Inca Government

The inca government was probably the most complex net of management, statistics, accounting, recollection and storage system ever been before; You need to understand that the incas did not knew the paper and did not have writing; The rule is that, any civilization must have a writing system to grow as the incas empire did, so how the incas grow into such complex culture then?; The answer is simple, the incas did have a way to record events equally effective than writing.

We have writing and the inca government had the Quipu; We need to clear our mind of the pre concept of, writing equal civilization, the incas create complex ways to account goods and record events, with a tool that was created to be a calculator; So it is right to say that the men responsible to manage the quipus were extraordinary good mathematicians.

The name of the inca mathematicians was the Khipukamayuqs, this name has many ways to spell it, because remember the incas did not have any inca symbols that represent sounds, they have numbers that represent sounds, besides the knowledge to translate a quipu is lost, so it is impossible to affirm how it is the right spelling of the word; The khipukamayuqs were the most important people of the inca government, because they collect all the information, from the entire kingdom and send it to the inca king.

The incas system to exchange information was as follow: The lower level was the khipukamayuq of the ayllu, the ayllu was the basic family cell of the incas society, the khipukamayuq of the ayllu keep record of how many people live in the community, birth, deaths, marriages, elders, crops production, court decisions of punishment, decisions and actions of the leader of the ayllu, levels of loyalty to the inca empire, etc; The khipukamayuq record absolutely everything that happen in the ayllu.

When all the information was recorded in a few sets of quipus, the khipukamayuq of the ayllu send a copy of the quipus to his inca government superior authority; It is not clear how many levels of passing and re grouping information happen, until the final quipus, containing the information of the region were send to Cuzco capital; The chasquis deliver the quipus to Cuzco capital and vice versa, they use the inca trail to run from one station to another, to pass the quipus to the next chasqui and so on.

At the top of the pyramid of power, we found the Apus, kind of principal authority of one quarter of the kingdom; The inca empire had four parts, so they were four apus, each apu has three sub apus helping him with the administration; So each apu make a total of four men, four apus are 16 men, all of them together were call the Imperial Council; The council was responsible to inform to the inca king and help him to take decision that will affect the entire kingdom.

We can define the imperial council as the brains of the inca government, it is unbelievable but the imperial council took decisions over information in real time every two days, it could happen because the transfer of quipus to update the records in Cuzco, need a maximum of two days to travel from the farthest point of the kingdom to the Cuzco capital; Imagine the amount of people necessary to keep the two ways flow of information, they should be thousands.

It has been estimated that it was need it 1331 inca government workers to administrate and control, each 10,000 people; So lets estimate the inca bureaucracy then, the archaeologist believe that the inca population were about 9 million people, now if we make a simple calculation, we came out with a smashing 1,197,900 government workers; The advance level of organization aloud the government to move people and products of all kinds, where it was need it, in a surprisingly short period of time.

Today there is no government that can match the inca government, not only for the level of organization, it has not match because the speed of the reaction, from the understanding of the situation to the solution of the problem, any where in the kingdom; Just to remind you, the incas occupied effectively about 2,600,000 Km2; All absorb and conquered cultures knew that while they will be inside the inca empire, all situations and all problems will be solve rapidly and efficiently.

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