Incas didn't used wheels

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Marquis de Sodaq
The Inca were surprizingly advanced astronomers

Not to mention masons. I was amazed at the stonework in Machu Pichu when I saw pictures. The Incas were, without any doubt, a civilisation, though admittedly not as advanced as some on Europe/Asia/North Afica (due to the "late start" of civilisation in the Americas caused by isolation from the rest of the human family). They were light years beyond most of sub-saharan Africa (though the Kush Empire had made an excellent start) and even farther than that ahead of most of the Pacific island/Oceania cultures.

[Grumbold]

Their stonework was so advanced and universal that I was tempted to speculate in my last post that craftable wood may have been a rarer commodity than stone. However it would only be speculation.

[Trifna]

Writings

Originally posted by BackdoorMan


Bull.

They didn't use the wheel because they hadn't discovered it. No American Indian tribe had. Which also, by the way, calls into question the Aztecs and Iroquois. They also didn't have writing, which as far as I'm concerned disqualifies them as a civilization.

Well when conquistadores came, they didn't burnt all "heretical" stuff?... Wasn't it written stuff?

[KrazyHorse]

Um...the Incas never developed writing in the formal sense, although they had developed the ability to pass messages on using knotted ropes.

[Marquis de Sodaq]

Another Incas plug: They made the best cloth known to man. Cashmir wool is the king of fabric today, and this was run-of-the-mill in the Inca world. This was in part due to having the right beasts to breed and trim, but they did it, nonetheless.

Backdoorman, you seem like an uninformed bigot with your responses. The amerindians had no writing?! There are still extant writings (that survived destruction by europeans) from the Aztecs and Mayans. Krazyhorse is right, the Incas "wrote" using a 3-D alphabet of knotted rope.

Besides, how does illiteracy disqualify a people from being civilized? Maybe you are unable to remember things, but people with an oral tradition (as it's called by whites) have just as well-developed laws, stories, histories, astronomy, etc, as any people who wrote things on paper. By your criteria, the ancient greeks were uncivilized? The Illyad and Oddessy were strictly song/poetry for centuries before the greeks wrote them down. The Iroquois happened to teach the Americans how to organize a representative government. Does that make you the inheritor of uncivilized ideas? Learn more before you spew nonsense. (Note my signature line, too. )

[Ozymandias]

There is also a significant theory that the "origin" of the wheel is actually the potter's wheel -- which would make Pottery a reasonable prerequisite for the Wheel.

-Ozymandias

[Laszlo]

Re: Re: Incas didn't used wheels

Originally posted by XarXo

Incas [, but but but, ] had an enormous road net in the Andes, they used llamas as us the horses, but they small size only allows kids or slow transport (better than horses, we must consider them like asses).

Actually, the Inca Empire was remarkably well connected because of the Andes road despite being so strung out up and down the continent. Other civilizations have crumbled because of their size limiting fast enough communication.

The Incan's solution was to have runners stationed along the road every mile or so, and each runner knew their stretch intimately enough to run it in pitch black or through storms. With this infrastructure in place, messages from the farthest corners of the empire would pass into the emperor's hands within 24 hrs (or vice versa) and kept the civ from breaking up.

Ironically, what enabled their prosperity also aided their downfall. When the Spanish conquistadors landed, they followed the road straight through to the capital before the Aztecs recognized them as a threat and the Spanish defeated them despite their vastly smaller force.