Manco Cápac

Also Known As: Quechua Manqu Qhapaq; also written Manco Ccapac, Mango Capac and, in the cave tradition, Ayar Manco; qhapaq meaning rich or mighty, which Sarmiento derives from the Ccapac-tocco or “rich window” he was said to come out of
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Incan Mythology, Andes Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He carried a rod of gold that tested the ground for the one place fertile enough to hold a capital, and a falcon-like oracle bird called indi that was held to have made him lord.
Role in Mythos: He is the first Inca, founder of Cuzco and the ancestor from whom every later Sapa Inca and every Cuzco noble lineage traced descent.
Relation to Humans: In the tradition Garcilaso recorded he is a teacher sent to people living in caves, bringing the plough, the irrigation channel, the loom and the law. In the tradition Sarmiento recorded he is an armed stranger who took the valley of Cuzco off the people already farming it, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.

The rod went in and came straight back out. Somewhere on the high ground south of the valley that would become Cuzco, a man pushed half a yard of gold into cold thin soil, felt it stop against stone, pulled it free and walked on. He did this for years, at every place the company halted to sleep. The Incas told this story about their own beginning, and the walking is the part they kept longest.

Where he walked from depends on who is telling it. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in Spain in 1609, has the Sun looking down on people who slept two and three together in holes in the rock, ate roots and grass, and knew nothing of weaving, and taking pity on them. The Sun set a son and a daughter on Lake Titicaca with a wedge of gold half a yard long and two fingers thick, told them to travel north, and told them to build where the wedge sank into the earth at a single stroke. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, writing in Cuzco thirty-seven years earlier, has no lake and no compassion. He has a hill called Tampu Tocco, the house of windows, six leagues south-southwest of Cuzco, with three openings in its face. Out of the middle one, the rich one, came four brothers and four sisters who knew no father and no mother.

Their names were Manco Cápac, Ayar Auca, Ayar Cachi and Ayar Uchu, and Mama Ocllo, Mama Huaco, Mama Ipacura and Mama Raua. They took Inca as a title because it meant lord, and Cápac from the window itself, because it meant rich. They came out announcing that they were born strong and wise, that they would go and find fertile land, and that anyone who would not receive them as lords would be made to. Ten lineages went with them, and those lineages were still naming their chiefs in Cuzco when Sarmiento came round asking.

Manco Cápac carried two things on that march. One was the gold staff. The other was a bird like a falcon, called indi, kept in a covered hamper of plaited straw and handled with the care owed to something that might be provoked. The company believed the bird had made him their lord and obliged them to follow him, and he did nothing to talk them out of it. It passed to his son, and stayed in the family for generations. They stopped at Huanacancha and sowed and found the ground barren. At Tampu Quiro, Mama Ocllo bore him a son, Sinchi Roca, and they held the birth feast and moved on.

Ayar Cachi was the problem. He was strong, deadly with a sling, and cruel enough to the people they passed that the others expected their followers to desert. So they told him that the golden vases had been left behind at the cave, along with the napa, the white llama in its red body cloth with gold rings in its ears that went ahead of the lords on a pole. They asked him to go back for it. He refused, until Mama Huaco raised her foot and shamed him for cowardice, and then he went, with a man called Tampu Chacay for company and secret orders in Tampu Chacay’s head. Ayar Cachi climbed in through the window. Tampu Chacay rolled a rock across the opening and sat on it.

What came next is the loudest thing in the story. Ayar Cachi threw himself at the blocked window with force enough to move the mountain, and shouted through the stone that the traitor would carry the news to nobody, that he would stay outside and be a rock. He was. They still point out the stone beside the window. The ravines along the line of march are where he brought hillsides down with his sling, and once he was dead the others were sorry, because they would have wanted him when the fighting started. No Inca afterwards would go near Tampu Tocco. They were afraid of being kept there.

At a hill two leagues short of Cuzco they saw a rainbow, which in that country is called huanacauri, and Manco Cápac read it as a promise that the world would not be drowned a second time. Near it stood a stone huaca in human shape. Ayar Uchu, who was said to resemble it, climbed up, sat on its shoulders and asked it what it was doing there. The huaca turned its head to see who had spoken and could not manage it for the weight. Then Ayar Uchu found that the soles of his feet had fused to the stone. He told his brothers to go on and be great lords, asked to be honoured first at every festival and named as father whenever the boys had their ears pierced, and finished the sentence as stone. Until the Spanish put a stop to the ceremony, Huanacauri took more offerings than any shrine in the kingdom.

That left Manco Cápac, the four women, and Ayar Auca, who by this point had grown wings. From the camp at Matahua his brother pointed down at a heap of stones near where the Dominican monastery stands now, told him to fly to it, sit on it, and hold the ground until the rest came. He flew. He sat. He turned to stone where he landed, and the heap was called cozco in the old speech of the valley, and the city took its name from that.

