4 ms·

> Some researchers had speculated that literacy might have been widespread in Inca society, but Hyland’s discovery is the first physical evidence. Previously, “

> Some researchers had speculated that literacy might have been widespread in Inca society, but Hyland’s discovery is the first physical evidence. Previously, “We had to rely on written documents by colonial era writers after the Spanish conquest,” If literacy were widespread, why did only colonial writers write about them?

lukeschlather 1y ago
The conquistadors burned most native writings they could find, and didn't necessarily write down what they were burning. They also killed a lot of people, along with European disease, there were not many people left who were able to write, and writing carried risks.
- HK-NC 1y ago
  I didn't think the Incas had a writing system at all? That's why they used the ropes.
marc_abonce 1y ago
In this context, literacy would probably be constrained to accounting or similar forms of record keeping, rather than literature as we know it nowadays. Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.
- mc32 1y ago
  Do we normally say Europeans or Chinese were literate 400 years ago, even with woodblocks and printing presses? Some people knew how to read and write and do math, sure, but would we call them literate societies? Even at 10% proficiency we don't tend to call societies literate.
  - jeltz 1y ago
    Sweden became literate during the 1600s with most people being able to read at the end of the century and the elite were certainly literate before then.
  - kragen 1y ago
    400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar. As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - mc32 1y ago
      It's estimated that even during the Q'ing dynasty, literacy rates were at or below 10%. Over 90% of people were rural four centuries ago. No way you had country bumpkins being able to read and write. Same for Europe. You may have had 30% literacy in the few towns/cities, but those were by and large a small proportion of the populations --most people lived in rural areas doing farming and related activities.
      - kragen 1y ago
        Your incredulity is due to Whig history and imagining late medieval and early modern China as being the same as Europe, but in fact they were quite different. The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers. There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_medievel_europe_were_jewish_people_more/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details. About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Writing-and-Literacy-in-the-Medieval-Period.pdf https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-literate-were-common-people-in-medieval-europe https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative. Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.
kragen 1y ago
You've jumped to a reasonable but incorrect conclusion: that only colonial writers wrote about the Incans. In fact, we know that Incans did write in khipus about other Incans, including in the colonial era after the conquest, because Spanish-speaking writers tell us so. So why can't we just read the Incans' own accounts, including from before the conquest? There are two major reasons: 1. We don't know how to read khipus except for numbers. Even that knowledge was rediscovered rather than being preserved and passed down to current archæologists. There's debate over whether there was even a systematic written language encoded in the non-arithmetic khipus at all. Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. And maybe the features of khipu such as fiber colors that aren't known to encode any information actually don't encode any information. 2. The Spanish eventually banned khipu making as a form of idolatry and burned all the khipu they could find. So the surviving khipu corpus is very small, about 1400 texts. So, a great deal of detailed historical information about the late Inca empire and early colonial era was definitely recorded in khipu, but most of it was burned, and we will probably never be able to read the rest; possibly nobody ever could have.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  > Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. That is the sort of things linguaphiles do, like JRR Tolkien, and certain highly neurodivergent people, but in general that's not something a general population would do. By definition, it still wouldn't make them literate even if true: "I can only read and write my own writing."
  - kragen 1y ago
    It's actually very common in our own society for children to make up "secret codes" for their own use or to communicate with a single friend, and notation systems limited to a small affinity group are fairly common even in societies like ours where they have to compete with a standard written language: baseball game records, knitting notation, cross-stitch notation, chess notations, mechanical dimensioning and tolerancing, electronic schematics, shorthands, cement chemist notation, Perl, hobo signs, and so on. If you've ever worked in a company that is more than a few years old, even something as small as a diner, you can probably think of two or three notational systems used only within that company. In our society, at least, it's not just highly neurodivergent people. I don't agree that being literate in a writing system nobody else uses is equivalent to not being literate.
ethan_smith 1y ago
Khipu literacy doesn't produce permanent documents like European writing - it's a tactile recording system using knots that would degrade over time, and Spanish colonizers systematically destroyed khipus as part of their cultural suppression campaigns.
user____name 1y ago
Literacy can mean being able to read but not write, which seems to have been pretty common in the past.

lukeschlather 1y ago

The conquistadors burned most native writings they could find, and didn't necessarily write down what they were burning. They also killed a lot of people, along with European disease, there were not many people left who were able to write, and writing carried risks.

