The Inca ran a 24,000-mile road empire without writing or the wheel
No alphabet, no wheeled carts, no iron — yet the Inca laced the Andes together with one of the great road networks of the ancient world.
The Inca built the Qhapaq Nan, a road system of roughly 24,000 miles (over 30,000 km) that threaded across six modern countries — Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile — over deserts, jungle and peaks higher than the Alps.
What makes it astonishing is what they did without. The road was “constructed without the benefit of a written language or the use of wheels or iron implements.” There were no carts and no draft animals pulling them; loads moved by llama caravan and human porters.
Communication ran on legs. Relay runners called chasquis, posted every few kilometres, sprinted messages along the roads — information could travel up to 240 km in a single day. To keep facts straight they used the quipu, a system of knotted, coloured cords that encoded numbers and records in place of writing.
Sources & references
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