A Tangent about Incan Walls

In the center of Cusco, you get your first taste of Incan architecture. There are eleven different kinds of walls that the Quechua people built, and the ones in this alleyway, and many of the streets jutting right off the main square, are built in the most prestigious, most time consuming, most royal manner. This form of wall is comprised of intricately shaped stones, each carved perfectly as to fit into its neighbor’s shape with no mortar. Our city tour guide told us that to shape just one of these stones, it took a team of twelve people a whole year. They’d put the stone on the wall, find where it does not fit correctly, rub a little more off, and then try again. Trial and error. For years on end. The Quechua people had less of a conception of work or down-time than we do nowadays. For them, work was work, and that’s what you did sunup to sundown. Your only time off was festivals. These stones are massive, some weighing as much as 15 tonnes in the downtown area, and in other areas, such as Saqsayhuaman, they can get to twice the height of a human.

The most powerful display of both Incan power and Incan manpower in the city of Cusco is the 12 Angled Stone. (This is, admittedly, numerically beat out by the 26 Angled Stone at Machu Picchu, though I still find the 12 Angled Stone to be more impressive. More on this in the coming articles).

The 12 Angled Stone

Down an unassuming alley in Cusco, sitting in the wall just like every other stone, is one that contains twelve angles. Of course, the engineering needed to fit this stone into the wall exactly is remarkable, and the shape of it is completely unpredictable. But that’s not all that this stone represents. There’s a meaningful Andean symbol, the Chakana, which too has twelve angles, and therefore, etches the number 12 into the Quechua mythology.  On one side, we have three corners representing the condor, the puma, and the snake. These three animals represent the future life, the present life, and the past life respectively. On the top left, we see the one corner representing the father, one the mother, and the third, the kids. On the bottom right, the three Incan aspects of a great ruler: don’t lie, don’t steal, and don’t be lazy, and on the fourth corner, the obligation to the parents, to the Inca, and to the gods. Clearly, the Inca had the power to etch his culture permanently into his society.

The Chakana

Another display of wall art shows a puma and a snake on the same wall, with overlapping stones. There was, originally, a condor on this wall as well, however, an earthquake led to the destruction of the upper part of the wall, and with it, the head of the condor.

The Quechua people built their walls sloping inwards (slabbed), and often with stones with pockets of air in them—mainly green diorite. Both of these techniques skillfully mitigated the damage that earthquakes could inflict. Though not foolproof, it’s certainly an effective technique. The slab on the wall prevents the walls from caving, and the air pockets give the stone extra rigidity, and thus, the wall more flexibility.

Green Diorite

Commoner’s houses had less precise stonework. Two of these less precise styles of wall can be found around the downtown: some stones that are thrown together and filled together with mortar, and stones that are more properly engineered as to fit together without mortar, but not shaped as meticulously such that the walls are flat, polished, and perfect.

For the most important buildings, such as the Temple of the Sun, the stones were all square, and were not “trial and errored” to fit together like how they are in the first kind of wall discussed. They just fit together because they were all perfectly aligned with each other. This type of wall, too, does not require mortar, and you’d struggle to fit even a single hair anywhere between the stones. Any gap you may perceive in the photo below is, almost certainly, a shadow.

Finally, there are the walls that aren’t Inca walls, but rather Spanish. This includes brick walls with more mass-produced, European bricks, which do require mortar, or just plaster walls. Many tops of Inca walls, which have caved in after centuries of earthquakes, are nowadays plaster. Again, Cusco is a multicultural celebration of several traditions, and I find it depressingly poetic that the work of the Quechua people serves as a backbone, as a support, for the newer, self-proclaimed superior work of the Spaniards, who themselves, would be nowhere were it not for the Moors.

A street showing all the interesting walls!