You're Dead to Me - The Inca Empire (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Bill Sillar and comedian Sue Perkins to learn all about the South American Inca empire. At their height, the Inca controlled a vast territory from their base in Peru, one that stretched down the mountainous west coast of the continent, from Ecuador all the way down to Argentina. But the empire barely lasted for a century. Beginning in the mid-15th century, it fell in the 1530s with the arrival of Spanish conquistadores, led by Pizarro. This episode goes beyond famous sites like Machu Picchu and explores all aspects of Incan life, death – and taxes! Along the way, it takes in social and family structures, food and drink, religious practices, art and architecture. [The podcast version of this episode has been edited slightly to amend an incorrect reference to the weight of the stones carried from Cuzco to Ecuador]This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Research by: Andrew Himmelberg Written by: Andrew Himmelberg, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Caitlin Hobbs Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to your dead to me the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I am a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are loading up our llamas and doing the Machu Picchu trail to learn all about the Inca Empire. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In Archaeology Corner, he's Professor at the Institute of Archaeology at University

College London, where much of his research focuses on the archaeology of the indigenous peoples of the Andes before, during and after the Inca Empire. It's Professor Bill Silla. Welcome, Bill. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. Looking forward to it. And in Comedy Corner, she's a renowned broadcaster, writer, actor and comedian. You'll know her from Literally Everything Good, including as host of the iconic Just a Minute, The Great

British Bake Off, various marvellous travel documentaries. You'll almost certainly remember her from our episodes on Ottoman Istanbul and Agatha Christie. It's Sue Perkins. Welcome back Sue. Total pleasure to be here. What a lovely dream team we've got. Right, okay Sue, we know you're a history fan. Yes. You're renowned for your knowledge and for being a very well-travelled person.

So South America for you is not far away and daunting. You've been. Yes, I've done some extraordinary things in South America. I've been shot twice in Colombia, once at point-blank range in the stomach and the other one through a, I'd admit, fortified bulletproof windshield. I was mugged in Rio so I feel I certainly have one side for what South America can offer. Hopefully today will be slightly less dangerous.

And what about the Inca, the intellectual Inklings towards the Inca? Do you know much about them? Not really, no. I'm Inca-lite when it comes to my database and my knowledge, but that's why I'm really glad to be part of this show, because it's a voyage into the unknown. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. I'm guessing you're picturing Machu Picchu, the phenomenal ancient citadel

in the Peruvian Andes, which is now a major tourist destination. In terms of Inca culture, you might have seen the hugely underrated Disney movie, The Emperor's New Groove, one of my faves. You may also have seen the heartbreakingly bad Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Weirdly, of course, our famous whip-wielding archaeologist is himself based on Charlton Heston's character in the 1954 film Secrets of the Incas. So the Incas are clearly in our cultural imaginations. But what do we actually know about this powerful civilization, this powerful empire that only really flourished for about a hundred years or so? Right, start with the basics. Sue Perkins, when and where?

That's the worst introduction I've had. When and where did the Inca Empire emerge? Give us a country, give us a time. Well, it's going to emerge in one of the South American countries. I'm going to imagine it's Peru or Chile. Century-wise, I'm going to go for 10th. Okay. Bill, I think Sue did better on the geography than the chronology on that one. Yeah, so Peru's good, but it's a bit later than that. So 1400, 1500, 1532, the Spanish arrive and knock them off. Yes.

So I think emerge around 1400 in the area of central southern Peru. Cusco is their central city. It's very high, isn't it, Cusco is their central city. It's very high isn't it, Cusco to build an empire. Well but they don't mind that, they make good use of that, that height. Lots of their stuff's 3500, 4000 meters, that doesn't worry them at all. So they initiate a process of making alliances and conquering and they eventually incorporate an area from Eur Colombia right down to Santiago in Chile and going a little bit into the Amazon basin but mainly along

that coast and the Andean mountain range. This shocks me in many ways, possibly because of the many cinematic iterations that you talk of. We see them as an ancient. Yeah, ancient is the word. But they are expanding at the same time that we're having the Renaissance. 1532 is when the Spanish show up, that's Henry VIII. So when we think of the Inca, we need to really think it's the sort of Wars of the Roses period. Already my mind is blown because they are more recent.

