qosqo reaches us along two channels that are best held apart. The first is the tradition and the chroniclers — the living Quechua name, glossed and elaborated by the writers of the century after the conquest, Garcilaso foremost among them. The second is the archaeology and the standing stone: the Inca masonry that still carries the colonial city on its back, read together with the documents that describe what the walls once held. Neither channel is transparent. The chronicles were written by Spaniards, by mestizos, and by indigenous authors, all after the empire had fallen, and they disagree with one another; the stones are eloquent but mute on names and dates. A careful account keeps both in view and marks where they part.

The name itself is contested. Garcilaso’s navel is a gloss, not an etymology, and a second derivation runs from qusqu wanka — a phrase tied to the foundation legend of the Ayar siblings, in which one of the four brothers who came out of the earth to found the city was turned to stone at the chosen spot, a boundary-marker of the lineage that would rule. That story is one of three rival origins the tradition preserves, and the three do not agree. In one the founding ancestors emerge from a cave at Pacaritambo south of the valley; in another the creator sends the first Inca and his sister up out of Lake Titicaca, far to the south, to walk north until the golden staff Manco Cápac carried sank into fertile earth and marked the place to build. These are charter stories rather than dated chronicles, and which the builders themselves held is not recoverable from the ground. What can be said plainly is that a real Cusco polity was taking shape by the early thirteenth century, one small highland lordship among many in the basin.

Its transformation into the head of an empire the chroniclers credit to the ninth ruler, the Sapa Inca called Pachacuti — a throne-name that carries the sense of the one who overturns and remakes an age. In the received account he defeated the invading Chancas, took the rule, and refounded Cusco as an imperial capital on a deliberate plan, conventionally about the year 1438. That date should be held loosely. It rests on the “official” king-list, the sequence of thirteen rulers the chroniclers set down, and the king-list is itself among the most disputed things in Andean studies: the archaeology of the basin does not map cleanly onto the dynasty of named kings, and the reigns before Pachacuti dissolve into legend under inspection. What the record supports is not the year but the shape of the event — a small lordship remade, in the middle decades of the fifteenth century, into the ordered center of a state that would run the length of the mountains under the name Tawantinsuyu, the four parts joined as one.

The body of the puma

The plan Pachacuti is said to have given the city was not an abstraction but a body. Cusco was laid out, the tradition holds, in the shape of a puma — the great cat of the Andean middle world, a creature of power. The terraced heights above the town to the north, the ramparts of Sacsayhuamán with their saw-toothed courses, formed the head, the bared teeth of the animal guarding the high approach. Two rivers channeled the flanks: the Saphi and the Tullumayo, running down through the basin on either side of the built city, canalized in fitted stone. The ceremonial plaza lay at the belly. And where the two rivers met, downstream to the south, was the tail — the wedge of land still called Pumachaupan, Pumaq Chupan, the puma’s tail. Whether the fifteenth-century builders held the figure as literally as the chroniclers who recorded it, or whether it is an image laid over the plan afterward, cannot now be settled from the stones. But the outline is not arbitrary: the rivers are where the flanks are said to be, and the fortress does crown the head.

Within that body the city was doubled and quartered. It was divided first into two moieties — Hanan Qosqo, the upper, and Hurin Qosqo, the lower — the paired halves that ordered almost everything in the Andean world, not opposites at war but complements whose union made a working whole. And it was divided again into four, for Cusco was the point at which the suyus met. Tawantinsuyu means the land of the four quarters, and the quarters were real divisions of territory that converged on the capital: Chinchaysuyu to the northwest, Antisuyu to the northeast, Kuntisuyu to the southwest, Qullasuyu to the southeast, the largest of them, reaching down toward Titicaca and the Aymara south. Their boundaries met in the city, and their four great roads set out from it — the arms of the Qhapaq Ñan, the royal road that bound the mountains together, each running out toward its quarter. A traveler leaving Cusco did not merely leave a city; he entered a named direction of the ordered world.

