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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 abou
by 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 agoIt'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.
- WalterBright 1y agoA couple things argue against widespread literacy. 1. The khipu appear to be slow and complex to make. It seems unlikely they'd be used to jot down thoughts, and so there wouldn't be that many. Compare with clay tablets, that clearly could be inscribed quickly and easily with a stick. 2. Easily erasing all knowledge of them argues against widespread literacy.
- edmundsauto 1y agoI don’t see how point 2 follows, given the context. Anywhere from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations. Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests or 70% and for everyone?
- IAmBroom 1y ago> Widespread literacy could mean a lot of things as well. Is it 2% and reserved for priests Sure, if you completely redefine "widespread" to mean "very highly limited", your statement is true.
- WalterBright 1y ago> from 30-95% of the population was dead from disease and warfare - literacy becomes a luxury in those situations. Such a wide range means they have no idea.
- kragen 1y agoYeah, we really have very little idea indeed of what the immediate pre-Columbian population of America was. There was an academic consensus for generations that it was pretty sparse, but there's some strong new evidence that it wasn't, so there's a whole big debate going on now. Of course it's a highly politicized issue! I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_In... isn't up to date, but it is a decent introduction to the debate.