Machu Picchu was probably built as an estate for the Inca ruler Pachacuti
Pachacuti turned the small chiefdom of Cusco into the Inca Empire, and most archaeologists think Machu Picchu was his private estate. Yet some scholars doubt he was a single historical person at all. His name means the turn of the world, an Andean idea of one era cataclysmically giving way to the next.
Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui was the ninth Sapa Inca of Cusco. He came to power after the Chanka–Inca War and launched conquests that, within three generations, spread Inca rule from the Cusco valley across a large part of western South America. His armies and commanders took land around Lakes Titicaca and Poopó, down the eastern Andean slopes toward the Amazon, north to the Quito basin and along the coast. Cusco grew strong enough to rival and eventually overtake the coastal Chimú empire. The chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega credits him with creating the Inti Raymi new-year festival, and he is linked to the spread of the sun cult of Inti.
His name joins pacha, a word tying together world and time, with kuti, to return. Juan de Betanzos rendered it turn of time, and the linguist Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino the turn of the world. Garcilaso's popular spelling Pachacútec, published in 1609, is judged grammatically implausible in Quechua. Before his coronation he was called Inga Yupangui.
Dating is guesswork, since the Incas did not count years systematically. John Howland Rowe's standard chronology puts his reign from 1438 to 1471, but radiocarbon dates suggest the early 15th century, and other historians offer ranges such as 1400 to 1448. Inca history survived as oral tradition, knotted quipu cords and life histories kept beside each ruler's mummy by his descent group.
The chief written sources are two colonial chroniclers. Betanzos drew on his Inca wife Angelina Yupanqui's account but slipped her ancestor into the succession story. Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, writing in 1572 for the Viceroy of Peru, compiled testimony from Inca nobles, partly to justify Spanish rule. Scholars such as María Rostworowski treat Pachacuti as historical; others, including Reiner Tom Zuidema and Gary Urton, see him as a mythic or symbolic figure marking the dawn of Inca expansion.
Source: Pachacuti