And yet, at the time, of course, they're bigger than the British Empire. What are the challenges of knowing about the Inca? Well, I guess the main challenge is that they didn't write about themselves in a way that we can get at. All of what we've got in terms of written sources were produced by the Spanish or by people that were indigenous that become Hispanicised. So for that reason we have to work with these accounts that we have from the Spanish and then we have archaeological knowledge which is great, it gives us a lot of information but it doesn't give us the personalities.

Do we call them the Inca or the Incas? The Sapa Inca is the ruler, he's the head Inca. The Inca called their own empire, Tawantinsuyu, the four parts brought together. So they didn't call it the Incas, we call it the Incas. Gotcha. Right, well we're going to start really with the kind of origin myths of who the Incas said they were. But first I wanted to ask Sue if you had to conjure up your own origin myth for the Perkins family, mythical beginnings for where the Perkinses began.

What would you go with? The Perkins, it's a long-standing dynasty and they've always been readily involved in the eating of carbohydrates, but it has no... The amazing thing about the Perkins is it doesn't affect their form in any way. They can gorge on three or four sometimes different carbohydrates in any one meal. And they will still emerge, even at the point of death, to be lean with a heavy muscle mass, ready for action, physically accomplished, deeply dexterous, fighting people, fighting sturdy outdoor people that can take to any sport, resistant to all

stuff. Mason Higgins That's a lovely way into how the Inca thought of themselves beginning, Bill, because they talk about stones. Bill Higgins Within the Andes, people tie themselves to the place, the landscape. So they come out of the landscape in their origin. Particularly, stone can be animate in the Andes in different ways. So one of the ideas is that they came out of a series of caves not too far away from Cusco, Tambotoco, the house of the windows, and they emerge out of this fully formed as four brothers

and four sisters. But they immediately get into difficulties. So the food connection is really good. One of them is brother Salt and he's a real problem, Ayurkachi, because he's too strong. The other brothers decide to sort of trick him and put him back in the cave and wall him up in the cave. Best thing to do. The second brother, Ayuruchu, so he's the brother Chilli. So brother Chilli, Ayuruchu, he is also a bit of a fighter, but he basically goes up onto a mountain, Wana Kaori, and he also gets turned to a stone. The third brother… – Is it mayonnaise?

– It's, you would have thought so. Ayarauka, he's just a sort of savagely difficult brother. The Ayarauka, when they get sort of close to Kusko, the third brother who becomes Manko Kapak is putting a staff into the ground, a staff of gold, and at the point where that can sink into the ground, he decides that's the right place to form a city, because it's soggy. At that point, the third brother, Ior-Olka, he sends him to fly over to a central point, and he becomes another stone. So Ior-Olka becomes a stone, actually in Kori Khorikansha which becomes the central temple of the Incas. So the fourth brother, this man called Kapak, who put his staff into the ground has now got rid of

his other brothers. He's got three of his sisters although particularly Mama Okhliya, his preferred sister, becomes his wife. That's where they found Kusko. So a great sort of origin myth for the Incas. So we had the chilli peppers there and we had the stones. So it's like Q magazine. We always had salt and pepper as well. We had salt and pepper. Push it.

Push it real good. But I mean, so from eight siblings, it turns into an empire of millions, Bill. It's not genetically the strongest start. Can I make that point? This is myth. This is myth. Because obviously there would have been many, many people in the area. But how fast does that Inca empire expand? And does it do so through war or does it do so through sort of, you know, gentle negotiation? Hey, come join the gang, we're

all fun over here. First of all, as you say, this is a myth. In practice, of course, the Andes has been occupied for 10,000 years. The Inca are just one group emerging out of a long history of occupation. Now we know, archaeologically, we can sort of partly trace this by styles of pottery and buildings and things like that, that basically this group begin to consolidate their area. And in the ethno-history, it's also very clear that they begin to effectively create alliances with other groups, sometimes conquering them, sometimes creating alliances, sometimes marrying into them. So it's not always your brother

and sister that get together. Reassuring. Well, there's a period of two or three hundred years when they are getting their act together, but then they begin to grow very rapidly. And Cusco itself potentially is a city of a hundred thousand people, is that right? By the end it's at least a hundred thousand people, but by the end the Inca Empire has, as we've said, it's stretched from borders of Ecuador down in Santiago in Chile and it's ten to twelve million people that are within that empire.

