The Two Faces of Inca History

Book excerpt: The historical narratives of the Inca dynasty, known to us through Spanish records, present several discrepancies that scholarship has long attributed to the biases and agendas of colonial actors. Drawing on a redefinition of royal descent and a comparative literary analysis of primary sources, this book restores the pre-Hispanic voices embedded in the chronicles. It identifies two distinctive bodies of Inca oral traditions, each of which encloses a mutually conflicting representation of the past that, considered together, reproduces patterns of Cuzco’s moiety division. Building on this new insight, the author revisits dual representations in the cosmology and ritual calendar of the ruling elite. The result is a fresh contribution to ethnohistorical works that have explored native ways of constructing history.