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Spent entire day reading about Inca Empire. Damn, didn’t know Peru is cool like that. I want to visit Macchu Picchu now.
The Incas were a really exceptional society. They had roads all over the Andes, from what is today Colombia reaching south to the Patagonia. Their logistics were so advanced they built over 40.000km, most of them paved or adapted for the terrain, built over mountains, deserts, bogs and jungles. They had runners that would travel over hundreds of kilometers, with waypoints and werehouses all over the empire, making their communication a marvel and, in terms of efficiency, more robust to any european empire during the XV century.
Their societies had extremely well developed hierarchies, even more than the Europeans that invaded their lands and continued using that organization for their colonies. They had Imperial education for local elites and expanded pragmatically throughout all west South America, creating the largest empire in the Pre-Colonial America within a period of just 100 years. The societal model was quite communal, with the Ayllu creating a type of imperial centralized tax payed by labor (called mit’a), and in return the state GUARANTEED land access, famine relief, and even social security for elders, disabled people and widows.
Their construction technology is superior even by modern standards, with polygonal masonry without mortar being extremely resistant to earthquakes and better to many, if not all, european building technics. There is even a meme telling that you can’t pass a razor blade through Incan Masonry, representing how good the stone fittings were. And in architecture they were almost without equal, with cities planned with drainage, sewers, and symbolic geometry all over the empire that you can see in Cuzco and Machu Picchu to this day.
