Facts about the Inca

1. 16

   Gold and silver were so abundant in Inca temples that Spanish conquistadors melted down over 13,000 kilograms of precious metals during their 16th-century conquest of the empire.

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2. 15

   Inca runners called chasquis relayed messages across the empire at speeds exceeding 240 kilometers per day by running short segments of the road network in organized relay teams.

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3. 14

   Inca soldiers organized into decimal units of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 warriors, creating a highly structured military hierarchy that enabled rapid communication and coordination across vast distances.

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4. 13

   Mummified Inca rulers were preserved through natural freeze-drying in the high Andes and brought out annually for religious ceremonies and public veneration by living emperors.

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5. 12

   Inca workers moved stone blocks weighing up to 200 tons without wheels or draft animals, using only wooden sledges and ramps to construct temples and fortresses with joints so precise that a knife blade cannot fit between stones.

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6. 11

   During the reign of Manco Capac in the 13th century, the Inca established their capital at Cusco, which became the administrative center of an empire that would eventually span three major mountain ranges.

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7. 10

   Inca nobles wore fine tapestries woven from vicuña wool, an animal producing fiber finer than cashmere that only emperors could legally hunt in the empire.

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8. 09

   Potatoes, originally domesticated by the Inca in the Andes mountains around 7000 BCE, became a staple crop providing over 60 percent of caloric intake across the empire.

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9. 08

   Inca surgeons performed trepanation on skulls with a 90 percent survival rate, demonstrating sophisticated surgical techniques thousands of years before European medicine.

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10. 07

    Mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests the Inca domesticated llamas and alpacas from wild guanacos beginning around 7000 BCE in the Andean highlands.

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11. 06

    Terrace farming on Inca mountainsides increased agricultural yields by up to 70 percent compared to flat lands, allowing food production across diverse elevations.

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12. 05

    Inca emperor Huayna Capac ruled over 12 million subjects across the empire before his death around 1525, making it one of the largest pre-Columbian states by population.

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13. 04

    Machu Picchu, built around 1450 by Inca emperor Pachacuti, sits at 2,430 meters elevation on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba River valley.

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14. 03

    Quipus, knotted cord recording devices used by the Inca, encoded numerical and possibly narrative information without any written alphabet or script.

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15. 02

    At its height around 1500, the Inca Empire under Pachacuti expanded to cover approximately 2 million square kilometers across western South America.

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16. 01

    Roughly 40,000 kilometers of stone-paved roads connected the Inca Empire across South America by 1532.

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