‘Weaving an Empire’ Shows How Textiles Enabled Inka Rule

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In the popular imagination, the Inka (or Inca) Empire may seem monolithic. But a new exhibition at The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum paints a truer picture: a realm characterized by a diverse array of cultures and communities. In "Weaving an Empire: Textiles of the Inka World," the Americas' largest empire appears as a vast coalition, kept stable partly by the Inkas' ability to map their own aesthetics and cultural values onto the existing practices of the people they'd conquered.

That quality is exemplified by the empire's textiles, which for centuries were "the primary medium of communication in the Andes," Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator Shelley Burian said. "People were able to continue doing their own things, weaving their own garments in their traditional styles, and that was an important way for them to communicate."

At its height in the 15th and early 16th centuries, Inka rule extended from modern-day Colombia at its northernmost point to what is now Chile at its southernmost-a distance of about 2,500 miles. It encompassed temperate coastal regions and frigid mountain highlands. Its own people saw the kingdom as multipartite: the empire's official name was "Tawantinsuyu," meaning "land of the four parts together."

Throughout this sprawling territory, textiles were a method of both communication and control. Their construction required reciprocity-materials from one family, dye from another, labor from another-which strengthened long-distance relationships. They were mobile, with both completed textiles and the materials to create them already physically circulating through the land before it became Inka territory. For instance, people living in the highlands generally migrated down during the uninhabitable winters, bringing their flocks with them.

Sometimes a textile communicated specific, explicit information, as in the case of khipus (or quipus), the belts of intricately knotted strings used in Inka accounting and record-keeping. Of the three in this exhibition, one is displayed in a circle on the wall, where its radiating strings-each with its own color, length and arrangement of knots, among other distinguishing characteristics-look decorative, like a sun's rays. But in fact each string is a densely packed data set, the full meanings of which are still being decoded by experts but which probably included crop yields, census data, battle outcomes and even poetry.

Textiles also were a form of taxation. Monarchs controlled their production, requiring both materials and skilled labor as tribute. Households would be expected to send plant and animal fiber, expensive dyes and potentially family members to the capital at Cuzco.

To create a sense of immediacy with a people 600 years in the past, the exhibition team arranged replica clothing on mannequins, looking first at sacrificial burials from the time to determine how the clothes would have been worn. Since most Inka sacrifices were women and children, however, these bodies couldn't provide much information on adult male clothing.

For more information, the team turned to Inka nobleman and artist Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, whose "First New Chronicle and Good Government," a long treatise written shortly after the Spanish conquest in around 1612, is lavishly illustrated with depictions of the people and buildings Poma de Ayala knew. Some of his illustrations are replicated next to similar pieces in "Weaving an Empire."

"These 400 line drawings are detailed down to the stitches, and we know that because we can cross-compare with the garments we have," Burian said.

Men wore short, sleeveless tunics and loincloths. Women wore belted wrap dresses, often pinned at the collarbone. Both also wore shoulder mantles and head wraps. These textiles communicated their wearers' characteristics: their wealth, position, political affiliation or spiritual attainment, the climate they lived in and the materials they could access.

Here, the Inkas' administrative style-allowing regional craft techniques to flourish while introducing their own design elements as conveyors of status and authority-helped avoid violent ideological clashes, maintain long-distance political relationships and make the rulers' influence visible even far from their physical seat of power.

"There are a lot of concepts and practices and philosophies that were pan-Andean, that everybody in this region believed in," Burian said. (These philosophies and their ruling deities were not shared by the peoples of the Amazon basin, Burian said, which is part of the reason the empire's dominance never extended east into the jungle.)

While the exact meanings of Inka design elements like the restricted color palette, geometric tocapu squares and stepped neckline are unknown, many appear to allude to these pan-Andean beliefs and to the unity of the four-part realm. These elements might be combined with regionally significant symbols or motifs: monkeys or feline-tailed birds in some parts of the empire, vivid stripes elsewhere.

One piece on display uses a pink dye common to the coast but rarely seen in Inka textiles. Yet it's checkered with the diagonal bar-and-dot "key" motif, which Burian said was "one of the most elite Inka symbols."

"Nobody wore that without explicit official permission from the highest level," she said. "So this was made for somebody who was probably the top regional governor, who could have been Inka themselves and trying to fit in" with their coastal subjects. That's a lot of information about a wearer whose body is long gone-a piece that speaks clearly even after more than five centuries.

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