The taking of the ground is not gentle in any version, and in Sarmiento it is a massacre. The Huallas held the fertile terrace at Huanay-pata and fought for it. Sarmiento says Mama Ocllo killed one of them, opened him, carried the heart and lungs in her mouth and came at the rest swinging a stone on a cord, and that the sight of it broke them; and that she then had every Hualla within reach killed so that nobody would be left to remember what she had done. Sarmiento was writing to order. Viceroy Toledo had commissioned a history proving the Incas were usurpers with no lawful title to Peru, and the chapter opens by calling the whole origin a set of fables the eight of them put about so that they would be feared and taken for gods.

He was not unstoppable either. A local leader named Copalimayta came out against him and drove him back, and he withdrew to the field he had already stolen, brought in a fine crop of maize, and waited. The second attempt worked. Copalimayta ran and was never seen again. Manco Cápac and Mama Huaco took his houses, his lands and his people, settled the ground between the two rivers, raised the house of the Sun they called Inticancha, and cut the site into four quarters.

Garcilaso’s founder spends those same years doing something else entirely. His Manco Cápac lays out aqueducts and water tanks, teaches men to plough and to gather the wild flocks into herds while Mama Ocllo teaches the women to spin and weave, shows them how to cut the sandals called usuta, puts a curaca over each settlement chosen for being gentler and more useful than his neighbours rather than for his birth, makes murder and adultery and theft capital, forbids a second wife, sets the marrying age at twenty, and orders the temple built. That is a lawgiver out of Plutarch, and Garcilaso had his reasons for him. He was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess, he left Peru at twenty-one and never went back, and he was writing for European readers who knew exactly what a founder of nations was supposed to look like.

Nobody described his face. The nearest thing to a portrait is a pen drawing made around 1615 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a Quechua nobleman assembling a thousand-page letter of complaint to the king of Spain, who set him at the head of a sequence of Inca portraits wearing the royal fringe with a shield on his arm. That is a picture of an office, drawn eighty years after the conquest, and not a face.

What he has, in the stories, is less power than sanction. The rod told him where the crust of the soil would hold a city. The bird told everyone else that he was owed obedience. Descent from the Sun in Garcilaso, or from Ticci Viracocha in Sarmiento, turned refusing him from a political question into a religious one. The rites he was said to have founded, the ear-piercing of the young men, the sacrifice of children before the stone at Huanacauri, the long purple-robed dance called Ccapac Raymi, bound every later generation of Cuzco nobility back to the season he arrived.

Every one of those props was portable, breakable or arguable. He could be pushed off ground he had claimed and made to wait for a harvest. He could lose brothers to a rock and a rainbow. He died, which his father did not. Archaeology in the Cuzco valley shows long continuous settlement and slow consolidation rather than the arrival of a founding company, and the empire’s real conquests belong to rulers four centuries downstream of him. There is a rock outcrop at Puma Orco in the district of Pacariqtambo that fits the description of Tampu Tocco, and beside it a large, finely built Inca site at Maukallaqta with the triple-jamb niches reserved for imperial work. Brian Bauer’s reading is that Cuzco’s ruling families built a shrine at the mouth of their own origin story and kept an oracle there to speak with the first Inca’s voice. The building did not stop with them. In the 1560s, Inca descendants at Pacariqtambo were still filing documents in the Spanish courts, tracing their line back to Manco Cápac and asking for what that descent was worth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Manco Cápac?

Manco Cápac is the legendary first Inca, the founder of Cuzco and the ancestor from whom every later Sapa Inca claimed descent. He is not a god in the sources but a mortal ruler said to be sent or created by one, and the ten noble lineages of Cuzco traced their standing to the march he led into the valley.

Where did Manco Cápac come from?

The sources give two irreconcilable origins. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega has him placed on Lake Titicaca by the Sun with his sister Mama Ocllo and sent north; Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa has him emerge with three brothers and four sisters from the middle window of a hill called Tampu Tocco, near Pacariqtambo, south of Cuzco. Neither version can be reduced to the other.

What was the golden rod of Manco Cápac?

It was a staff of gold, in Garcilaso about half a yard long and two fingers thick, given by the Sun as a test for soil. He was to drive it into the ground wherever he stopped, and to build his city where it sank at a single stroke, which finally happened on the fertile terrace at Huanay-pata beside Cuzco.

What happened to Manco Cápac’s brothers?

All three were removed before Cuzco was founded. Ayar Cachi was tricked into returning to the cave and sealed inside it, cursing his guard into stone as he died; Ayar Uchu sat on a stone huaca near Huanacauri and found his feet fused to it, and became the most heavily endowed shrine in the empire; Ayar Auca flew ahead to the heap of stones in the valley and turned to stone there, giving Cuzco its name.

Was Manco Cápac a real person?

There is no independent evidence that he existed, and the earliest accounts of him were written down more than thirty years after the Spanish invasion by men with strong political motives. Archaeological survey of the Cuzco valley shows gradual local consolidation rather than a founding migration, and Gary Urton has shown that the official Pacariqtambo version of his story was bound up with colonial-era legal claims by Inca descendants seeking Spanish privileges.