The Ayar Brothers

Six leagues south-southwest of Cuzco, by the road the Incas built, stands a hill the chroniclers called Tampu-tocco, the house of windows. It has three openings. The side ones were named Maras-tocco and Sutic-tocco. The middle one was Ccapac-tocco, the rich window, and out of it, the Inca nobles told the Spanish, came eight people who would found an empire: four brothers and four sisters, stepping into the cold thin light of the high valley with nothing in front of them but a long walk north.

The brothers were Ayar Manco, Ayar Auca, Ayar Cachi and Ayar Uchu. The sisters were Mama Occlo, Mama Huaco, Mama Ipacura and Mama Raua. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, who set the story down in 1572 in his History of the Incas, lists ten ayllus that walked out with them, kin groups whose names the Cuzco nobility still carried, among them Maras and Sutic-tocco, named for the side windows. The whole place was called Paccari-tampu, which is usually glossed as the inn or house of origin. That is what it was meant to be.

The earliest full version is older. Juan de Betanzos, who married into the Inca royal family and spoke Quechua, finished his Suma y narración de los Incas in 1551, and his telling agrees in outline with Sarmiento’s while differing in the details. In Betanzos the brothers are Ayar Cache, Ayar Oche, Ayar Auca and Ayar Mango. Both writers agree on the problem at the heart of the story, and the problem was Ayar Cachi.

Ayar Cachi was too strong. Betanzos has him fit a stone into his sling and throw it at a high hill, and the hill came down; he threw again, and again, and each shot left a ravine in the mountains. Sarmiento says the same in fewer words: with every shot he pulled down a mountain and filled up a ravine. The noise must have rolled down the valley like thunder. His brothers watched, and they did not admire it. They were afraid that a man who could flatten the landscape would frighten away the people travelling with them, and leave them alone.

So they lied to him. They told him that precious things had been left behind in the cave: golden vessels called tupac-cusi, seeds, and the napa, a sacred emblem. Ayar Cachi went back through the window to fetch them. Behind him a man named Tampu-chacay, who had come out with the company, rolled a rock across the opening and sat on it. Inside, Ayar Cachi made the mountain shake, but the rock held. Betanzos puts it plainly: they took a great slab and closed the door he had gone in by. The brothers had buried their strongest man alive. According to Sarmiento, Tampu-chacay did not profit from it either. Ayar Cachi cursed him to stay outside forever, turned to stone for his treachery, and people were still shown that stone beside Ccapac-tocco in Sarmiento’s day.

The rest of the company went on, slowly, the way real migrations go. Sarmiento names their stops, Hays-quisro, Tampu-quiro, Pallata, Matahua, and at Tampu-quiro Mama Occlo gave birth to a son by Ayar Manco. They called him Sinchi Rocca, and he would rule after his father. Then they climbed a hill and saw a rainbow over it. The people of the region call the rainbow huanacauri, and the hill took the name.

At Huanacauri the company lost its second brother. Sarmiento tells it this way: on the hill stood a huaca, a sacred stone figure, and Ayar Uchu walked up to it with great courage, sat on it, and asked it what it was doing there. The huaca turned its head to look at him, and he could not get up again. He was fastened to it. Knowing what was happening to him, he told the others how to remember him: when they held the huarachico, the rite in which boys were armed and made men, they were to worship him as the father of those boys. He became stone, and Huanacauri became the most venerated huaca in the land. Betanzos gives this hill to his Ayar Oche instead, and gives him wings. Ayar Oche stood up, spread a pair of great wings, flew up into the sky and came back down with a message: Ayar Mango should take a new name, Manco Capac. Then Ayar Oche turned to stone exactly as he stood.

The third brother went last. In Sarmiento, Ayar Manco sent Ayar Auca ahead to take possession of the valley. Ayar Auca opened his wings, flew to the place, sat down there and was turned into stone, the stone of possession, and from the heap of stone the city took its name, cozco. Betanzos is less dramatic: two years after reaching the valley, Ayar Auca simply died and left no children.

Before any of this could stick, the newcomers had to find soil worth keeping. They carried a staff of gold, and the tellers did not all agree whose hand held it, but where it sank deep into the earth they knew the ground was rich. That place was Huanay-pata, two arquebus shots from Cuzco. The valley already had people in it. Sarmiento says the Incas began to take the land and water from the Huallas against their will, and his most notorious scene belongs to one of the sisters: she killed a Hualla man, cut him open, carried his heart and lungs in her mouth, and went at the rest of the Huallas swinging an ayuinto, a stone on a rope. The Huallas fled. There is nothing gentle about this founding.

What survives, then, is a story about subtraction. Eight people come out of a hill and one couple founds a city. Every other brother is used up on the way, sealed in rock, fixed to a hilltop or poured into the boundary stone of Cuzco itself, and each loss becomes a shrine the Incas could point to. Their power was real and ran in one direction: Ayar Cachi could break hills, Ayar Uchu and Ayar Auca could become holy ground, and Huanacauri went on receiving offerings. Their limit was their brothers. Strength frightened the family, and the family solved it.

The story was also useful, which is not the same as false. The anthropologist Gary Urton, in The History of a Myth: Pacariqtambo and the Origin of the Inkas (1990), traced how a legal document from the 1560s shows the nobles of Pacariqtambo using this origin to claim descent from the first Incas and special standing under Spanish rule. The archaeologist Brian Bauer, in Latin American Antiquity in 1991, argued that the rock outcrop of Puma Orco near Pacariqtambo is the Tambo Toco of the tale, and that the nearby ruins of Maukallaqta may have housed an oracle of Manco Cápac. Not everyone told the same opening. Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in 1609, gave greater weight to a version in which Manco Cápac and his sister-wife come from Lake Titicaca as children of the Sun. But in the accounts written closest to the Inca court, the dynasty begins with eight people at a window in a hill, and three of them never reach the city at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Ayar brothers?

The Ayar brothers were the four mythical founding ancestors of the Inca dynasty: Ayar Manco, Ayar Auca, Ayar Cachi and Ayar Uchu. With their four sisters they came out of a cave at Pacaritambo, south of Cuzco, and travelled to the valley where Cuzco was founded. Only Ayar Manco, who became Manco Cápac, survived to rule.

What happened to Ayar Cachi?

Ayar Cachi was so strong that a single sling-stone from him could bring down a hill. His brothers feared he would scare away their followers, so they sent him back into the cave at Pacaritambo to fetch golden vessels, seeds and a sacred emblem, then sealed the entrance with a rock. Juan de Betanzos (1551) and Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1572) both tell this episode.

Why is Huanacauri sacred in the Ayar story?

Huanacauri is the hill where one of the brothers turned to stone. In Sarmiento’s account Ayar Uchu sat on a sacred stone there, became fixed to it, and asked to be worshipped during the huarachico, the Inca rite that made boys into men. In Betanzos’s account the brother there is Ayar Oche, who flew into the sky and told Ayar Mango to take the name Manco Cápac.

How did Cuzco get its name in the Ayar myth?

In Sarmiento’s History of the Incas, Ayar Auca flew ahead to take possession of the valley and was turned into a stone of possession. The heap of stone was called cozco, which gave the city its name. Betanzos instead says Ayar Auca died two years after arriving and left no children.

Is the Ayar brothers story the only Inca origin myth?

No. Garcilaso de la Vega (1609) favoured a version in which Manco Cápac and his sister-wife came from Lake Titicaca as children of the Sun. The Pacaritambo story of the Ayar brothers is the one recorded by Betanzos and Sarmiento, and historian Gary Urton has shown that colonial-era nobles of Pacariqtambo used it to claim descent from the first Incas.

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