lrai wrote: ↑Mon Mar 28, 2022 5:04 am
That is interesting, how did you choose the flag?
I did not.
The rainbow flag is traditionally assigned to the Inca empire, where Quechua was the official language. Today it is also the flag of the city of Cuzco, where Quechua is widely spoken.
The Incas did not have a flag per-se because having a flag is a European concept, but we know that a rainbow was part of the Incas' emblem:
Bernabé Cobo wrote:The royal standard or banner was a small square flag, ten or twelve spans around, made of cotton or wool cloth, placed on the end of a long staff, stretched and stiff such that it did not wave in the air and on it each king painted his arms and emblems, for each one chose different ones, though the sign of the Incas was the rainbow and two parallel snakes along the width with the tassel as a crown, which each king used to add for a badge or blazon those preferred, like a lion, an eagle and other figures.
(... el guión o estandarte real era una banderilla cuadrada y pequeña, de diez o doce palmos de ruedo, hecha de lienzo de algodón o de lana, iba puesta en el remate de una asta larga, tendida y tiesa, sin que ondease al aire, y en ella pintaba cada rey sus armas y divisas, porque cada uno las escogía diferentes, aunque las generales de los Incas eran el arco celeste y dos culebras tendidas a lo largo paralelas con la borda que le servía de corona, a las cuales solía añadir por divisa y blasón cada rey las que le parecía, como un león, un águila y otras figuras.)
-Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1653)
(Quoted from Wikipedia but you can browse the whole Cobo's manuscript online; transcription vol. 1, 2).
Since we don't really know how the rainbow pattern was presented during the Inca Empire, two variants of "rainbow flag" have been used since the middle of the 20th century to symbolize the native people of the Andes: first the diagonal/checkered "wiphala" flag in Bolivia (used as the symbol of the Aymara-speaking people, and more broadly indigenous people of Bolivia), and later the striped flag in Peru (used as the symbol of Cuzco and of the Inca Empire, and by extension, for the Quechua people and language). Here is a short history of the striped flag (in English).
A Google search will show you some heated and bitter debates whether wiphala has actual Prehispanic roots, or is a fake invented in the 20th century. I don't want to get into that, but I can tell you that the idea of a checkered design is certainly very old and present on some very ancient iconography (over a 1000 years old). However, filling that "checkered board" with rainbow colors is much more recent: combining an ancient pattern, with a historical description of the Inca banner, to create a modern flag. The article cited above gives 1945 for the first confirmed instance of the wiphala as we know it today, and the period between 1948 and 1973 for the emergence of the striped Inca/Cuzco flag.
Wiphala/Aymara flag in Bolivia:
Inca/Cuzco flag with the Peruvian flag in Cuzco: