Reading path · 7 stops

The Americas before Columbus

Great cities, empires and roads built long before 1492.

When Europeans arrived, the Americas already held some of the largest cities on earth, roads that outran anything in Europe, and empires that had risen and fallen for two thousand years. This path crosses that world: the metropolis of Teotihuacan, the island capital of the Aztecs, and the Inca realm that ran ten thousand kilometres of mountain road - and the two emperors who met the conquistadors.

Suits the Navigator · the Builder

  1. 1 · Profile · 100 BCE – 550 CETeotihuacanA city of a hundred thousand people, planned on a grid, that shaped Mesoamerica centuries before the Aztecs.
  2. 2 · Profile · 1325 CE – 1521 CEAztec EmpireThe last and greatest power of Mesoamerica: tribute, war and a capital on a lake.
  3. 3 · Encyclopedia · PlaceTenochtitlanThe island metropolis that stunned the Spaniards, larger than most cities of Europe.
  4. 4 · Encyclopedia · PersonMoctezuma IIThe emperor who received Cortes, and whose fate still divides historians.
  5. 5 · Profile · 1438 CE – 1533 CEInca EmpireThe largest state of the pre-Columbian Americas, run by roads, storehouses and knotted cords instead of writing.
  6. 6 · Encyclopedia · PlaceMachu PicchuThe royal estate in the clouds that conquest never found.
  7. 7 · Encyclopedia · Person · c. 1502–1533AtahualpaThe Inca who won a civil war just in time to meet Pizarro at Cajamarca.

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