{ "id": "pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru", "type": "entity", "name": "Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua, An Account of the Antiquities of Peru (c. 1613; first printed in English, London 1873)", "summary": "An Andean nobleman from between the Canas and the Canches wrote the history of his own people in Spanish, signing it with five generations of his ancestors and opening with a full profession of the Christian creed - including the statement that the natives of Ttahuantin-suyu descend from Adam like every other nation on earth, white and black alike. The orthodoxy is the condition of the record: it is what allowed an Andean chronology, in Quechua terms, to be written down at all.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "peru", "historiography", "indigenous-peoples", "religion", "language", "books", "spanish-empire", "seventeenth-century" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "cristobal-de-molina-fabulas-y-ritos-de-los-incas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "polo-de-ondegardo-report-on-inca-government" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "inca-garcilaso-de-la-vega" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "fernando-de-alva-ixtlilxochitl" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "betanzos-suma-y-narracion-de-los-incas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "catedras-de-lenguas-indigenas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quechua-printed-lexicography-1560-1754" } ], "questions": [ "Who was Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua?", "Did any indigenous Andean write a history of Peru?", "What is the Relacion de antiguedades deste reyno del Piru?", "How did Andean authors divide time before the Incas?", "Why do indigenous colonial chronicles open with a profession of faith?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The account identifies its author before it says anything else, and the identification is a genealogy. It opens \"I, Don Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua, a Christian by the grace of God our Lord, am native of the towns of Santiago of Hanalucayhua and Hurinhuayhua-canchi of Urco-suyu, between Canas and Canches of Colla-suyu\", legitimate son of Don Diego Felipe Coudorcanqui and Dona Maria Huayrotari, and names his grandfathers, great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers in turn - remarking of two grandmothers that they were still alive - all of them once principal chiefs of that province.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The claim he makes for his family is a claim about timing. Those ancestors, he writes, were professed Christians in the things of the holy Catholic faith and \"were the first chiefs who came to the tambo of Caxamarca to be made Christians, renouncing all the errors, rites, and ceremonies of the time of heathenry, which were devised by the ancient enemies of the human race, namely the demons and devils\". The credential offered by an Andean author writing under Spanish rule is priority of conversion, and it is stated in the same breath as the condemnation of what his history is about to describe.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Before the history begins there is a creed, and it contains a proposition about human descent. He professes belief in God three and one, creator of heaven, earth, sun, moon, stars, thunder and lightning, and states that God created Adam, the first man, in his image and likeness, \"progenitor of all mankind, whose descendants we, the natives of Ttahuantin-suyu, are, as well as the other nations throughout the whole world, as well white as black\". The common descent of Andeans, Europeans and Africans is asserted by an indigenous author, from inside the doctrine, at a moment when the question of Amerindian origins was contested in print.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "He then states his sources in a single formula: \"I affirm that I have heard, from a child, the most ancient traditions and histories, the fables and barbarisms of the heathen times, which are as follows; according to the constant testimony of the natives touching the events of past times.\" The authority claimed is lifelong oral transmission within his own community, not documents and not Spanish informants - and the material is labelled fables and barbarisms in the act of transmitting it.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "What he transmits includes an Andean division of time in Quechua terms. The volume prints that in the time of Purun-pacha all the nations of Ttahuantin-suyu came from beyond Potosi in four or five armies arrayed for war and settled as they advanced, a period called Ccallac-pacha or Tutayac-pacha; that as each company chose its lands this was called Purunpacharacyaptin; that after the country was peopled there was want of space, and wars, fortresses and daily battles with no rest; and that the Hapi-nunos were then heard disappearing in the night crying \"We are conquered, we are conquered\". The editor glosses the terms from Quechua - purum, wild or untamed; ccallac-pacha, \"beginning of time\"; tutayac-pacha, \"time of night\" - and the author reads the disappearance as the defeat of the devils by Christ on Calvary, followed by the arrival in Ttahuantin-suyu of a bearded man of middle height.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The Christian frame is not a preface that can be peeled off; it runs through the chronology itself, dating Andean epochs by the Crucifixion and casting pre-Inca beings as demons. That is a limit on the account as a witness to pre-conquest belief, and it is also the reason the account exists: a text that opened otherwise, written by a provincial cacique's descendant around 1613, would have been a confession of idolatry rather than a history.", "sources": [ "markham-narratives-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The 1873 editor places him carefully rather than enthusiastically. He dates the account about forty years after Molina, values it as tradition handed down by the grandchildren of those living at the conquest to their own grandchildren, and ranks Salcamayhua as an authority after Cieza de Leon, Polo de Ondegardo, Molina, Balboa and Garcilaso de la Vega - but before Spanish writers who were ignorant of the native language though they wrote earlier, such as Zarate, Fernandez and Acosta, on the ground that \"the Indian Salcamayhua was intimately acquainted with the language, which was his own, and he received the traditions from his own people\". The ranking is an editor's judgement and is recorded as his.", "sources": [ "markham-introduction-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.75 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "His account also reached print in translation before it reached print in Spanish: Markham states that the four papers in the volume had never been printed in the language in which they were written and were translated for the first time in 1873. An Andean author's history of his own people circulated first as an English book issued by a London learned society.", "sources": [ "markham-introduction-rites-laws-yncas-1873" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Pachacuti-yamqui is usually reduced to one thing - the drawing of the Coricancha wall attributed to his manuscript - or folded into a list of \"indigenous chroniclers\" beside Guaman Poma. This object quotes the pages that show how such a text was actually built: a signed five-generation genealogy, a claim to be descended from the first chiefs baptised at Caxamarca, a full creed containing the statement that Andeans descend from Adam as much as any nation white or black, a source formula naming lifelong oral testimony, and an Andean periodisation in Quechua that the same author dates by the Crucifixion. The orthodoxy is presented as the price and the enabling condition of the record, with the editor's own ranking of his reliability attributed to the editor rather than asserted.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-15", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua, An Account of the Antiquities of Peru (c. 1613; first printed in English, London 1873)", "description": "An Andean nobleman from between the Canas and the Canches wrote the history of his own people in Spanish, signing it with five generations of his ancestors and opening with a full profession of the Christian creed - including the statement that the natives of Ttahuantin-suyu descend from Adam like every other nation on earth, white and black alike. The orthodoxy is the condition of the record: it is what allowed an Andean chronology, in Quechua terms, to be written down at all.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pachacuti-yamqui-antiquities-of-peru", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-15", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas, translated from the original Spanish manuscripts and edited, with notes and an introduction, by Clements R. Markham (London, printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1873)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=W3RfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA3" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Clements R. Markham, introduction to Narratives of the Rites and Laws of the Yncas (Hakluyt Society, London, 1873), pp. v-xx", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=W3RfAAAAcAAJ&pg=PR10" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti-yamqui Salcamayhua, An Account of the Antiquities of Peru (c. 1613; first printed in English, London 1873)" } }