Encyclopedia of the Incas

king list connected the imperial present to the mythical past, defining who was
Inca, and helping to explain why some Cuzco groups were Inca subjects.
The first Spaniards had little use for Inca history as they plundered the empire,
and eyewitness accounts from the 1530s rarely probe more than a decade into
the past. The European interest in Inca chronology emerged around 1550 as part
of a debate over the legitimacy of Spanish conquests in the Andes. Over time,
Spanish writers began to contextualize the Inca dynastic narrative by linking it to
the biblical creation story and situating it in emerging universal histories. Several
authors, including Juan Polo Ondegardo, José de Acosta, and Blas Valera,
estimated the total duration of the Inca dynasty at 350–450 years, whereas a
handful of other sources attempt to establish chronology on a ruler-by-ruler
basis.
The earliest surviving Inca chronology may come from testimony given by
quipu specialists in 1542, although this account only survives in an early-
seventeenth-century manuscript. This source states that the Inca dynasty endured
for 473 years from the time of the founding ancestor to the execution of the last
legitimate ruler. It offers no calendar dates, just a ruler’s approximate age at
death or length of reign.
In 1572, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa composed a dynastic chronology in
consultation with representatives of the royal Inca lineages, linking each ruler
with specific calendar dates, as well as to the tenures of Spanish rulers and
Catholic popes. Most Inca scholars ignore these dates—not because of the
computational errors found in several places, but rather because the lengths of
early reigns are too long to be credible. Sarmiento de Gamboa’s Inca dynasty
begins in AD 665 and includes several reigns that purportedly lasted a century or
longer.
Most modern scholarly chronologies derive from the sequence found in
Miguel Cabello Valboa’s 1586 Miscelánea Antártica. The author insists that his
dates for the Inca dynasty were based on quipu evidence, but does not specify
the sources of his information. Cabello Valboa’s chronology suffers from the
same weaknesses as that of Sarmiento de Gamboa: it begins in AD 945, contains
several impossibly long reigns, and is riddled with numerical inaccuracies. Its
appeal lies in the apparent plausibility of the dates for the final preconquest
rulers: Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, Topa Inca Yupanqui, Huayna Capac, and
Atahualpa.
Writing around 1615, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala produced an
indigenous account of the Inca dynasty that spans more than 1,500 years. He