Excerpt from Narrative of the Incas
Originally titled Suma y narración de los Yngas; written in 1557

Translated and edited by Roland Hamilton and Dana Buchanan
from the Palma de Mallorca manuscript, 1996

The details known about the life of Juan de Betanzos, the author of Narrative of the Incas, are sketchy at best. His birth and death dates are unknown. Betanzos was born in Spain but traveled to the Americas as a young man. By the beginning of the 1540s he was living in Cuzco (pronounced KOO-sko), a Spanish colony (a group of people living as a community in a land away from their home that is ruled by their distant home government), and had already spent several years learning Quechua...