The king behind Machu Picchu built his legacy in stone.

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In lieu of a written language, the Inca communicated through construction.

A statue of Pachacuti.
Pexels; Illustration by Katie Belloff
▼ Popular Science’s new series, The Builders, takes you behind the construction tape to reveal the individuals responsible for history’s greatest architectural works.
Glance at an Incan brick, and you’ll notice there’s very little that’s conventionally bricklike about it. There are no right angles, no proper corners. And it’s not a rectangle at all, but a trapezoid: one side wider and squatter than the other. Look at another. Then another. Then another. No two are exactly the same, each a polygonal version of the unique rock it started as.
Carefully stacked together like a 15th-century game ofTetris, these seemingly haphazard blocks have withstood 500 years of disasters, both natural and human. The signature style of the pre-Columbian empire, these stones marked the Inca expansion some 2,500 miles down the backbone of South America. The sprawl took just a few decades, propelled by the strength of a man named Pachacuti, the ninth Sapa Inca (the indigenous Quechua term for “king”). His most impressive building project was Machu Picchu, a 200-building, mountain-hugging summer resort for the ruler and his extended family. But this wonder of the world is just one place where Pachacuti carefully recorded his legacy—and building concepts that continue to help us create more-resilient cities—stone by stone.
Born in 1438 as Cusi Yupanqui, Pachacuti didn’t plan his rise to power. When the Chankas, an enemy ethnic group invaded, his father, then king, and his brother, the future ruler, retreated. Cusi Yupanqui had to defend the Inca’s fertile Peruvian valley alone. The puma-shaped crown city of Cusco occupied a sacred spot in between two forking rivers, and the Chankas wanted to call the prestigious place their own.
As the Chankas made their way toward the gold-plated Temple of the Sun, part fortress and part temple, Cusi Yupanqui led his men into a battle so ferocious that the stones beneath the warriors’ feet rose up to fight alongside them—or so the story goes. In the aftermath, the victorious Inca rechristened their leader Pachacuti, or “Earth Shaker.” After his brother’s eventual murder and his father’s death, Pachacuti ascended the throne as the sole king of Cusco.
Unsatisfied with this one little valley, he set about conquering swaths of the Andes, knitting together lands in the vast quilt of the expanding Inca Empire, which at its zenith stretched from Quito, Ecuador, in the north, down a long coastal strip to Talca, Chile in the south. The Inca laid roads and raised cities among diverse natural ecosystems, from the Atacama—the only desert drier than the poles—to the rainforests of Cusco to the flood zones of Machu Picchu. Everything they built, they built to last, with the aid of Pachacuti’s soldiers, engineers, and stones.
In colonizing the land outside Cusco, Pachacuti used architecture to “mark their presence on the landscape,” says Stella Nair, an art historian at the University of California at, Los Angeles, and an expert in indigenous art and architecture in the Americas. Absent a written language, he used construction to put his stamp on every conquered village, reminding potential enemies of his power. “The [Inca] are a really small population, and within 100 years, they conquer the western rim of South America,” Nair says. “You have to convey the idea that you’re there.”

Machu Picchu
Wiki Commons; Illustration by Katie Belloff
The hallmark of their stonework is the trapezoid, a form that lends the structures extraordinary strength. Without modern earthmovers to dig foundations into bedrock or advanced metallurgy to imbue strength, the Incas wisely focused on shaping their buildings to their environment,  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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warlikeprince

One of the ancient civilization was also equally advance one. They built up things that even modern era machines can't do with equal quality of ancient one...