Is there any way of comparing, for example? England's about two million people at that time. Okay. So that's big. Really big. There's a lot of lamb to be fair. What do the Incas believe in? What are they, what cultures are they suppressing as they spread across South America? The Inca did have a cult of the sun that they push

as a state religion, but at the same time, they very much recognize local locations. So they're called wakas, which are powerful locations that are animate places. The Inca carry on celebrating those and sometimes will capture them and develop them themselves. In a sense, they don't just conquer, they create alliances and they assimilate. And they're interested in getting work from the people that they bring in. So in some ways, they don't just want to sort of kill everybody, they want to get the access to the resources. So they don't impose a singular religion, although there are ways in which they promote this cult of the sun. How do you imagine the empire is run? So did they develop a sort of, almost like a local

government system where you've got sort of smaller agents? I mean, my first thing was pigeons obviously. I'm good, but I'm not understand like an idiot. And then I couldn't think of what the sort of South American equivalent would be. I suppose a condor. Did they train condors to fly? Then I became rational inside and I thought, well, there's going to be maybe regionalised hubs with messages running between them conveying the messages from the sapper. I mean, I love the Condor answer but I think your second answer is pretty much bang on Bill. It's very very good. So they have Chaski that are runners running at 4,000 meters but they are

running quite large distances, 30 or so kilometers and then passing it on to somebody else so that you can pass messages on. We've said that the Incadent of writing but what they've got are little strings with other strings hanging off them, and you put knots in these strings. We can only get certain information of this. We get a decimal system, but we can't get at all the nuance of the narrative content. So that was one aspect of it. They constructed a very large road system. There's also a common language that is promoted by the Inca.

It exists long before them, but Quechua gets promoted by them as a common language of communication. So that system Bill's describing is called a Kipu, a K-H-I-P-U. They're a semiotic system of information that literally strings. So what do we know of, I don't know, the class system for example, you know, we've got a king, we've got the Sapa Inca, what about everyone else? I guess if we go archaeologically, most of the people are living in sort of small communities distributed amongst the very different environments that the Inca take over. So up in the highlands, many of them are living in small round houses, sometimes little groups of houses with a patio

area, sometimes with a bit of a bit of a... Patio, lovely! Oh, very nice. Absolutely wonderful! Patio, lovely. Oh, absolutely wonderful. They're organised as ethnic groups effectively that are brought into the Inca Empire and within those you have kinship groups, IUs, that will work together and they will own or access bits of land and they will share their labour, share some of that product, partly with the chief of that community or whatever it may be. The cascade of this is that the Inca Empire requires the people

that they have assimilated, conquered, to contribute labour towards them. Is this a patriarchal society? Are men the ones in control? Do women have self-determination and influence? I'm betting they don't. Well, let's see what Bill says. They don't have self-determination, if you like. I think there's probably more male than female, but it's certainly described as being more balanced. There are matrilineal aspects, and indeed there are some communities in the Andes that were matrilineal. And many people would maintain both of their kinships. And certainly women got into positions of significant power.

The wife or mother of the ink held a lot of power. Some of the religious leaders were women. So yes, there were certain roles that women had. But as ever, there was probably more male control. More to do. More work to do. Yeah. So, Sue, we have you here.

