What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?
[center] The Inca Road
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What Endures From the Ancient Civilizations That Once Ruled the Central Andes?
To journey here is to roam through almost six thousand years of civilization, to one of the places where the human enterprise began
July 22, 2015
Huayna Capac had a problem: He didn’t like his hometown, Cusco, in the bracing heights of southern Peru. Unfortunately, Cusco was the center of the Inca Empire, and he was the empire’s supreme ruler. Running the empire obliged him to spend a lot of time in the chilly capital city. Fortunately for Huayna Capac, he was king. With a word he could command thousands of his subjects to build a second capital. Huayna Capac said the word. His new capital was near the Equator, in what is today Quito, Ecuador. The palace was bigger and more luxurious than the first. And the weather was nearly perfect.
The king was pleased with his new digs but now faced a second problem. More than a thousand miles of steep, rugged mountains separate Quito and Cusco. The royal personage required a comfortable passage between them. He ordered hundreds of villages to dispatch all their able-bodied men to build a highway. The finished roadway was lined with guesthouses for travelers and so straight and flat, the chronicler Agustín de Zárate later marveled that you “could roll a cart down it.” Pleased with what he had conjured into existence, the king ordered up a second huge thoroughfare, this one along the coast.
The Inca highway network—the two main arteries and the mass of secondary courses that joined them—was arguably the biggest, most complex construction project ever undertaken. Running for 3,700 miles between Chile and Ecuador, about the distance from New York to Paris, the backbone of the system cut through every imaginable landscape, from icy mountain peaks to tropical lowlands, from the world’s driest desert to one of its wettest forests. It astounded the Spaniards who saw it—the conquistador Pedro de Cieza de León said that the road through the Andes should be more famous than Hannibal’s route through the Alps. “In the memory of people I doubt there is record of another highway comparable to this,” he wrote in the 1540s. It was called the Qhapaq Ñan—which translates from the Quechua as “Road of the Lord.”
Huayna Capac died around 1527, still seeking to incorporate the northernmost parts of the Andes into the empire. His death set off a civil war, fought bloodily along the Qhapaq Ñan. European conquerors arrived in 1532, accompanied by European diseases: smallpox, measles, typhoid, influenza. More than half the population of the Andean realm died. For the next three centuries, Spain tried to wipe out the histories and traditions that remained. But the conquistadors did not succeed. Native peoples tenaciously held on to their beliefs and practices. And archaeologists discovered ever more about the pre-conquest past.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/ancient-civilizations-central-andes-180955910/#wWVfjo4K0VUUIpqb.99
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