In 1532, the Spanish explorer Francisco Pizarro "discovered" the
Inca empire, known to its inhabitants as Tawantinsuyu. The Tawantinsuyu empire stretched a total length of 2485 miles, essentially the length of the South American continent between the Ancasmayo River at the border of modern day Colombia and Ecuador, all the way to Santiago, Chile.
Tawantinsuyu was divided into four provinces, each with its own governor. Kings held their position by divine right; ancestor worship was very elaborate indeed. The economic base of the empire was maize and llamas; an extensive trade network was in place, with state artisans working in gold, textiles, and polychrome ceramics, for selective distribution. The massive empire was connected by a complex series of roads, over 18,000 miles of roads in fact, supported by as many as 2000 way stations. The monumental and communal architecture of the Inca includes some of the most beautiful and technically amazing structures on the planet, such as Ollantaytambo, and the famous city of the clouds Machu Picchu. Irrigation canals, suspension bridges, paved and buttressed roads, and spectacular terraces are all characteristics of the Inca architectural style. The Inca Empire was substantial, sophisticated, and successful.
Written Records of the Inca
But it did not have what most of the rest of the world would recognize as a writing system. No carved stone, no papyrus, no wedges pressed into clay, no lines painted on potsherds. Nothing like that.
If you think about it, a working empire without a writing system would truly be an amazing feat. Empires require accountants. Who owes taxes, who is next in line for the throne, where are the best agricultural fields and how much do they produce? How many people live in each segment of the society? What is the weather like in one section and how do we protect the people from drought or famine? When should we expect the winter? When is a good time to plant? How do we keep all those people, spread out so far along the Andes, in line and in communication with the centers? Furthermore, what about origin myths? What about the thousands of stories that are generated by people that form their religion, their society, their cultural memories? For a society to function, this information must be kept somewhere.
Quipu: A Most Unusual System
And sure enough, there was, in fact, a writing system among the Inka; but one so strange that it is going to take me all of the remaining words of this article to convince you of the facts. The Inka kept their accounts, their genealogy, their astronomical calculations, and (probably) their stories on a complicated system of cords and knots, called quipu (also spelled khipu).
We know this in part because once the Jesuit missionaries of the Spanish Inquisition recognized the range of function of the quipu, they did their best to destroy as many as humanly possible. The description of the quipu as "a system of cords and knots" does not do justice to their complexity; and it is that complexity that is so convincing. Quipus have information stored in them using cord color, cord length, knot type, knot location, cord twist direction. Cords are often plaited in combined colors; cords sometimes have single threads of distinctively dyed cotton or wool woven in. Cords are connected mostly from a single horizontal strand; but subsidiary cords come off the vertical strands in oblique directions.
There are only a few hundred Inka period khipu left--and in the intervening centuries, much of the ability to decipher the meaning of the knots and colors has disappeared. A recent collection of articles in a new book called Narrative Threads, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, describes how a handful of scholars is working towards cracking the code. Most exciting, recent excavations at the newly discovered ancient civilization of Caral have identified the oldest known quipu, dated to 4600 years ago.
Source
Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton. 2002. Narrative Threads. University of Texas Press: Austin.
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