Who were the Inca?
The Inca built the largest empire in the Americas before European arrival. From their capital, Cusco, in Peru, they ruled much of western South America in the 1400s and early 1500s.
The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu, meaning the four parts together, stretched about 4,000 kilometers along the Andes, from present-day Ecuador and Colombia to Chile and Argentina. It grew rapidly under the ruler Pachacuti from around 1438 and may have governed about 10 to 12 million people.
The Inca were brilliant engineers. They built a road network of about 40,000 kilometers with rope suspension bridges, terraced mountainsides for farming and stone walls fitted so precisely that no mortar was needed. They had no written alphabet but kept records using knotted cords called quipu.
The Spanish conquest
In 1532, Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived during a civil war and after smallpox had already killed many people. He captured the emperor Atahualpa, who was executed in 1533. Today, millions of people in the Andes still speak Quechua, the Inca language.
Did You Know?
Machu Picchu, the famous mountaintop site, was probably built as an estate for Pachacuti in the mid-1400s. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.