Once Cusco was founded, Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo divided the work of civilizing the population gathered around them along gendered lines that Garcilaso presents as foundational to Inca social order: Manco Capac taught the men how to cultivate the land, construct irrigation works, and make tools and weapons, while Mama Ocllo taught the women how to spin and weave cloth, cook, and manage a household, together establishing the basic economic and domestic patterns Inca society would build on for centuries afterward.
From this founding pair, Inca tradition traces the royal lineage of the Sapa Inca, the empire's ruling emperors, who were understood to descend in an unbroken line from Manco Capac and to rule by virtue of that descent from the sun god's own children. Other origin accounts recorded in the same colonial period describe a different founding story, of four sibling pairs, the Ayar siblings, emerging from a cave at Pacaritambo rather than from Lake Titicaca, a variation Garcilaso himself acknowledges circulated among competing panaca, or royal lineage groups, in his own time, each with reasons to favor the version that most flattered its own descent. Modern scholars generally read the coexistence of these variants as evidence of genuine regional and dynastic diversity in Inca origin storytelling rather than as a contradiction requiring one version to be declared correct.