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By Root 1823 0

that distinguished between territorial and hegemonic empires. Territorial empires directly occupy territories with their armies, throw out the old rulers, and annex the land. In hegemonic empires, the internal affairs of conquered areas remain in the hands of their original rulers, who become vassals. Territorial empires are tightly controlled but costly to maintain; hegemonic empires are inexpensive to maintain, because the original local rulers incur the costs of administration, but the loose tie between master and vassal encourages rebellion. Every conquest-minded state is a mixture of both, but all Native American empires leaned toward the hegemonic. Without horses, Indian soldiers unavoidably traveled slower than European or Asian soldiers. If brigades were tied up as occupiers, they could not be reassigned quickly. As a result, the Inka were almost forced to co-opt local rulers instead of displacing them. They did so with a vengeance.

Pachakuti gave command of the military to his son Thupa Inka in 1463 and turned his attention to totally rebuilding Qosqo in imperial style, in the process becoming one of history’s great urban planners. Although he drew on Andean aesthetic traditions, Pachakuti put his own stamp on Inka art and architecture. Whereas the buildings of Sumer and Assyria were covered with brilliant mosaics and splendid pictorial murals, the Inka style was severe, abstract, stripped down to geometric forms—startlingly contemporary, in fact. (According to the Peruvian critic César Paternosto, such major twentieth-century painters as Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko were inspired by Inka art.)

Inka masonry amazed the conquistadors, who could not understand how they put together such enormous stones without mortar or draft animals. And it was astonishingly durable—the U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham photographed the citadel of Machu Piqchu in 1913, and found it in near-perfect condition despite four centuries of neglect.

At the heart of the new Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro’s younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported “that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.” Across their facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light.

In Pachakuti’s grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the empire—and the cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire, Tawantinsuyu, “Land of the Four Quarters.” To the Inka, the quarters echoed the heavenly order. The Milky Way, a vast celestial river in Andean cosmology, crosses the Peruvian sky at an angle of about twenty-eight degrees to the earth’s orbit. For six months the stream of stars slants across the sky from, so to speak, northeast to southwest; the other six months it slants from southeast to northwest. The transition roughly coincides with the transition between dry and wet seasons—the time when the Milky Way releases life-giving water to PachaMama, Mother Earth—and divides the heavens into four quarters. Awkaypata, reflecting this pattern, was the axis of the universe.

Not only that, Qosqo was the center of a second spiritual pattern. Radiating out from Awkaypata was a drunken spiderweb of forty-one crooked, spiritually powerful lines, known as zeq’e, that linked holy features of the landscape: springs, tombs, caves, shrines, fields, stones. About four hundred of these wak’a (shrines, more or less) existed around Qosqo—the landscape around the capital was charged with telluric power. (The zeq’e also played a role in the Inka calendar,