You are the iconic host of not one but two fantastic cookery shows that Great British Break Off and Super Sites. So question I have to ask you, what do you think the Inca were eating? Well, I'm imagining three sisters. I'm imagining squash and I'm imagining beans and I'm imagining maize and things like that. Delicious. So that's definitely for the Aztecs. Is that the same for the Inca? Yeah, no, in many ways. Although it's high altitude, they can produce, slightly lower down, they can produce chilli, lots of potatoes, we've said, maize up to 3,800 or so metres, so within Cusco you can still produce maize, slightly lower down, lots of beans. You've also got coca, the origin of cocaine, but it's been used as a herbal chewing thing,

rather than a drug-making thing, if you like. Usually it was organised so that one ethnic group had sort of access to several different ecological zones. So although you as a farmer might be farming in one area where there was just potatoes because you were just a bit too high, you'd be able to access some of these things that were coming down from the chilli and the nice exotic sort of lower valley things by swapping them within your ethnic group. And in terms of things like livestock, are they rearing animals? I've not been to Peru, my wife has and she I think nibbled a guinea pig. Was it furious? You can't just go up to a guinea pig and nibble it.

So livestock, so there's no horses right? No horses, no traction animals, that's really important. So you can't have the plough and neither can you, there's no wheeled transport because if you're going to transport anything, people have to carry it or llamas that can take 25, 30, 40 kilos. But, so you've got llamas and alpacas, they're really important, partly for transport, partly for making textiles because they're going to produce a lot of the wool that's used for making textiles. Most people would be eating vegetarian food a lot of the time. Meat would be for special occasions, but guinea pigs are widely produced. In fact, dogs were also sometimes eaten here as dogs.

A bit like a pig, but they don't have pigs. It's not a bit like a pig. It depends how much you'd love your pig. I don't need any animals. It's all just a rolling horror for me. When you say guinea pigs were an abundance, I'm now imagining just these sorts of terraced, rocky terraced, altitudinous farmlands. Just guineas running amok.

And I know for a fact they can run amok. And they are ferocious and violent breeds. They're really nibble. They're n, they nip, don't they? They make an amazing noise as well. They're very loud. But it's more like the Star Trek trouble with the tribbles or whatever it was because they're inside. Well, actually quite often in your kitchen. So they'll be running around in your kitchen. You're feeding them the scraps of your potatoes and peelings and things like that. They'll be eating them and then when you've an eat, that's them available. All right. And you could also store some of this, not so much the guinea pig, but the lamb and alpaca meat.

You can store it by freeze drying it. Which they also do for potatoes, right? They do. So the meat one is called charke, which is actually probably where we get our word jerky from. is called ciarchi, which is actually probably where we get our word jerky from, which is to freeze dry the meat. The potatoes, you're doing that by trampling them and letting them freeze, drying out a bit in the sunshine, letting them freeze again, trampling them a couple of three, four days, and then you've got little frozen potatoes that are called ciu-niu. And the other thing I suppose we should mention is drink. They're not wine drinkers. They've got grapes of that.

They don't have grapes. they only come with the Europeans. Ignore that, right, so beer. So the beer was mainly made out of maize. One of the ways of starting your beer is to chew it. So if you masticate your beer you can sort of introduce the yeasts and then leave it and it begins to, you then leave it for a few days, you add that as a sort of starter mix to your beer and then let it ferment. I'm with you, so the mash part of the process. And it's really important because it is the way that you cement relationships by sharing

beer but you also make libations, so you make the gifts of the god. The nuns, the aclia, were one of the groups that were responsible for brewing the best of this beer that was used for some of the ceremonies and things. Let's talk about textile because it's a really big deal in Inca society. Weaving really matters, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, first of all, you're up 4,000 metres or whatever, you need cloth and therefore the production of cloth was a vital thing for all society. Textiles for blankets, footwear, carrying things. It was also used for defence and armaments, slings

and things like that. It was sacred and it was used as a burnt offering. So when the Spanish arrive, the Spanish are all interested in the gold, actually what the Incas are interested in is the quality of fine cloth that some of the Spanish have got, silk and things like that. 400 years later we have very little textile surviving. But weaving was part of the imperial tax system, Sue. It was. If only HMRC would go that way. Because I'll tell you what, I'm pretty good at all that.

