The American Race / A Linguistic Classification and Ethnographic Description of the Native Tribes of North and South America

by Daniel G. Brinton

The region around the Gulf of Guayaquil was conquered by the Inca Tupac Yupanqui about 1450.[272] The accounts say that it had previously been occupied by some five-and-twenty independent tribes, all of whom were brought under the dominion of the Kechuas and adopted their language. The most prominent of these were the Cañaris, whose homes were in the hot valleys near the coast. Before the arrival of the Incas they had a certain degree of cultivation, being skilled in the moulding of copper, which they worked with a different technique from the Kechuas. Many of their copper axes are ornamented with strange figures, perhaps totemic, cut into the metal. As much as five or six hundred pounds’ weight of these axes has been taken from one of their tombs.[273] Some of the most beautiful gold work from the Peruvian territory has been found in modern times in this province, but was perhaps the work of Kechua rather than of Cañari artists.[274]

The original language of the Cañaris, if it was other than the Kechua, appears to have been lost.

2. THE PERUVIAN REGION.

The difficulty of a linguistic classification of the tribes of the Peruvian region is presented in very formidable terms by the old writers. Cieza de Leon said of this portion of the continent: “They have such a variety of languages that there is almost a new language at every league in all parts of the country;”[275] and Garcilasso de la Vega complains of the “confusion and multitude of languages,” which gave the Incas so much trouble, and later so much impeded the labors of the missionaries.[276] An authority is quoted by Bollaert to the effect that in the vice-royalty of Quito alone there were more than forty distinct tongues, spoken in upwards of three hundred different dialects.[277]

Like most such statements, these are gross exaggerations. In fact, from all the evidence which I have been able to find, the tribes in the inter-Andean valley, and on the coast, all the way from Quito, under the equator, to the desert of Atacama in 25° south latitude, belonged to probably four or at most five linguistic stocks. These are the Kechua, the Aymara, the Puquina, the Yunca, and the Atacameño. Of these, the first three were known in the early days of the conquest, as “the three general languages”—lenguas generales—of Peru, on account of their wide distribution. But it is quite likely, as I shall show later, that the Aymara was a dialect, and not an independent stock.

1. The Kechuas.

The Kechua in its various dialects, was spoken by an unbroken chain of tribes for nearly two thousand miles from north to south; that is, from 3° north of the equator to 32° south latitude. Its influence can be traced over a far wider area. In the dialects of Popayan in Ecuador, in those on the Rio Putumayo and Rio Napo, in those on the Ucayali and still further east, on the banks of the Beni and Mamore, in the Moxa of the Bolivian highlands, and southeast quite to the languages of the Pampas, do we find numerous words clearly borrowed from this widespread stock.

This dissemination was due much more to culture than to conquest. It was a tribute to the intellectual superiority, the higher civilization, of this remarkable people, as is evident by the character of the words borrowed. It is a historic error to suppose that the extension of the Kechua was the result of the victories of the Incas. These occurred but a few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards, and their influence was not great on the native tongues, as even the panegyrist of the Incas, Garcilasso de la Vega, confesses.[278] The opinion of Von Tschudi was so positive on this point that he says: “With a few unimportant exceptions, wherever the Kechua was spoken at the time of the conquest, it had been spoken thousands of years before the Inca dynasty began.”[279] The assertion of Garcilasso de la Vega, that the Inca gens had a language of its own, has been shown to be an error.[280]

Where should we look for the starting-point, the “cradle,” of the far-spread Kechua stock? The traditions of the Incas pointed to the shores and islands of Lake Titicaca as the birth-place of their remotest ancestors; but as Markham has abundantly shown, this was a pure myth. He himself is decidedly of the opinion that we must search for the cradle of the stock in the district of Cuzco, perhaps not far from Paucartambo, “The House of the Dawning,” to which other venerable Incarian legends assigned the scene of the creation of their common ancestors.[281]