The Inca civilization, like other ancient Andean groups, practiced artificial mummification as a means of honoring their ancestors and preserving the connection between the present and the past. The most important Inca mummies, including those of their emperors, were treated like living things – draped in fine textiles and jewelry, served food and drink, and carefully cared for by their living descendants.
Mummification in ancient Andean cultures
Chinchorro mummy of a baby on display at the Archaeological Museum of San Miguel de Azapa, Chile.
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The Incas were not the first Andean culture to make mummies. In fact, the Chinchorro, a hunter-gatherer culture who lived in the northernmost part of what is now Chile from around 5,000 BC, began to practice artificial mummification some 2,000 years before. the ancient Egyptians.
While the dry, mountainous climate near the coast naturally preserved human and other remains, the Chinchorro learned to extend this process by removing organs, embalming or drying the flesh, and collecting bodies. They began by mummifying the remains of children who died young, but over time they also mummified adult remains, especially those of older individuals considered influential in the life of a community. This process of making ancestors by mummification was common among Andean groups in the 12th century AD, when the Incas established their capital in Cuzco, in what is now southern Peru.
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The role of mummies in the Inca expansion
A mummy believed to be an Inca girl of around 15, found on Mount Esmerelda in Chile, piques the interest of a student at the Santiago Forensic School.
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“The artificially preserved mummies from the Andes don’t look like the mummies in Egypt,” says Christopher Heaney, assistant professor of Latin American history at Pennsylvania State University. Andean mummies were usually arranged in a fetal position and wrapped in layers of leather or fabric to form bundles. For the Incas in particular, says Heaney, it was believed that stillness and solidity “gave mummies their ability to move through time and continue to shape the lives of the living.”
With their imperial expansion in full swing in the mid-15th century, the Incas used mummification and ancestor-making as a common language to aid in their conquest and the subjugation of other Andean groups. According to Inca tradition, the Inca emperor was the direct descendant of the sun, making him the ancestor of all those he claimed as a subject. When the Incas incorporated a group into their empire, they would claim the ancestral mummies of the group, offering them offerings and bringing the most powerful of them to the Inca capital of Cuzco to worship them.
“It was a coup, but it was also nuanced, because what they said they were doing is honoring the dead of these other groups,” Heaney said. “The Incas were able to expand because they could speak this language of ancestral relationships. ”
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Reign in the afterlife
View of an Inca-era mummy found in a cave above the village of Coquesa, Bolivia, 2007.
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As the empire expanded, the role of the most powerful Inca mummies, known as the illapa—has gone beyond simple ancestor worship. When an Inca emperor died, his successor inherited his power, but not his material goods; these were supposed to follow the dead emperor into the afterlife. His family members would then care for his mummified body, ensuring that it was maintained in luxurious style even in death.
When the ilapa were withdrawn and assembled, the new Inca Emperor sometimes showed his own power by taking his place and sitting like a stone among his deceased predecessors. But these powerful Inca mummies weren’t just men, says Heaney; instead, they were often kept in male-female pairs. To claim power, a future emperor had to marry a prominent Inca woman, sometimes even a relative.
“There was a duality in the Inca and Andean understanding of the universe – that it is men and women together, with their respective powers and abilities, who create the empire,” he says.
The fate of the Inca mummies after the Spanish conquest
When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 1530s, the Inca Empire stretched from what is now northern Ecuador to central Chile. “The Spaniards were fascinated and confused by the Inca cult of their ancestors,” explains Heaney. “They realized that these were not just embalmed bodies, but for the Incas and their subjects, they were still cosmically powerful and socially alive.”
After looting and vandalizing some of the mummy tombs, the Spaniards finally decided to confiscate all the Inca mummies in 1559. The most important were taken to Lima and stored in a Spanish hospital, where they were probably buried. During this time, the stories of Inca mummies began to spread around the world, thanks in large part to Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca nobleman, whose writings have been widely translated and republished in the 17th century.
Child sacrifices
The Andean mummy “Princess of Ampato” rests in a display case in an exhibition in Washington, DC, 1996. Sacrificed as a gift to the gods, the mummy is the first frozen Inca woman ever found in the Americas since pre-Columbian times.
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While efforts to excavate the Imperial mummies have so far failed, another group of Inca mummies have taken center stage in recent decades – those Inca subjects, especially children, who have been ritually killed by the Incas and placed in mountain tombs to serve as emissaries between the living world and the apus, or the mountain gods.
The most famous of these child sacrifices, or capacocha, include “Juanita”, the naturally mummified body of a young girl discovered on Mount Ampato in the Peruvian Andes in 1995, as well as the bodies of a 13-year-old girl and two younger children found in a shrine near the summit from the Mount Llullaillaco Volcano in Argentina in 1999. Dating back to the time of the Inca Empire, they are among the best preserved mummies ever found in any period in the world.
“We can think of their murders as a show of Inca strength, but by dying they also became one of the most powerful beings in the empire,” Heaney says of the capacocha. “The irony is that they are the ones who have survived the centuries, not the emperors themselves. ”
