Did the Egyptians and Peruvians have any trade activity?

1. 71

   platinumOwl4posted 11 years ago

   Did the Egyptians and Peruvians have any trade activity?
   
   There are those who believe there was some trade and exchange of technology. Please answer base on fact not speculation and conjecture.

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2. 79

   Vlorsutesposted 11 years ago

   If your question is basically did the Ancient Egyptians ever trade with the Incas, which was the major empire of Peru before European contact was made, I do not, for several reasons.
   
   1) There is nearly 1,500 years between the pre-Roman Egypt (when it was last under "Egyptian" rule) and the time frame that the Incas ruled what is now modern-day Peru and its outlying areas, with Roman-controlled Egypt starting at roughly 30 BC, and earliest Incan records place the empire as starting in 1438. Now if you're looking at earlier Peruvian civilizations, such as the Norte Chico, they did exist within the time frame of the Ancient Egyptians, but if it's the Incan Empire you're looking at, then certainly not.
   
   2) Until the creation of the Panama Canal, there was no quick way to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice-versa. For the Egyptians to travel to Peru (or vice versa) they'd need to either need to go completely around the bottom of South America, or they would need to go over land for a certain length of the trip. Boats of the era would have an extremely hard time (if not impossible) of even crossing the Atlantic, let alone going along the coast all the way south to the cape and through the Straights of Magellan or up the Amazon, and traveling by land between Peru and the eastern coast would be an extremely arduous task. Egyptian and Peruvian boats were usually somewhat small, and wouldn't be able to hold the provisions necessary to make such a trip.
   
   3) There's really just nothing concrete to suggest they ever had contact with one another. The only reason that people believe they had made contact with one another was due to both constructing pyramids, but the pyramids served different purposes, and other than the fact that they were pyramid shaped, there wasn't any similarities between the structures. They didn't use similar construction methods or anything that would suggest that the technology was borrowed by one of the two cultures. Several cultures around the world, including China and Mesopotamia, developed the ideas of large pyramid structures independently of the Egyptians (Mesopotamia's actually predated the Egyptians), so there's no reason why the ones in Peru might have been influenced by them or vice-versa.
   
   4) There's been no tangible evidence found in Peru or Egypt to this day to suggest any early cultures in the two regions had contact with one another. No writing, no currency, nothing suggesting a connection.

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   1. 71

      platinumOwl4posted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Thank you for considering my question and taking the time to include some useful information.

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