Kharara

  Rise and Fall of the Inca Empire_Tawantinsuyu in the Andes of South America-A scholarly survey, c. 1200–1572 CE_By Dr. Rahul Kharat Abstract The Inca Empire, known to its own people as Tawantinsuyu, "the Four Parts Together," was the largest state ever to arise in the pre-Columbian Americas and, by area and population, one of the great empires of the early modern world. In less than a century, a modest highland polity centred on Cusco extended its authority from what is now southern Colombia to central Chile, binding together perhaps ten million people across some of the most vertical and forbidding terrain on Earth. It did so without writing in the alphabetic sense, without the wheel as a transport technology, without iron, and without money. This article surveys the empire's origins, expansion, institutions, ideology and material achievements, and then examines its collapse in the 1520s and 1530s, a catastrophe in which epidemic disease, dynastic civil war, Sp...