thumb|Depiction of Pachacuti worshipping [[Inti (Sun god) at Coricancha, in the 17th century second chronicles of Martín de Murúa]]

thumb|Part of the ruins of Pachacuti's palace in [[Cusco|Cuzco]]

Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, also called Pachacútec (, ), was the ninth Sapa Inca of the Chiefdom of Cusco, which he transformed into the Inca Empire (). Most archaeologists now believe that the famous Inca site of Machu Picchu was built as an estate for Pachacuti.

In Quechua, the cosmogonical concept of means "the turn of the world" and could mean "honorable lord". During his reign, Cusco grew from a small town into an empire that could compete with, and eventually overtake, the Chimú empire on the northern coast. He began an era of conquest that, within three generations, expanded the Inca dominion from the valley of Cusco to a sizeable part of western South America. According to the Inca chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega, Pachacuti created the Inti Raymi to celebrate the new year in the Andes of the southern hemisphere. Pachacuti is often linked to the origin and expansion of the cult of Inti.

Following his death, Pachacuti's deeds were transmitted through various means, including genealogical histories, life histories, and quipus, kept near his royal mummy.

Accessing power following the Chanka–Inca War, Pachacuti conquered territories around Lake Titicaca and Lake Poopó in the south, parts of the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains near the Amazon rainforest in the east, lands up to the Quito basin in the north, and lands from Tumbes to possibly the coastal regions from Nasca and Camaná to Tarapacá. These conquests were achieved with the help of many military commanders, and they initiated Inca imperial expansion in the Andes.

Pachacuti is considered by some anthropologists to be one of the first historical emperors of the Incas, and by others to be a mythological and cosmological representation of the beginning of the era of Inca imperial expansion.

Name

The compound refers to an ancient Andean cosmological concept, representing cataclysmic change of era-worlds. The anthroponym appeared written as ⟨Pachacuti⟩ or ⟨Pachacute⟩ in the early colonial chronicles and documents of the 16th century. This written form can be reconstructed into Quechua as "the turn of the world". The form ⟨Pachacútec⟩ (in contemporary Quechua spelling: ⟨Pachakutiq⟩) was introduced by the writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in his published in 1609. Before the coronation, Pachacuti was referred to as Inga Yupangui, with the Spanish navigator Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa additionally claiming Pachcuti's first name was .

The compound is not influenced by other languages such as Aymara or Puquina, and is considered purely Quechua. It is composed of the noun , which today means "world, Earth, universe; (a precise moment in time)" and represents an Andean concept associating time with the physical world, and the verb – "to return, to come back". The apparent absence of a nominalization mark is attributed to the Spanish colonial scribes' failure to recognize the presence of an – y action nominaliser. Consequently, means "turn, return". The colonial chronicler Juan de Betanzos translated the anthroponym as "turn of time" and the Peruvian linguist Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino translated the compound as "the turn of the world". The form used in Garcilaso de la Vega's writing likely was caused by the Inca's storing of the agent nominalizer – q instead of the action nominalizer – y. In Quechua, the presence of a uvular consonant such as /q/ causes the vowel /ɪ/ to be pronounced as an [e], thus being transcribed as – ec in Spanish. However, Garcilaso's restitution contradicted early colonial documentation and was grammatically implausible, since the verb – is an intransitive verb, and the chronicler's intended meaning for the word of "(he) who turns the world" required an additional morpheme altering the verbal valence. The form ⟨Pachacutec⟩ () reconstructed by Garcilaso was ungrammatical in Quechua, and the meaning of "he who turns the world" would have instead required an expression similar to .

According to the oral tradition of Pachacuti's imperial lineage, the name was acquired following the war against the Chancas, according to the chronicler Juan de Betanzos' version together with the names or epithets and .

Historicity

Pachacuti is often considered the first historical Incan emperor, despite various mythological elements of his reign. Various historians associate Pachacuti with the rewriting of the previous Inca rulers' reigns to justify Incan imperial expansion. The nature of Pachacuti's reign, the cosmological concepts associated with it, the lack of physical representations and of archeological evidence made some scholars come to the conclusion that Pachacuti was an Incan ideological and cosmological concept.

The linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, ethnologists and historians Martti Pärssinen, Catherine Julien, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, Alfred Métraux, Brian S. Bauer, John Howland Rowe, Franck Salomon, Waldemar Espinoza Soriano, José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu, and María Rostworowski, and Carmen Bernand consider Pachacuti to be historical, while others, such as Pierre Duviols, Juan Ossio Acuña, Reiner Tom Zuidema, Gary Urton, and Franck Garcia consider Pachacuti to be mythological or mytho-historical. According to the archeologist Franck Garcia, the story of Pachacuti's reign was mainly symbolical and served to set philosophical principles, Inca history having the structural elements of a myth. John Howland Rowe analyzed and compared various colonial sources and came to the conclusion that there existed a state-sanctioned "standard history", believing Pachacuti's victory over the Chanka people to be the cause of imperial expansion. In 1953, María Rostworowski published her biography of Pachacuti and supported Rowe's conclusion of late imperial expansion under Pachacuti. The Dutch structuralist anthropologist Reiner Tom Zuidema criticised Rowe and Rostworowski for methodological practices, and studied the symbolical territorial organization of Cusco and its surroundings. Based on the dualist philosophy of the Andes, Reiner Tom Zuidema and Pierre Duviols came to the conclusion that the Inca Empire was a diarchy, and that Pachacuti had co-reigned with the warrior chieftain Mayta Capac (the fourth ruler of Cusco in the traditional list), while Martti Pärssinen, examining Andean tripartite traditions, wrote that the Inca capital, Cusco, had three rulers, the co-rulers of Pachacuti being Capac Yupanqui and Mayta Capac, while the state-wide imperial administration had only one. In 1945, Rowe devised an imperial chronology, stating Pachacuti reigned from 1438 to 1471, however archeological data suggests the early 15th century to be the beginning of Pachacuti's reign. The former minister of culture Juan Ossio Acuña supported the position of Zuidema, who wrote that the Inca rulers before Topa Inca Yupanqui, including Pachacuti, weren't historical rulers but rather social groups or factions.

His lineage or panaqa of birth was Iñaka Panka, whose common ancestor was Mama Wako, the wife of Manco Capac, which he left to found his own lineage called Hatun Ayllu. He married Mama Anawarkhi or Anarwakhi , of the ayllus of Choqo and Cachona, most likely to reward a chief belonging to one of these ayllus who had defended Cusco during the Chanka invasion.

Legacy

thumb|Pachacuti Monument on the Sun Avenue in [[Cusco]]

  • Pachacuti is featured as the leader of the Inca in the video games Europa Universalis IV, Civilization III, Civilization V, Civilization VI, and Civilization VII.
  • Pachacuti, a resurrected Sapa Inca king who is over 500 years old, plays a major role in James Rollins' novel Excavation, whose major action occurs in the Peruvian Andes. The book is steeped in history and culture about the Inca, Moche, and Quechan peoples, their interactions with the Dominican Order and Spanish conquistadors, and the Spanish Inquisition.
  • He was portrayed in the American documentary series Mankind: The Story of All of Us.
  • The BBC children's series Horrible Histories featured Pachacuti, played by Mathew Baynton, in the song "Do the Pachacuti" (a parody of novelty party songs) during its second series.
  • Pachakutiq is the name of a character played by Clark Gregg in season six of the Marvel TV series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — not the Incan emperor, but a character who might be said to be a "he who overturns space and time" in a certain sense.
  • The video game Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition contains a five-chapter campaign titled "Pachacuti".

See also

  • Colla–Inca War
  • Diarchy

References

Bibliography