The Inca did not invent the Andean empire. They inherited it. Five hundred years earlier, the Wari built planned cities across Peru’s mountains and coast, terraced entire valleys, and ran a road network the Inca would later walk into — quite literally — as their own.
Pacific Ocean Huari ★ Northern coast Southern valleys Greatest extent — stylized map 600 CE Wari emerges 1000 CE Collapse Rise · zenith · fall The rise The Wari emerged in the south-central Andes around 600 CE, in country that punishes disorganization: thin air, steep valleys, water that must be coaxed downhill through canals. Their answer was infrastructure. They laid out Huari — the capital — as a planned city of walled compounds, and then replicated the model: provincial centers built on the same grid logic from the highlands to the coast, each one an administrative node in a single system.