HK-NC 1y ago
I didn't think the Incas had a writing system at all? That's why they used the ropes.

marc_abonce 1y ago

In this context, literacy would probably be constrained to accounting or similar forms of record keeping, rather than literature as we know it nowadays. Or at least that's the mainstream theory about quipus today, although their content is still being disputed today.

mc32 1y ago
Do we normally say Europeans or Chinese were literate 400 years ago, even with woodblocks and printing presses? Some people knew how to read and write and do math, sure, but would we call them literate societies? Even at 10% proficiency we don't tend to call societies literate.
- jeltz 1y ago
  Sweden became literate during the 1600s with most people being able to read at the end of the century and the elite were certainly literate before then.
- kragen 1y ago
  400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar. As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 1y ago
    It's estimated that even during the Q'ing dynasty, literacy rates were at or below 10%. Over 90% of people were rural four centuries ago. No way you had country bumpkins being able to read and write. Same for Europe. You may have had 30% literacy in the few towns/cities, but those were by and large a small proportion of the populations --most people lived in rural areas doing farming and related activities.
    - kragen 1y ago
      Your incredulity is due to Whig history and imagining late medieval and early modern China as being the same as Europe, but in fact they were quite different. The Qing dynasty (or Ch'ing in Wade-Giles, but never Qing) caused a disastrous collapse in literacy rates, as a matter of intentional policy, bringing the literacy rate well below 1% by the end of the dynasty. But we were talking about 400 years ago, which was the Ming dynasty, when literacy was indeed widespread even among "country bumpkins", though still far from universal. Many authors writing in vernacular Chinese at the time included prefaces explaining that their work was directed at all of the "four classes", one of which (though not the lowest) was those rural farmers. There was a lot of variation even within Europe; literacy in medieval rural shtetls was nominally a prerequisite for adulthood for men, for example, and universal primary education dates back to the Talmudic period. See https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_medievel_europe_were_jewish_people_more/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/d9hnt7/in_me... for more details. About medieval Europe more generally, https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Writing-and-Literacy-in-the-Medieval-Period.pdf https://research.yorkarchaeology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20... and https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-literate-were-common-people-in-medieval-europe https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/68148/how-litera... look plausibly informative. Literacy among "country bumpkins" was nearly universal 300 years ago among the New England colonists, fueled by movable-type printing and the Protestant rejection of priestly intermediaries, despite lacking the Imperial civil service examination system or the rabbinate as an incentive to study.

kragen 1y ago

You've jumped to a reasonable but incorrect conclusion: that only colonial writers wrote about the Incans. In fact, we know that Incans did write in khipus about other Incans, including in the colonial era after the conquest, because Spanish-speaking writers tell us so. So why can't we just read the Incans' own accounts, including from before the conquest? There are two major reasons: 1. We don't know how to read khipus except for numbers. Even that knowledge was rediscovered rather than being preserved and passed down to current archæologists. There's debate over whether there was even a systematic written language encoded in the non-arithmetic khipus at all. Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. And maybe the features of khipu such as fiber colors that aren't known to encode any information actually don't encode any information. 2. The Spanish eventually banned khipu making as a form of idolatry and burned all the khipu they could find. So the surviving khipu corpus is very small, about 1400 texts. So, a great deal of detailed historical information about the late Inca empire and early colonial era was definitely recorded in khipu, but most of it was burned, and we will probably never be able to read the rest; possibly nobody ever could have.

IAmBroom 1y ago
> Maybe each khipu user had their own system for encoding non-arithmetic data as khipu numbers, so that each person's khipu was incomprehensible to anyone else. That is the sort of things linguaphiles do, like JRR Tolkien, and certain highly neurodivergent people, but in general that's not something a general population would do. By definition, it still wouldn't make them literate even if true: "I can only read and write my own writing."
- kragen 1y ago
  It's actually very common in our own society for children to make up "secret codes" for their own use or to communicate with a single friend, and notation systems limited to a small affinity group are fairly common even in societies like ours where they have to compete with a standard written language: baseball game records, knitting notation, cross-stitch notation, chess notations, mechanical dimensioning and tolerancing, electronic schematics, shorthands, cement chemist notation, Perl, hobo signs, and so on. If you've ever worked in a company that is more than a few years old, even something as small as a diner, you can probably think of two or three notational systems used only within that company. In our society, at least, it's not just highly neurodivergent people. I don't agree that being literate in a writing system nobody else uses is equivalent to not being literate.

ethan_smith 1y ago

Khipu literacy doesn't produce permanent documents like European writing - it's a tactile recording system using knots that would degrade over time, and Spanish colonizers systematically destroyed khipus as part of their cultural suppression campaigns.

user____name 1y ago

Literacy can mean being able to read but not write, which seems to have been pretty common in the past.