No wheel, no writing, no iron — yet Tawantinsuyu ran 40,000 kilometers of mountain road like clockwork. Then 1533: the cough that killed an empire.
No wheel. No writing. No iron, no draft animals. And yet, for a century, an empire ran four thousand kilometers of Andes like clockwork — messages sprinting hundreds of kilometers in days, accounts kept in knots, mountains terraced into staircases. Then, in 1533, came the cough that killed an empire.
