The dead Inca kings kept their palaces, servants and estates, and the Spanish seized their mummies in 1559 and lost them in a Lima hospital

Under Inca custom the heir received the throne but not his father's property. The dead king's mummy kept its palaces, lands and servants, run by its descendants. Pedro Pizarro, who entered Cuzco in 1533, wrote that most of the people, treasure and expenses were "under the control of the dead". Each mummy had a man and a woman who spoke its will. When Francisco Pizarro wanted a woman from a dead king's household married to an Inca captain, Pedro Pizarro was sent to ask the mummy. He found a seated bundle on a litter; after a silence its two attendants said the dead lord consented. Sarmiento records that the gold image of Pachacuti "had a house, estate, servants and women". In 1559 Juan Polo de Ondegardo, chief magistrate of Cuzco, searched out the royal mummies. José de Acosta writes that Polo found Pachacuti's body still guarded by servants, so well preserved it seemed alive, with eyes of gold cloth. On the viceroy's orders Polo sent it and others to Lima, where Spaniards saw them, "much decayed", in the Hospital of San Andrés. Brian Bauer reports five mummies reached the hospital in 1560. His radar surveys and excavations there have not found them.