ABSTRACT
I n A.D. 1532, the Inka empire, Tawantinsuyu, controlled the lives of over 6 million people. This extraordinary domain was unique in world history because it included peoples living both at extreme high altitudes and in some of the driest environments on earth. The Inka, like the Aztec of Mesoamerica, created their own imperial propaganda. Their historians taught that civilization was invented by the Inka at Cuzco and spread from there throughout the Andes. They denied that any civilizations existed before their great conquests and proclaimed that in their city civilization began. Inka propagandists wrote history to promote their own selfimage, but even they revered the silent ruins of the great city of Tiwanaku on the shore of Lake Titicaca, said to have been built by giants turned into stone by the Inka god Viracocha before he created people. Tiwanaku in the highlands and Chan Chan and Pachacamac on the coast make a mockery of Inka offi cial histories, for powerful states and empires fl ourished throughout the Andean region while Cuzco itself was still a small village. Chapter 18 tells the story of these early Andean states, which in turn developed from earlier kingdoms described in the previous chapter (Figure 18.1; see also Table 17.1 on page 433 ).
