Manco Cápac

In Inca tradition the royal line of Cuzco begins with Manco Capac, a founder whose story belongs to myth rather than documented history. No contemporary records exist for the period, conventionally placed in the thirteenth century; everything known about him comes from oral traditions written down by Spanish and Andean chroniclers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and these accounts differ substantially among themselves. He is therefore best understood as the figure through whom the Incas explained the origin of their state and the legitimacy of their kings.

Two principal versions of the foundation story circulated. In one, recorded most fully by Garcilaso de la Vega, the sun god Inti sent Manco Capac and his wife and sister Mama Ocllo from Lake Titicaca to civilize humankind, instructing them to settle where a golden staff would sink into the earth — a sign given at the site of Cuzco. In the other, preserved by chroniclers such as Sarmiento de Gamboa and Betanzos, Manco Capac emerged with three brothers and four sisters, the Ayar siblings, from a cave at Pacaritambo south of Cuzco; after journeys and conflicts in which the brothers were eliminated or transformed, Manco Capac established himself in the Cuzco valley.

Both versions assign him the same essential roles: founding the city, instituting the cult of the sun, teaching agriculture, and fathering the royal line through his union with Mama Ocllo, whose son Sinchi Roca was counted as the second Inca ruler. The pairing of ruler and sister-wife in the myth provided a model invoked by later Sapa Incas, several of whom married full or half sisters to concentrate the royal bloodline.

Manco Capac also stands at the head of the panaca system, the distinctive Inca institution of royal descent groups. Each ruler's descendants, apart from his successor, formed a corporation that preserved his mummy, lands, and cult; Chima panaca, the group claiming descent from Manco Capac, still existed in Cuzco at the time of the Spanish conquest and supplied informants to the chroniclers. Whether a historical chief lies behind the legend cannot be determined from the available evidence, and the dates sometimes attached to him are conventional placeholders rather than established facts.