At the belly of the puma lay the great plaza, Haucaypata, the ceremonial heart of the capital and of the empire. It was here that the four quarters touched, here that the festivals were staged and the dead kings brought out to sit among the living, here that the roads began. The plaza was not left as bare ground. Its surface was spread, by Pachacuti’s order, with white sand carried up from the shore of the Pacific — a labor of the whole state, sand hauled hundreds of kilometers into the high basin to floor the sacred square — and into that sand, during the ceremonies, offerings of gold, of silver, and of the red Spondylus shell prized above them both were buried. The plaza was a made surface, an offering in its own right, the coast brought to the center of the mountains and laid down at the navel.

The wheel of sight-lines

Return now to the hub, and to the lines that ran out from it. The sacred heart of Cusco was the Coricancha, the Qorikancha or golden enclosure, the House of the Sun. Within its precinct stood the shrines of the powers: Inti the sun, the divine father of the ruling line, in his gold-plated sanctuary; Mama Killa the silver moon; Wiraqocha the creator; Illapa the thunder who draws the rain from the celestial river; Chaska, the planet Venus; and the rainbow. The temple is its own subject, and holds it. What belongs to the city as a whole is what the Coricancha anchored: for from this court, and not from any street or gate, the ceque system was reckoned.

A ceque was a line — not a drawn road but a conceptual sight-line, a bearing held from the Coricancha out to the horizon. The tradition counted roughly forty-one of them (some reckonings give forty-two), grouped by quarter, radiating from the temple across the basin like the spokes of a wheel or the ribs of a fan. Along each ceque, in order outward, lay its huacas: shrines of every kind, some three hundred and twenty-eight in all threaded onto the lines. A huaca might be a spring, a boulder of odd shape, a carved outcrop, a field, a ridge where a road crossed a pass, a stone into which an ancestor had turned, a seat of the sacred where offering was made. Each ceque, and the huacas strung on it, was the charge of a named kin-group, an ayllu or a royal panaca, which tended its shrines and made their offerings in the reciprocal obligation the Andes call ayni — nothing given without a return, the account with the sacred kept current in turns. The whole apparatus was at once a map of the holy landscape, a roster of ritual duties divided among the descent-groups of the city, and a scheme that fixed each ayllu’s place in the sacred order by giving it a line to keep.

It was also, the evidence suggests, a calendar written across the ground. The number is the clue. Three hundred and twenty-eight is exactly twelve times twenty-seven and one-third — twelve sidereal lunar months, the sidereal month being the time the moon takes to complete a circuit through the stars, some 27.3 days, two days shorter than the cycle of its phases. The anthropologist R. Tom Zuidema, who reconstructed the ceque system in the twentieth century from the colonial sources, argued that each of the 328 huacas answered to a day, so that to walk the shrines in order was to walk the sidereal lunar year — the shrine-grid doubling as an almanac in space and time, the days of the ritual year distributed across the hills of the basin. Some of the ceques, run out to the visible horizon, are held to strike it at points where the sun rises or sets at a solstice, tying the count of shrines to the turning of the year in the sky. How much of this scheme the Inca held as a single articulated system, and how much is the order Zuidema’s reconstruction imposes on a list, is debated; the number itself, and the correspondence to the sidereal reckoning, are not easily explained away. Either way the design is of a piece with the city: a capital that is a body, a plaza that is an offering, a temple that is the origin not of streets but of sight-lines, the whole landscape around the navel made legible as a wheel of the sacred and the calendar at once.

The central plaza of Cusco at night, the ground of the Inca Haucaypata, seen from the heights of San Cristóbal — the colonial cathedral and the church of the Compañía de Jesús raised on the frame of the old ceremonial square. Martin St-Amant (S23678), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Almost none of this survives to be counted on the ground. The huacas were springs and stones and seats, unmarked to a stranger’s eye and known only to their keepers; when the keepers were dispersed and the tending forbidden, the lines went out of the world though the stones remained. That so much of the system can be reconstructed at all is owed to a single document, and to the campaign that made it necessary.

