The Incredible Inca Indians for Kids and Teachers
Come meet the incredible Inca Indians, the Children of the Sun. Explore Inca religion, dreams, and omens. Meet the Sapa Inca. Find out why other tribes decided to join the Inca Empire rather than fight the Inca warriors. Learn how the Inca nobles trained their heads to grow to a point. Discover why most people were not allowed to travel on the well built Inca roads that spread all over the empire. Find Machu Picchu. Play interactive games! Discover why people in each village were assigned certain clothing designs. For a quick look at this amazing culture, scroll down. Or see the menu below to find just what you need.
Welcome to the Inca Empire!
A Quick Look
The Inca Indians created an empire high in the rugged Andes Mountains of South America. They built thousands of miles of roads and connected mountain peaks with bridges. Everyone in the empire was well fed and no one was homeless. Yet, the Inca Indians never invented the wheel. They never invented a system of writing. But they did invent quite a few other things.
The Quipa: The Inca counted everything a conquered tribe owned, everything, down to the smallest thing. They needed a way to remember everything they had counted. To do so, they invented the quipu. The quipu had colored strings tied to a main string. The color of the strings and the distance between the knots tied in each string told a story - how many of this, and what was going on. You had to have special training to be a quipu reader.
Calendar: The Inca invented a calendar they called time makers or time watchers. Time was important to the Inca for religious purposes.
Much More! They also invented a flute, a drum, the famous Inca panpipe (a collection of hollow tubes of various lengths stuck together), terrace farming, aquaducts, hanging bridges, marvelous stonework, dried foods, strange and scary art, a central government, strict laws, a unified language, woven colorful textiles, gold and silver jewelry and statues, wonderful ceramics, specialized professions, a system of communication (the roadrunners) and much more. They were very clever people.
Although their empire only lasted about 100 years, the Inca Indians also created a system of government, a history, trade and economy, tall tales and legends, stories about their many gods and goddesses, all kinds of very strange customs, and paved their cities with gold.
All that glitters: The Incas loved anything that glittered. All Inca people, from the Sapa Inca to the lowliest of peasant wore jewelry. The royals and nobility had jewelry made of gold and gems. The common people wore jewelry made of mud, copper, silver, and even occasionally gold. They all wore lots of jewelry - rings and necklaces and bracelets and pins. The use of jewelry was encouraged. It made people happy.
Dangling earlobes: The most interesting jewelry was the earring. Earrings were the same for all noblemen. Men had their ears pierced when they were about 12-14 years old. The men all wore really heavy earrings, designed to change the shape of their earlobes. By the time they were 20 years old or so, their earlobes had been pulled so out of shape that they rested on their shoulders. This was high fashion. Dangling earlobes never went out of style.
Pointed heads: When a noble was just a small child, a board would be strapped to his or her head. This would force the top of their head to grow almost to a point. This was the symbol of nobility and royalty. Each noble family had a distinctive hairstyle for the men. The Inca people could easily recognize who was a commoner and who was a nobleman or woman simply by the way their head was shaped, their hairstyle or the way their head was shaped.
The Incas were wonderful builders. They designed their cities to blend with the landscape around them. They built to last. The cities were safe. Rather than build walls around their cities, each city had a fortress built beside it. In times of trouble, people ran to the fortress for protection. The rest of the time, the fortress housed the military.
The military kept an eye on the people, and on anyone entering or leaving the city. It was illegal for people to leave a city. You lived where you were put. People could not move from one city to another. Since it was illegal for most people to use the Inca roads, they would have no way of going anywhere else anyway. The Inca civilization was built high in the Andes mountain tops. If you were caught on an Inca road without permission, there was no trial. You were simply tossed off the mountain and died.
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