Page 60 - A History of the World in 25 Cities

Life in
Until the start of the 1400s, Cuzco was little more than a small mountain town. However, over the next 100 years, the city grew to become the capital of a vast empire stretching over 4,000 kilometres from north to south.
Everyday life in Cuzco centred around small units called ayllu. An ayllu was a group of families who worked together and shared their homes and belongings like a large extended family. People were born into an ayllu and stayed in the same one all their lives. The Inca looked after their old and sick. If a person was injured or too frail to work, they would be given food and a home.
Children from noble families went to school, although we don’t know much about what they learned there, as the Inca never developed a
system of writing. Instead, they used word of mouth to share information, and kept records by using colourful collections of knotted and twisted string
called quipu. These were used for accounting and keeping a tally of crops and people – but may also have been used as maps or to store other information.
If they weren’t from a noble family, then children had to start work when they were very young. They were taught skills such as weaving, growing corn and potatoes or caring for alpacas and llamas.
The Inca did not use money or pay taxes. People usually contributed to society by spending a certain number of days every year working for the empire, from building roads to caring for the emperor and his family.
The Inca were highly skilled in stonework and engineering. They built walls by cutting huge blocks into irregular shapes and fitting them together perfectly so that there were no gaps. They also built aqueducts to channel water away from buildings and roads into the fields and even invented suspension bridges to cross rivers and valleys.
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