The Inca labour tax and the khipu ledgers

The Inca state had no coinage and ran on labour owed to it by households in turn (mit'a): farming state and temple land, building roads and terraces, serving in the army, with accounts kept on knotted-string khipus. Khipus excavated at the Inkawasi storehouse on Peru's south coast record a fixed deduction from deposits of produce, which researchers read as the first evidence of a tax on goods in the empire.

The mechanism

THE CLOCK

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
• Letter eraTHE RELEASES, AND THE ENCLOSURE THAT FOLLOWS EACH 1382 to 1694
• SourcesRECORD — G. Urton and A. Chu, 'The Invention of Taxation in the Inka Empire', Latin American Antiquity 30:1 (2019): 1-16 (published online December 2018); Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire, 'Mit'a and Ayni'; E. J. Marsh, R. Kidd, D. Ogburn and V. Duran, 'Dating the Expansion of the Inca Empire: Bayesian Models from Ecuador and Argentina', Radiocarbon 59 (2017): 117-40; Britannica, 'Inca' (roads for state use; khipu relays; service required of subject peoples) · checked 19 September: Crossref record and abstract, Urton and Chu, 'The Invention of Taxation in the Inka Empire' (DOI 10.1017/laq.2018.64); Smithsonian NMAI, The Great Inka Road (read in a browser); Crossref abstracts: Ogburn, 'Reconceiving the Chronology of Inca Imperial Expansion', Radiocarbon 54 (2012); Marsh et al., Radiocarbon 59 (2017)