The complicated religious ceremonies connected with the periodical festivals, the daily worship, and the requirements of private families gave rise to the growth of a very numerous caste of priests and diviners. The pope of this hierarchy, the chief pontiff, was called Uillac Umu, words meaning “The head which gives counsel,” he who repeats to the people the utterances of the Deity. He was the most learned and virtuous of the priestly caste, always a member of the reigning family, and next in rank to the Inca. The Villcas, equivalent to the bishops of a Christian hierarchy, were the chief priests in the provinces, and during the greatest extension of the empire they numbered ten. The ordinary ministers of religion were divided into sacrificers, worshippers and confessors, diviners, and recluses.[1193] It was indeed inevitable that, with a complicated ritual and a gorgeous ceremonial worship, a populous class of priests and their assistants, of numerous grades and callings, should come into existence.[1194]
But the intellectual movement and vigor of the Incas were not confined to the priesthood. The Amautas or learned men, the poets and reciters of history, the musical and dramatic composers, the Quipu-camayoc, or recorders and accountants, were not necessarily, nor indeed generally, of the priestly caste. It is probable that the Amautas, or men of learning, formed a separate caste devoted to the cultivation of literature and the extension of the language. Our knowledge of their progress and of the character of their traditions and poetic culture is very limited, owing to the destruction of records and the loss of oral testimony. The language has been preserved, and that will tell us much; but only a few literary compositions have been saved from the wreck of the Inca empire. Quichua was the name given to the general language of the Incas by Friar Domingo de San Tomas, the first Spaniard who studied it grammatically, possibly owing to his having acquired it from people belonging to the Quichua tribe. The name continued to be used, and has been generally adopted.[1195] Garcilasso de la Vega speaks of a separate court language of the Incas, but the eleven words he gives as belonging to it are ordinary Quichua words, and I concur with Hervas and William von Humboldt in the conclusion that this court language of Garcilasso had no real existence.[1196] It is not mentioned by any other authority.
THE QUIPUS.
[Following a sketch in Rivero and Tschudi, as reproduced by Helps. It shows a quipu found in an ancient cemetery near Pachacamac. There are other cuts in Wiener’s Pérou et Bolivie, p. 777; Tylor’s Early Hist. Mankind, 156; Kingsborough’s Mexico, vol. iv.; Silvestre’s Universal Palæography; and Léon de Rosny’s Écritures figuratives, Paris, 180. Cf. Acosta, vi. cap. 8, and other early authorities mentioned in Prescott (Kirk’s ed. i. 125); Markham’s Cieza, 291; D. Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. ch. 18; Fourth Rept. Bureau of Ethnology (Washington), p. 79; Bollaert’s description in Memoirs read before the Anthropological Society of London, i. 188, and iii. 351; A. Bastian’s Culturländer des alten America, iii. 73; Brasseur de Bourbourg’s MS. Troano, i. 18; Stevens’s Flint Chips, 465; T. P. Thompson’s “Knot Records of Peru” in Westminster Review, xi. 228; but in the separate print called History of the Quipos, or Peruvian Knot-records, as given by the early Spanish Historians, with a Description of a supposed Specimen, assigned to Al. Strong by Leclerc, No. 2413. The description in Frezier’s Voyage to the South Sea (1717) is one of the earliest among Europeans. Leclerc, No. 2412, mentions a Letter a apologetica (Napoli, 1750), pertaining to the quipus, but seems uncertain as to its value.—Ed.]
It was the custom for the Yaravecs or Bards to recite the deeds of former Incas on public occasions, and these rhythmical narratives were orally preserved and handed down by the learned men. Cieza de Leon tells us that “by this plan, from the mouths of one generation the succeeding one was taught, and they could relate what took place five hundred years ago as if only ten years had passed. This was the order that was taken to prevent the great events of the empire from falling into oblivion.” These historical recitations and songs must have formed the most important part of Inca literature. One specimen of imaginative poetry has been preserved by Blas Valero, in which the thunder, followed by rain, is likened to a brother breaking his sister’s pitcher; just as in the Scandinavian mythology the legend which is the original source of our nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill employs the same imagery. Pastoral duties are embodied in some of the later Quichuan dramatic literature, and numerous love songs and yaravies, or elegies, have been handed down orally, or preserved in old manuscripts. The dances were numerous and complicated, and the Incas had many musical instruments.[1197] Dramatic representations, both of a tragic and comic character, were performed before the Inca court. The statement of Garcilasso de la Vega to this effect is supported by the independent evidence of Cieza de Leon and of Salcamayhua, and is placed beyond a doubt by the sentence of the judge, Areche, in 1781, who prohibited the celebration of these dramas by the Indians. Father Iteri also speaks of the “Quichua dramas transmitted to this day (1790) by an unbroken tradition.” But only one such drama has been handed down to our own time. It is entitled Ollantay, and records an historical event of the time of Yupanqui Pachacutec. In its present form, as regards division into scenes and stage directions, it shows later Spanish manipulation. The question of its antiquity has been much discussed; but the final result is that Quichua scholars believe most of its dialogues and speeches and all the songs to be remnants of the Inca period.
INCA SKULL.
[After the plate in the Contrib. to N. Am. Ethnology, vol. v. (Powell’s survey, 1882), showing the trephined skull brought from Peru by Squier, in the Army Med. Museum, Washington. Squier in his Peru, p. 457, gives another cut, with comments of Broca and others in the appendix. Cf. in the same volume a paper on “Prehistoric Trephining and Cranial Amulets,” by R. Fletcher, and a paper on “Trephining in the Neolithic Period,” in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Nov., 1887. Cf. on Peruvian skulls Rudolf Virchow, in the third volume of the Necropolis of Ancon; T. J. Hutchinson in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, iii. 311; iv. 2; Busk and Davis in Ibid. iii. 86, 94; Wilson’s Prehistoric Man, ii. ch. 20; C. C. Blake, in Transactions Ethnolog. Soc., n. s., ii. There are two collections of Peruvian skulls in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass.,—one presented by Squier, the other secured by the Haasler Expedition. (Cf. Reports VII. and IX. of the museum.) Wiener (L’Empire des Incas, p. 81) cites a long list of writers on the artificial deforming of the skull.—Ed.]
The system of record by the use of quipus, or knots, was primarily a method of numeration and of keeping accounts. To cords of various colors smaller lines were attached in the form of fringe, on which there were knots in an almost infinite variety of combination. The Quipu-camayoc, or accountant, could by this means keep records under numerous heads, and preserve the accounts of the empire. The quipus represented a far better system of keeping accounts than the exchequer tallies which were used in England for the same purpose as late as the early part of the present century. But the question of the extent to which historical events could be recorded by this system of knots is a difficult one. We have the direct assertions of Montesinos, Salcamayhua, the anonymous Jesuit, Blas Valera, and others, that not only narratives, but songs, were preserved by means of the quipus. Von Tschudi believed that by dint of the uninterrupted studies of experts during several generations, the power of expression became developed more and more, and that eventually the art of the Quipu-camayoc reached a high state of perfection. It may reasonably be assumed that with some help from oral commentary, codes of laws, historical events, and even poems were preserved in the quipus. It was through this substitute for writing that Montesinos and the anonymous Jesuit received their lists of ancient dynasties, and Blas Valera distinctly says that the poem he has preserved was taken from quipus. Still it must have been rather a system of mnemonics than of complete record. Molina tells us that the events in the reigns of all the Incas, as well as early traditions, were represented by paintings on boards, in a temple near Cuzco, called Poquen cancha.