When the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo finished his Historia del Nuevo Mundo in 1653, it was the culmination of forty years of research and study. Cobo conceived his work on a monumental scale, dividing it into three parts. Roland Hamilton has relocated Cobo’s holograph manuscript of Books 11 through 14 of part one. The History of the Inca Empire is the translation of Books 11 and 12 and it brings an important part of Cobo’s work to readers of English.
Cobo stands out among the Spanish chroniclers for his judicious, masterly synthesis of Andean culture and history. His work was based upon his own observations and extensive research in collections of documents in Peru, where he used sources that have since been lost.
The present translation offers Cobo’s account of the settlement of the New World, of interest because he was an early believer in the Asiatic origin of the American Indians, and his systematic account of the dynastic history of the Inca rulers. The recording of Inca oral tradition by the Spanish, whose own cultural tradition led them to cast this material in the form of the lives and deeds of the rulers, obscures the fact that part of this material was historical and part was mythical.
Hamilton’s translation is clear and accurate, marred only by very occasional anachronisms. His rendering of the Spanish word parcialidad (literally, “a part of a whole”) as a “tribal group” (pp. 123, 132, 194-196), however, is unfortunate. Cobo used this term to refer to Andean social divisions at different levels, of which the hartan-hurin division of the Inca is the best known. In none of the instances noted above is reference to a tribal mode of organization appropriate. This caveat aside, one hopes that a translation of Books 13 and 14 covering Andean religion and culture will soon appear.
