Inca Empire (Tawantinsuyu)

The largest state in the pre-Columbian Americas, run without money, markets or writing. Tawantinsuyu, the four parts together, expanded from Cusco in barely a century after 1438 under Pachacuti and his successors to cover the Andes from southern Colombia to central Chile, some ten million people. Its administration was extraordinary by any standard: around forty thousand kilometres of road with rope suspension bridges and relay runners, storehouses along them holding food and cloth against famine, and a labour tax, the mita, under which subjects worked on state projects rather than paying tribute in goods. Records were kept on quipus, knotted cord devices that certainly encoded numbers and may have encoded language, which nobody has yet fully read. Conquered peoples were often moved wholesale to break up resistance. Stonework at Sacsayhuaman and Machu Picchu was cut to fit without mortar closely enough to resist earthquakes. The empire was in civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar, following a smallpox epidemic that had run ahead of the Spanish and killed the previous ruler, when Pizarro arrived in 1532 with under two hundred men. Atahualpa was captured at Cajamarca, ransomed a room of gold, and executed. Resistance continued at Vilcabamba until 1572. Quechua has around eight million speakers. Cusco was the capital, laid out on a plan said to represent a puma. Machu Picchu was probably a royal estate and was never found by the Spanish. The Inca road system is a World Heritage site. Potatoes and quinoa were domesticated in this region. Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador all sit on former imperial territory.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history