Inca Empire
▶ Explore on the map
The Inca empire, called Tawantinsuyu, the four regions together, by its Quechua-speaking rulers, was the largest state in pre-Columbian America, stretching along the Andes from modern Colombia to central Chile. It grew from the kingdom of Cusco, and under Pachacuti in the 1430s and 1440s the Inca conquered the Chancas and then a chain of neighbours; when the Spanish arrived it covered some two million square kilometres and perhaps twelve million people. The state had no written script, using instead the knotted quipu for accounts and the chasqui relay system for messages along a road network of more than 30,000 kilometres that crossed deserts and high passes. Labour taxes, the mita, kept the roads, storehouses and terraces in order, and the state redistributed food in times of famine. Cusco held the Coricancha, the golden temple of the sun, and the emperor was regarded as a descendant of Inti. Civil war between Atahualpa and Huascar was raging when Francisco Pizarro landed in 1532; Atahualpa was captured and executed at Cajamarca in 1533, and the empire was dismantled within a few years, though resistance continued at Vilcabamba until 1572. The empire's storehouses held dried potatoes, freeze-dried meat and wool for the army.