Exactly how advanced were the Aztec and Incan empires...

Exactly how advanced were the Aztec and Incan empires? I know very little about them other than the very basic overview I learned in school as a kid. Obviously, in terms of military technology, they were far behind anyone of note in Eurasia and had been for thousands of years. But what about everything else? I know for example that they had some of the largest cities in the world at the time with sprawling pyramids and other buildings, which requires no small knowledge of architecture, agriculture, communication systems, urban planning, logistics, etc.

Aztecs=Minoans
Incans=Early mesopotamians

Aztecs and other central American civilizations had wheels, but interestingly they only used them with toys, like with animals made out of clay.
Natives at Lake Texcoco (drained, now there's Mexico city on top) and Lake Titicaca (Peru/Bolivia) had artificial, swimming islands on which they lived and cultivated crops.
Andean civilizations like the Incas used terraces at mountainsides to increase the area on which they could cultivate crops. Incas also built roads and suspension bridges, and they had a very good messenger system (those messengers ran and delivered information relatively fast for such a huge empire, see Chasqui).
Many Mesoamericans built pyramids, the most notable examples being the Aztecs, Theotihuacans and the Mayans, but there were also some pyramids in South America, mainly in the Andes.
Mayans and Aztecs had a writing system and used paper, but they relied on graphic characters. Incas had a system of knots with which they communicated (Quipu).
Mayans and Incas also had astronomical observatories (the ones that come to my mind are in Palenque and Machu Picchu). They also built impressive fortresses, and the Incas built with very large stones that fit together perfectly (without grout) and actually proved more resistant to earth quakes than the Spanish colonial buildings that were built next to them. The most notable example for such a fortress would be Saksaywaman.
Incas also used copper, I'm not sure about other civilizations.

one of these wheel toys I spoke of

Andean terraces

An Inca road

remains of the Saksaywaman fortress

Inca Copper Star Mace Head

Aztec calender stone

Teotihuacan pyramids (Mexico)

Incans used bronze.

right, I wasn't sure on that.

did they have bronze tools and weapons?

>Exactly how advanced were the Aztec and Incan empires?

not much, they were defeated by a bunch of lazy moors

yup

More like they got wiped out by the 20+ diseases brought from mainland.

Why did most of them still used obsidian spiked wooden clubs then? Was it more available?

Spain was Europe's dominant military power in the 16th century, and upwards until the 18th.

Mesoamericans used such things.
Incas had sections of armies. Coastal people used maces, clubs made of wood and stone. Jungle people used bows, "pipe" blow devices. Andeans used a more wide variety of weapons. Bronze spears, bronze/copper protohalberds, axes made of copper mainly, boleadoras, etc...

Incas were awesome. Do you think they would have been conquered anyway at some point if it wasn't for the civil war?

The civil war was provoked by european diseases duh. The inca king and many of his sons including the heir prince died. The popular sons are Huascar and Atahualpa. Yet they didn't even were correctly instructed and still faced more epidemics and hierarchical tensions.

The dead inca had more than 150 sons, according to some spanish records. Many of them died due to disease.

Right, forgot that. Why were the natives actually harmed that much by European diseases but the Spaniards weren't? Were there no American diseases to which the Europeans weren't adapted?

Not him but i think syphilis is an American disease. Obviously nowhere near the severity of polio so I am also very interested in the answer

Europeans had to die and get epidemics thousands of years ago to get "immunity" against those diseases.

The thing is that incas nor the other american civilizations weren't exposed to those diseases before, so they had to get decimated someday, unfortunately they got them just from other powerful interested civilizations.

>Spain was Europe's dominant military power in the 16th century, and upwards until the 18th.
yeah thanks to german, walloon and italian mercenaries

there were barely any spaniards in the army of flanders

European diseases were 20+
American diseases were 3-

In some ways they were technologically behind many Old World civilizations, like they had very little metal (some copper and bronze, no iron). But they had large cities, agriculture, etc. Aztecs had writing, the Inca kept records on ropes called quipu.

they had no significant technology the old world didn't besides innovations related to crops native to the Americas and superficial cultural differences

Nice meme, they didn't all drop down on first contact with the Europeans, they got BTFO solidly for quite a while before they started to cough

>solidly
>drop down
There were epidemics for 2 centuries. The mortality rate surpassed 60% certain times.


The thing is that the diseases already wiped out several of them and provoked the civil war.
>solidly BTFO
Spaniards literally poisoned the veterans who were unarmed, drunk and going back to rest after the civil war. Then, they kidnapped Atahualpa. Both of those brothers weren't even the heir prince, and Huascar was planning to kill Atahualpa anyway. Both of those weren't even instructed as heir princes to be kings.

The Neo Inca state was just the reorganization of the noble people and population, who got completely doomed as the epidemics fucked them up over time.

Their technology was somewhat comparable to that of the Ancient Egyptians, Hitties, and Babylonians. (Without the metal or livestock of course)

That's the sun stone, not a calendar

With the help of other Amerindian kingdoms, otherwise they would have failed

>Were there no American diseases to which the Europeans weren't adapted?
Syphilis, we sure got those Eurangutans

>ctrl+f "eurangutans"
>less than 700 results
a good day

Obsidian was less likely to kill your opponent, just wound him pretty bad. The Atecs fought 'flower wars' mostly for captive to religiously sacrifice, among other things.

Europe had been in communion with Asia/North Africa/middle east/etc. A huge area that spawned and spread such diseases as the Black Death. It shouldn't be too unusual that they'd have greater disease resistance than the relatively isolated american peoples. Any Europeans who didn't died long ago in the numerous plagues since roman times. There's also an element of just luck. Tropicial diseases like malaria did murder Europeans like candy however, which is what stunted African colonization and even up to Napoleon continued to be the bane of any non-natives who came to the tropical colonies around the Caribbean.

No, syphilis existed in both the Americas and the Old World. The modern strain of syphilis that we see now, which untreated can cause severe facial scaring and eats away at the brain, occurred when the two different strains combined.

the aztec ;empire' in moder0n-day mexico was actually a colony
the aztec culture is intergalactic in scope and universal in ambition

Ottomans were the dominant military power u nigger. Spain was getting cucked left and right in Europe, the Med, and was only good to be white slaves for Turkish mastah.

They actually did. Many places got wiped out by epidemics before they even met Euros

Prove it

just check the pudding

The prevailing opinion right now is that syphilis was a disease originally from the Americas. We know outright that it existed there prior to contact, but we only have clear records of it in Europe from the 1490's onward. Not only is the timing extremely coincidental, but when that first described wave hit Europe, it was extremely lethal, sometimes killing 10-15% of the population. That's a likely indicator that Europeans didn't have exposure to it.

You missed the part where the diseases were effecting them as they were getting "btfo" and the fact that the "lazy moors" had 200000 native allies doing most of the work

>Incas also used copper, I'm not sure about other civilizations

Everybody used copper, everybody with metallurgy at least, so we are taking about Andinoamerica, Interamerica and some nomads of North America.

Not all of andinoamerica, the tribes in the far south of the andes didn't used copper nor knew how to farm, all the ones south of the mapuche and even they learned metalworking very recently at the time of the spanish arrival.