The city taken, and what outlived the taking

The Inca city fell to the past in a season. In 1532 the forces of Francisco Pizarro seized the Sapa Inca Atahualpa far to the north at Cajamarca and within a year executed him; the gold that ransomed him — and did not save him — was carried in from the temples, the Coricancha’s plating among it. Pizarro’s men entered Cusco itself on 15 November 1533. The golden court was stripped of its sheeting, and the capital of the four quarters passed into other hands. On 23 March 1534 the Spanish refounded the town as a Castilian municipality on the Inca street-plan, distributing the palaces of the dead kings as house-lots to the conquerors. Over the fitted Inca walls they raised the Baroque churches and mansions of a colonial city; the Dominican convent of Santo Domingo was built directly onto the Coricancha, whose stonework still shows through the arches beneath it. The account of that stripping and that overbuilding belongs with the temple; here the city’s own reception is the plainer fact that the colonial town was set down on the body of the Inca one, course by course, and carried it.

The conquest was not accepted quietly. In 1536 the Inca whom the Spanish had installed as a client, Manco Inca Yupanqui, broke with them, escaped the occupied city, and raised a great army across the highlands. From 6 May 1536 he laid siege to Cusco, tens of thousands of warriors against a few hundred Spaniards and their Andean allies, the fighting centered on the heights of Sacsayhuamán above the town, from which the Inca host commanded the streets below and burned much of the thatched city. The siege held into the following spring and then broke; by early 1537 it had failed, and Manco withdrew down the Sacred Valley — turning back a Spanish column at Ollantaytambo before falling back into the forests of Vilcabamba, where Andean sovereignty kept a diminished court for another generation. The last independent Inca resistance ended in 1572.

What the siege did not undo, the following century set out to erase. Under the campaigns the colonial church called the extirpación de idolatrías, the extirpation of idolatries, the huacas of the ceque system and the mummies of the ancestors were hunted out and destroyed as demonic — the shrines broken, the ancestral bodies burned, the tending forbidden and its keepers punished. The word idolatry is the campaigners’ own, and marks their frame rather than the tradition’s: what to them was a dead idol fit for burning was, to the Andean, a huaca — a spring, a stone, an ancestor’s body, alive with the presence that had to be kept. It is precisely because the system was suppressed that its fullest record is a document of what was lost. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo completed in 1653, preserved the single most detailed account of the ceques and their shrines — the roughly forty-one lines and the three hundred and twenty-eight huacas, listed quarter by quarter — drawing on an earlier lost source. Cobo’s list is largely a catalog of the vanished, and it is the ground on which the twentieth-century reconstruction was built. The sacred geography of Cusco reaches the modern world chiefly through the pages of the men who set out to end it.

Yet the older world did not vanish, and it must be spoken of in the present tense. The Quechua are a living people, the runakuna, and the veneration of Pachamama, the earth-mother who must be fed, continues in the basin and across the Andes — the first of the drink poured to the ground, the offering-bundle burned or buried so the earth may eat it, folded through four centuries into a Catholic calendar without ceasing to be itself. Cusco keeps its Inca street-plan beneath the colonial one, its fitted foundations under the mansions, and its festivals: above all Inti Raymi, the feast of the sun at the June solstice, banned in the colony and reconstructed as a great civic pageant in the twentieth century, staged each June on the terraces of Sacsayhuamán that were once the head of the puma. In 1983 UNESCO inscribed the City of Cuzco on the World Heritage List under criteria (iii) and (iv), citing exactly the double thing the place had become — the unique testimony of the Inca capital of Tawantinsuyu, and the confluence of Inca and Hispanic cultures written into one urban body. The Smithsonian’s account of the Inka world and the standard reference treatments, such as the World History Encyclopedia’s entry on Cuzco, tell the same layered story. The navel was overbuilt, not unmade. The wall still runs shoulder-high along the lane; the plaza still fills; and the city that was reckoned outward from a golden court, in forty-one lines and three hundred and twenty-eight shrines, is still standing to be walked.

The Inca wall along Calle Hatunrumiyoc in central Cusco — polygonal blocks ground to a mortarless fit, among them the celebrated twelve-angled stone, still carrying the colonial street above. ErnestoTalav.Montoya, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

→ Related: Coricancha · Inti · Viracocha · Pachamama · Mama Quilla · Illapa · Lake Titicaca · Pachacamac · The Inca · The Quechua · The Aymara