Daily Life in the Inca Empire
Daily life in the Inca empire was characterised by strong family relationships, agricultural labour, sometimes enforced state or military service for males, and occasional lighter moments of festivities to celebrate important life events in the community and highlights in the agricultural calendar.
The Family & Ayllu
The family was a fundamental component of Inca society, and strong attachments were made between even distant relations, not just close family. For example, the words for father and uncle were the same, as were mother and aunt, and the word for cousin was the same as brother and sister. Naming conventions illustrate that the male line was regarded as the most important by the Incas.
The wider family would all have been members of the same kin group or ayllu. Some of these, composed of hundreds of small family units, were large enough to be categorised as a subtribe. Marriage outside of this group was unusual so that all members of the ayllu were, in practice, related. They believed they came from a common ancestor, usually a legendary figure or even a mythical animal. Ancestors were often mummified and revered in regular ritual ceremonies. A further collective identity besides blood was the fact that an ayllu owned a particular piece of territory and the elders parcelled it out for individual families to work on so that they might be self-sustainable.
The ayllu system of social governance was much older than the Incas themselves, but following their conquest of local tribes they used its conventions – for example, common labour in the service of the ayllu chief or chiefs and role as a political and trading body for relations with other ayllu – to good effect to better govern their empire. The Incas also put greater emphasis on the geographical ties between individuals and introduced a new aristocratic class which could not be accessed from a lower social group through marriage. Even new ayllus were created (each Inca king created his own, and forced resettlement was another reason), and above all, warriors now no longer pledged allegiance to the leader of their ayllu but to the Inca ruler at Cuzco. In the same way, the worship of particular local deities by any one ayllu was permitted to continue, but these were made subservient to the Inca gods, especially the sun god Inti. Finally, the Incas kept precise census records using their quipu (khipu) devices of knotted-string, in which males within the empire were classified according to their age and physical capacity for work in mines, fields, or the army.
Several of these cultural changes under Inca rule may well have been factors in the empire's collapse following the European invasion and explain many communities' readiness to join forces with the conquistadores against their Inca overlords. With distant leaders, imposed tribute and religion, and a feeling of isolation and anonymity in the vast Inca empire, the traditional ayllu with its close ties between individuals, a common heritage, and familiar leadership must have seemed a much more preferable way of life.
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