The government structure followed a simple plan based on decimal units. Ten households comprised an ayllu or clan group. Bachelors, unmarried women, widows, and widowers usually lived with a core family unit. Upon marriage, the husband became a taxpayer, a puric, while the wife was listed as a subject and member of the ayllu.
One leader, a conka camayoc, ensured that everyone within the ayllu worked and paid taxes. He also made sure accurate records were kept of births, deaths, marriages, ages of the ayllu members, crop yields, and wool and meat from herds of llamas.
To make sure each leader did his job, government inspectors toured the regions. The inspectors were called tokoyricoq, which means “see-all.” They spied on everything from how clean a house was kept to the amount of work produced by an ayllu. Every unit level had its share of government spies to make sure no one cheated the sapa inca. This profession was
Considered honorable, since the spies prevented corruption at every level of the government power structure.
Moving up on the governmental ladder, higher prefects administered to increasingly larger units of households; 20,000 households comprised a province. “Each province had a governor who was responsible for its affairs. There were more than 80 provinces in the Inca Empire, so this added 80 or more administrators to the bureaucracy. Each governor was under the orders of the apo (apu) of the quarter in which his province lay,” says anthropologist Michael Malpass in Daily Life in the Inca Empire.
The entire empire was divided into quarters (suyus), and each quarter had several provinces. Apus, top-ranking officials who were noble relatives of the sapa inca, administered the government of each quarter. At the top echelons of the government, hahua incas (appointed nobles) reported to capac incas (born nobles) who, in turn, reported to the sapa inca. The Inca government system was thus like a pyramid with peasants forming the foundation and the sapa inca at the apex.
World History