I can turn around some crafting. Very happy turning a sort of coat or whatever they need really, a tabard. Yeah. I can do really ornate stuff, Greg, they just won't have it. So they don't have money, Sue. There's no currency, no cash. Cashless society. Cashless society.

Yeah. And they have all this gold and silver that the Spanish are like, wow, hooray! Just lying around. Just lying around. What do you think they were using the gold and silver for? Well, I mean, I wouldn't say temples, but I guess, you know, when you're empire building, you do want a bit of jazz hands and a bit of razzmatazz, do you not? So I'll go for temples, big structures, big Inca building, centralised government kind of vibes in Cushko.

Good guess, Bill? Absolutely good guess. The Inca do not have iron, they've got copper alloys for a lot of different things, but gold and silver are largely ornamental. And sometimes actually they're mixed with copper for the colouration of it it they like it a little bit mixed with copper because they prefer the color of that. Ugh, gold! Let's put some copper in! And gold gets referred to as the sweat of the Sun and silver as the tears of the Moon. Thank you very much, I was trying to remember.

It's like a romance novel. The Sun God is called Inky, is that right? Inty. So he. Yeah. The sun god is called Inky, is that right? Inti. Inti, Inti. So he's the main god. It's difficult, but there's also Viracocha, who's a sort of animating creator god, who the Spanish sort of think is even better.

So they sort of promote the idea that Viracocha might have actually been the Christian deity in certain circumstances. The Pleiades are very important as well. The stars. The stars. The stars, but also lots of these local locations. This gorgeous gold and silver and copper mixed, these treasures, these, as you say, they were in temples. We don't really have them because the Spanish melted them down. Melted them down.

You knew where I was going with that one. So the artworks we don't have, many of the textiles have rotted away. We've got some, we don't fully understand the khipu knots. Is there anything in Inca society and culture that we... Have you made up the Incas? It's a pretty good make-up, I'd be quite pleased with that. I think my fiction score would be very high. No, we have, in many ways, we have lots of evidence. So we have buildings, structures, match-pitching things like that, but also much more local sort of houses and domestic things. Lots of

pottery survive, which is really important as a marker of both local production, but also some styles that are very definitely key to the Inca. Also sort of really important in terms of sort of monumental structures, they're building very beautiful stonework that is this close fitting stonework that's only used for really some of the most prestigious buildings. We've got these kind of fascinating city planning them. We've got in our head Machu Picchu is probably the one that comes to mind. Cusco is the major capital. There's a city that's planned to resemble a puma. Cusco, the Inca capital, is conceived as a puma and the puma was the sort of icon of the Inca royal family.

Ah, alright, so let's talk about Machu Picchu because it's the one that people will know. The stonework is astonishing, but what's it for? Is it a palace? Is it defensive? Is it a fortress? So it's a magnificent location with the sort of river going round it and that area was a vast area of agricultural production so the estate itself was producing an awful lot of stuff but Machu Picchu is the sort of elite hub of that. It was a religious area so there are lots of structures that have very significant religious purposes viewing to the stars and things.

And you mentioned religious sites, religious rituals a little bit there but we should also talk about the rituals involving the dead. Do you know about mummification in Inca society, Sue? Have you ever? I've heard of mummification, but not specifically to do with the Inca society and what the significance of wrapping a loved one in multiple bandages or cloth would be. In Inca society, mummification is different in the technique, but also the dead continue to be functioning society. They're consulted.

They are absolutely central to Inca society. So although you have died, your body continues to be a living entity in the world. And in fact, the Inca mummy was held as still owning things. So exactly how they were mummified, we don't have any elite mummies surviving. I just love the phrase elite mummies. I'm going to have to try and find a way of using that. Yeah. The mummy carries on in society as a useful thing, if you like, and as an owner. And famously, Pedro Pizarro was going with one of the local indigenous military captains to help him get

a marriage with a local indigenous elite woman and goes in to ask for permission for this and finds out that he's asking permission from the mummy. The mummy has an interpreter, luckily, that is able to explain what is required, but it's the mummy that he is asking permission from. Sue, would you be happy to sit on political councils, visit other corpses, give permission for marriages and even guest on this podcast after nature has taken its course? You know, we're called You're Dead to me. Oh, I mean...

