records. In fact, we are also told that census figures were collected and recorded
according to age-grades.
According to the age-grade system, the population was divided into 10 (some
sources say 12) age-grades—10 for men, 10 for women. The age-grades
organized the population into categories according to stages of life and status
(e.g., child, married, warrior, old man/woman), not by years. The Incas appear
not to have kept track of their age in years. John H. Rowe provides an excellent
summary overview on the various, conflicting accounts pertaining to the Inca
age-grades.
Further Reading
Julien, C. J. “How Inca Decimal Administration Worked.” Ethnohistory 35, no. 3: 257–79, 1988.
Rowe, J. H. “The Age-Grades of the Inca Census.” In Miscellanea Paul Rivet Octogenario dicata: XXXI
Congreso Internacional de Americanistas, vol. 2, 499–522. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1958.
Urton, G. “Censos registrados en cordeles con ‘Amarres’: Padrones poblacionales pre-Hispánicos y
coloniales tempranos en los Khipus Inka.” Revista Andina no. 42: 153–96, 2006.
■GARY URTON
CEQUES
Ceques (also spelled ziqi [line]) were imaginary or conceptual lines that went out
from the Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, in Cuzco to the horizon. The
specific direction and conformation of any given ceque was defined by a set of
between three and fifteen huacas (roughly “sacred places”) located within the
city and the Cuzco valley in a particular direction, as viewed from the
Coricancha. Sources tell us there were 41 or 42 ceques (one ceque was divided
into two parts) arrayed in a radial-like system of orientations around the
Coricancha. The basic framework of the ceque organization was the division of
the city (and the empire) into four quadrants, or “parts,” designated as suyus (see
Antisuyu, Chinchaysuyu, Collasuyu, and Cuntisuyu). Three of the suyus
(quadrants) of the city had nine ceques each; the fourth suyu (Cuntisuyu), had 14
ceques. What is referred to as the “ceque system” was the total system of lines
and sacred places in the valley, organized by the four suyus, and their collective
roles in organizing space, time, social and political groups, and ritual activities
across the four suyus within the Inca capital.
Information on the ceques and the ceque system is contained in a relatively
late, mid-seventeenth-century Colonial chronicle by the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo.
The information in Cobo was apparently copied from an earlier, sixteenth-
century document by Cuzco’s chief magistrate, Polo Ondegardo; this document