Can we keep booking you? Absolutely, and the great news is my agent will keep hoovering her 20%. She will... cannot, whether I am living or dead, absolutely fine with her. But I think we've got to really the end of the Incan Empire. How does the empire collapse? Collapse is maybe not the right word. Conquered? Well, it is conquered and it happens fairly quickly.

So 1531 the Spanish arrive. Very rapidly the Saro gets up and captures Atahualpa, who is by that stage the Sapi Inca, persuades him to give lots of treasures for his ransom, but then kills him anyway. Ah, classic. Yep. As ever, there are some disgruntled indigenous communities that are actually helping. The Spanish numbers were so small, they could not have conquered the Andes without the help of other Andean people.

That rapidly causes the collapse of the political system, very rapidly the Spanish take control. One of the key factors within this is probably disease because the European diseases are wiping out large numbers of indigenous people. And the last Inca ruler is Tupa Amaru who's in 15 1572 so that's actually 40 years after. So first of all they get a sort of puppet Inca he then sort of rebels against the Spanish and goes and sets up a sort of an enclave in Vilcabamba down below Machu Picchu in the jungle that basically keeps sort of the Inca lineage alive and it's

eventually when the Spanish managed to conquer Vilcabamba that they bring Tupac Amaru up and kill him in Cusco. Right, so 1572 is sort of the absolute end point, but 1530s is really when it, we get, the Spanish show up and everything ends. The nuance window! This is where Sue and I sit quietly and chew, well I'll chew alpaca jerky, you're having the vegetarian option. Yeah, and lots of cocoa leaves.

Absolutely. While Professor Bill tells us something that we need to know about the Inca. So you have two minutes, Bill, my stopwatch is ready. Please, the nuance window, take it away. Well I think the first thing to say is of course the Inca coming at the sort of after a lot of development in the Andes, 10,000 years or so of people up to the end of the Inca Empire, which lasted longer and covered quite a lot of a similar area of the Inca, only collapsed about 1,000 in the Common Era. So the Inca emerge after that. And that's quite important in terms of the fact that the Inca actually are picking up on quite a lot of things that pre-exist them.

We think of the Inca's greatest legacy in many ways as things like their architecture of Cusco and Machu Picchu, Ollanto, Tampa, Pachacamac. Actually, it was this organisation of labour. The fact that they could get people to work together and construct terraces systems and canal systems and road systems that covered this vast area and much of that is still being used. So the agricultural productivity of the Inca is something that is still there now and they invested heavily in developing some of these areas. Areas like Cochabamba which were low occupation areas that are now a booming sort of area of agricultural production. Within that, I think we've got to do things like potatoes. You know, the crops that are being produced in the Andes

are vital to our own society. We would not exist the way we do if we did not have the potato. It is a major contributor to world nutrition. So that idea of landscape management and use of the land, I think, is one of the main things that we should be thinking about in terms of the Inca, as well as the beauty of their places that we can now go and visit Oyantaytambo, Cusco, Machu Picchu. Amazing. Thank you, Bill. Thought on that, Sue. You're right. Let's boil it down to the potato at the end. It was a magnificent civilization. But yeah, we've got the Inca gold, the real

Inca gold, which is the spud. You're right, where would we be? I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In Archaeology Corner, we had the brilliant Professor Bill Silla from University College London. Thank you, Bill. Thank you very much. It's been fun. And in Comedy Corner, we have the sensational Sue Perkins. Thank you, Sue. Thank you. I'm off to now smash the potatoes underfoot, freeze dry them. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we unravel another knotty historical topic.

But for now, I'm off to join Sue in asking HMRC if I can knit my tax bill and weave it into blankets. Bye. From BBC Radio 4, Britain's biggest paranormal podcast is going on a road trip. I thought in that moment, oh my God, we've summoned something from this board. This is Uncanny USA. He says, somebody's in the house and I screamed. AHHHHHHHHH! Listen to Uncanny USA on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

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